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The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

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Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#41

Post by dale_glass »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #35
Reventlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

It's not so much a cost cutting measure as a competition measure.

A given channel has only so much bandwidth. In DSL and the like, you can pick which part is dedicated to up, and which to down because you only have one pair of wires to work with.

So your link gives you say, 100 Mbps. You can split that 50/50, but then your competition can go with a 90/10 split, and look, their downloads are much faster!

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#42

Post by m4rtink »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #35
Reventlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. I don't know where you live, but in the EU we tend to take the net neutrality seriously, and that does not happen.

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

Sadly this is not unheard off in Europe as well - for example here in Czech Republic I had to get the highest tier 1 Gbit/s dow load cable connection (including modem exchange) to get a measly 50 Mbit/s upload. And all the lower tiers have much less.

Thankfully not all local cable ISPs are like this, but that's what was available. And I don't think they can do this for much longer due to proliferation of cloud backups, teleconferencing, desktop/game streaming, etc.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#43

Post by littlestymaar »

dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #19
littlestymaar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being behind a NAT poses constraints for p2p technologies (you need some well-known servers to do the hole-punching and act as a relay, but that's not too different from the well-know IPs that are needed for bootstraping a regular p2p system anyway, except of course, not every NAT are friendly to hole punching, and that's a problem as well…) but that also has a significant security and privacy advantage: since you ar…

NAT punching definitely tells other peers your NAT's IP address (and often your local address too, but that's less important). Unless you're behind CGNAT, your NAT IP can often be used to find your neighborhood with public information. With private information (a legal challenge for example) you can find the exact subscriber/house.

> NAT punching definitely tells other peers your NAT's IP address

Yes, and that's all you share, so when the NAT is shared with other people (like other students on a campus for instance, or other customers of your phone mobile phone carrier) the amount of info that can be collected is much lower than if you have a public IP address for your computer.

> Unless you're behind CGNAT

Did you read what I wrote above, when I said: “at least when we're talking about a NAT you share with other people, not just your ISP box's NAT”.

> (and often your local address too, but that's less important).

Here you're mixing up the hole-punching part with the signaling protocol (ICE, which have had this issue in the past, before browsers switched to mDNS[1] instead of private IP addresses in ICE candidates).

[1]: https://groups.google.com/g/discuss-webrtc/c/6stQXi72BEU?pli...

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#44

Post by tete »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #31

ISPs killed P2P. Even if you have the upstream to seed all day, they'll just rate-limit you. There is no monetary incentive for them to allow P2P anyway. That said.... Gnutella/Gnutella2, eDonkey2000, and others were objectively crappy designs, but still worked very well at one use case: distributing rare files. The thing is, if you have a stable high-speed mirror, the files aren't rare anymore. Hence the only files…

I'd say vendor lock-ins and mobile killed P2P.

With people replacing more and more laptop and desktop usage the platforms are Android and iOS. On both of these you essentially have to pay to release software, on top of that people more frequently have to pay for traffic, which oftentimes is in some for of ISP NAT, which might mean no or only certain incoming connections.

I think these platforms are the biggest inhibitor for P2P and actually also new technologies, because they are extremely constrained in what you can do compared to a typical desktop OS/environment.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#45

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

littlestymaar wrote: post #43
dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT punching definitely tells other peers your NAT's IP address (and often your local address too, but that's less important). Unless you're behind CGNAT, your NAT IP can often be used to find your neighborhood with public information. With private information (a legal challenge for example) you can find the exact subscriber/house.

> NAT punching definitely tells other peers your NAT's IP address Yes, and that's all you share, so when the NAT is shared with other people (like other students on a campus for instance, or other customers of your phone mobile phone carrier) the amount of info that can be collected is much lower than if you have a public IP address for your computer. > Unless you're behind CGNAT Did you read what I wrote above, when…

You need a signaling protocol to do hole punching.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#46

Post by noman-land »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #38
tartoran wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say this. Still using p2p in 2022. Yes, it’s less frequent than before due to ubiquitous content online but it’s still very reliable.

Where does one go and search for magnet URIs in 2022? (Not sure if this is a copyright sensitve question but curious)

BTDigg is another option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTDigg

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#47

Post by sliken »

ilyt wrote: post #25
sliken wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago, most computing devices were desktops. They often had a routable IP address, unlimited power, and would happily sit passing packets all day. This made things like a DHT practical, so you could find your other peers. This made things like the early days of skype where except for auth, chat and file sharing was p2p. After being online for long enough and having a routable IP, you could become a supernode to h…

NAT was the problem since near beginning of P2P tho > One solution to this is to add a "superpeer" to a router distribution like OpenWRT, or sell the "plug/wallwart" to help. That way a cheap (under $100) computer could build reputation with it's peers, accept incoming packets form new peers, provide some storage, and keep up with DHT maintenance. ...and do what exactly ? Don't have CPU power to do much, dont have st…

> and do what exactly ? Don't have CPU power to do much, don't have storage to serve anything.

My new $140 router had 8 cores (4xA76 + 4xA55), 8GB ram, 32GB eMMC storage, and 2x2.5gb+gbe ports. Even has a SD slot for more storage. My thinking is more along the lines of what can't it do. The low hanging fruit would be to replace maps.google.com (with p2p shared openstreemmaps or similar), drive.google.com/dropbox.com, chat/blog/twitter/instagram/snapchat/facebook and similar low hanging fruit. If you need more storage a 256GB sd card is $25 to $40. I believe the default storage for most google accounts is 17GB.

With a healthy P2P ecosystem you could leverage your peers, things like FileCoin could let you supplement your storage from any provider, and not depend on any single provider.

Running SHA256 on files, even reed-solomon, keeping track of your DHT peers, running IPFS or similar, even mastodon (once implemented in Go or Rust) shouldn't make newish hardware work hard.

Being in the router avoids the NAT issue, and if this kind of thing gets any traction. Anything outside the router will need working IPv6 (like Comcast in the USA), an accommodation from the router with port forwarding, or one of the various NAT traversal protocols like ICE, TURN, or STUN.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#48

Post by littlestymaar »

dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #45
littlestymaar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NAT punching definitely tells other peers your NAT's IP address Yes, and that's all you share, so when the NAT is shared with other people (like other students on a campus for instance, or other customers of your phone mobile phone carrier) the amount of info that can be collected is much lower than if you have a public IP address for your computer. > Unless you're behind CGNAT Did you read what I wrote above, when…

You need a signaling protocol to do hole punching.

The two are working together to establish a p2p connection behind a NAT but that doesn't make them equivalent. It's like saying “UDP sometimes leaks your local IP address”, that's factually inaccurate.

Re: The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

#49

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dale_glass wrote: post #41
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, ISPs offer lower uplink speeds than downlink speeds as a cost cutting measure. More modem channels will be dedicated to downlink than uplink. With fiber ISPs this is beginning to change, but ISP quality in the US quality is highly variable.

It's not so much a cost cutting measure as a competition measure. A given channel has only so much bandwidth. In DSL and the like, you can pick which part is dedicated to up, and which to down because you only have one pair of wires to work with. So your link gives you say, 100 Mbps. You can split that 50/50, but then your competition can go with a 90/10 split, and look, their downloads are much faster!

Right, it allows them to offer smaller pipes of 100 Mbit to users, which is a form of cost cutting. A true internet connection, the kind you'd get with your box in a colo or peering direct to an ISP or at an IX has symmetric uplink and downlink. The ISP is only willing to sell, say, 100 Mbit rather than the 180 Mbit equivalent a symmetric connection would provide.
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