It's a standard, we know it works and how.
I dont want to be (potentiall forced to) distribute software.
With recent developments in net neutrality and data plans, p2p could drastically impact my data plan and cost me money.
Sure I can see why you would think the potential is, but for me p2p data distribution is out of the question, at least for now.
Disclaimer: Haven't checked in a while and can not do it now, but it was there until not long ago.
What I can't remember and am unable to check at the moment is whether Metered is turned on by default or not.
But regardless of defaults, if you mark a connection as Metered than the background update distribution is turned off.
Done respectfully, it can be a great way to make everybody's file arrive faster while balancing the traffic better.
They already have local streaming for games so they have the infrastructure for this.
Just because you have a logical reason to not want to serve updates, should not prevent IT admins from getting a good default experience when they have 1000 machines on a LAN that all want to update.
Pretty much all internet connections are metered/capped, though prior to recent FCC transparency rules the caps on residential fixed broadband were often undisclosed or affirmatively misrepresented under false "unlimited" labels.
Making the OS appropriately sensitive to the costs incurred by each network-involved transaction relating to updates and the system owner's preferences regarding balancing those costs against the value they provide in update experience is abstractly ideal but decidedly difficult.
Note that, even in that case, the connection to the outside world might still be metered/capped—but the connection to LAN peers obviously isn't. That means that "does this traffic cost anything" is an evaluation the OS would have to make per socket (or requested socket from a higher-level library, like Windows' BITS), rather than per interface.
The solution is to pressure your government to make net neutrality a law and vote with your dollars and use ISPs and network providers that are not intent on breaking the Internet. All Internet nodes need to have the same access to the network. "I am too lazy to do anything about it and too cheap to pay for data" is not a valid argument on a discussion forum called Hacker News.
Seeding a website would be like paying a membership fee with surplus currency that you have been throwing away monthly.
With the proper incentives and controls I suspect there is content you would be compelled to seed.
It's incredible how Opera was innovative at the time. Nowadays it just another useless chrome.
[0] http://www.seamonkey-project.org/start/
^ version 4 I think but maybe earlier versions too
Too bad it couldn't keep up with the whole Web 2.0 sh*tstorm.
The great thing was that Opera 12 even with IRC, mail, torrent and other goodies (such as HTTP server) was still lighter on resources than Firefox and Chrome.
I really do miss the old Opera, and even the Vivaldi is not really good replacement since it still uses Blink engine.
I switched to Firefox after, I like its extensions but it's not perfect.
HTTP headers can allow to know when to flush cache (just like it's currently done) and provide last known md5/sha1/whatever digest to make sure page is not tempered with (let's say it's checked when the download is complete, and retry a download if the signature does not match: it should not happen often anyway). It obviously won't work for pages which distribute auth related content, but it would be great for assets.
I guess a problem could be that page load will be slower (depends on the ability to parallelize and to contact geographically close peers, I suppose), but it would mean way less heavy load on servers.
Sounds like a cool way to deter people from using it if you ask me.
I'm not sure if the cap is in effect for places with fiber internet (like Verizon FIOS). It wouldn't surprise me, since they've admitted caps are unnecessary.[1]
[0] Charter + Time Warner Cable (after merge) is larger, I think.
[1] https://consumerist.com/2015/11/06/leaked-comcast-doc-admits...
About the time Chairman Wheeler was aiming for net neutrality, he was also looking at data caps and if they were bad. Within a month, Comcast increased theirs to 1 TB. Coincidence?
There's going to be a lot about how 'competitive' ISPs are in the next few years in America now that everything's Republican. But most people have two options: expensive cable ISP that's fast when it wants to be, and slow DSL that's also expensive and not getting better.
Using: 1 terabyte = 8,388,608 megabits
Ultra HD: 25 mbps ~= 93.2 hours HD: 5 mbps ~= 19.5 days SD: Would be good but hey I bought an HD TV for a reason so that would not be fair to skimp out on quality just because they don't want to introduce cheaper bandwidth caps.
side note It is $10 per 50 GB once you go over the cap with Comcast which is pretty huge for overhead if a user wasn't even aware of the cap. Thankfully they cap it at $200 over your bill.
side note2 this number will only increase - so really that 1 TB cap already needs to see a lift to 2 TB just to start to fulfill the requirements of the newer age web.
Wow, that's disgusting.
Back when I was on cheap and cheerful, capped internet - if you went over the (paltry 100GB, although this was the best part of a decade ago now...) cap, I'd pay an extra £6 on my bill and that was it, regardless of how much I went over by.
Ironically, the price to remove the data cap as part of your package was more expensive than the over-cap charge.
The privacy concern makes me realize something else : there's no incentive for users here. They lose privacy, what do they win?
It does not prevent totally the idea of using p2p to distribute content as a low level implementation, but since we (the ones who manage servers) are the only ones to benefit from it, we must first find a way for it to have no impact on users.
The biggest privacy problem is because of how p2p works currently : we have a list of IPs associated to a resource. How can we obfuscate this without going through proxies?
This makes me think that an other feature could be to not disclose all peers available, but randomly select some. This would force someone wanting to look someone up to download a possible big amount of times the same list to check for an ip, instead of just pulling it once per ressource to know as a fact.
Both ideas are not exactly privacy shields, but steps to mitigate the problem.
It works if we don't do naive P2P but rather Friend-2-Friend; this is what retroshare does, your downloads can go through your friends so that only they know what you download. But that requires a lot more steps than traditional bittorrent, so I'm not sure it could work in general.
Perfect Dark (a Japanese P2P system) is a direct implementation of that concept, where you automatically "maintain ratio" as with a private torrent tracker by your client just grabbing a bunch of (opaque, encrypted) stuff from the network and then serving it.
A more friendly example, I think—and probably closer to what the parent poster is picturing—is Freenet, which is literally an onion-routed P2P caching CDN/DHT. Peers select you as someone to query for the existence of a chunk; and rather than just referring them to where you think it is (as in Kademlia DHTs), you go get it yourself (by re-querying the DHT in Kademlia's "one step closer" fashion), cache it, and serve it. So a query for a chunk results in each onion-routing step—log2(network size) people—caching the chunk, and then taking responsibility for that chunk themselves, as if they had it all along.
Good ! Now I know you have JQuery 1.2.3, which is vulnerable to exploit XYZ, which I can now use to target you. This is one reason why apt-p2p and things like that can't be deployed in large; it's way too easy to know what version of what packages are installed on your machine.
In short their approach is that instead of connecting point to point and using addresses of hosts, what if we could address based on the data we want.
This suddenly makes routers aware of what data they are forwarding, that knowledge allows them to start caching and reuse the same data packets when multiple people request the same data.
Things like multicasting or multi path forwarding are simpler. Interestingly, the more people are viewing the same video for example the better, essentially CDN is no longer needed.
Most of use cases how we currently use the Internet, are actually easier to do this way.
Things that are harder though (but not impossible to do) is point to point communication, such as SSH.
(note to others: the description of project can be found here https://named-data.net/project/ )
Actually, what could be done without "rebooting" the whole internet is to use caching relays, which would operate just like DNS servers do, but caching content instead of IPs (maybe it's what they're suggesting, it was unclear from general description).
EDIT : but I wonder if I'm really ready to deal, as a webdev, with content propagation based on TTL, like we do with dns zones :D
EDIT 2 : actually, this is a non issue. TTL is there because when caching something as short as a IP string, you don't want to have to issue a request to parent node. But when caching assets, it won't be that a problem to issue a HEAD http request to asset owner to ask if the cached content should be invalidated.
If you download, for example, a Windows.iso from technet and start sharing it via the integrated p2p system, I can see a shitstorm of lawsuits raging through the web.
You’ll be perfectly fine sharing legal stuff like Linux ISOs or mods for your favorite game using BitTorrent 24/7.
Users should not fear a content-agnostic protocol.
Mass adoption of bittorrent would render this type of discrimination much more difficult.
I think this is a part of the exciting proposition intended by WebTorrent (webtorrent.io) in having an entirely JS/client-side-capable BitTorrent stack that can run directly inside a browser (or in Node or Electron or Cordova apps) with potentially minimal setup.