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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder if the bad connotation due to piracy made this protocol not standard (in a sense, that's not widely adopted, and people need dedicated clients, instead of it working for example in browsers).

I don't know enough, maybe it has security issues, or some limits... but the fact is that it's still widely used, by tech literate people, so it still stands the test of time and it must be doing something right.

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> people need dedicated clients, instead of it working for example in browsers

"Version 9.0 [...], released on June 20, 2006" "Opera introduced [...] a built-in BitTorrent client" [1]

That's history now, of course, courtesy of today's browser monoculture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows...

Does Firefox have an extension to download torernts?

I know it used to have one, but that now that I'm aware of the v57+ extension issue, I notice that the one linked to first in a search seems to be dead.

Brave has a built-in torrent downloader.

Probably, but it is quite a neat technology. As people in this industry, we know what else it is being used for, and it serves those purposes pretty well. I love torrents. I love the technologies that it uses. Many other projects use it, for example take a look at https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/dht and https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht just for DHT alone. There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme. There are many more, just too lazy to find them at the moment, but believe me, the things you will encounter once you go down this road, is truly amazing. Worth it!

> the bad connotation due to piracy made this protocol not standard

Back when Resilio Sync was known as Bittorrent Sync, I proposed it as a file-sharing solution between multiple locations for the company I was working for. Immediately returned with an emphatic refusal to use any kind of software that had "Bittorrent" in the name, regardless of what it was for.

This is the same company where they picked up I had "Bittorrent Software" installed on my work laptop, and the people who ran the auditing software freaked out because, you know, it's Bittorrent! I told them it was a single icon in my PortableApps folder but they just kept saying "There's a Bittorrent client on your PC, you could be fired!" until I deleted the icon.

So yes, the fact it's associated with piracy has made a huge difference in some places.

I was kicked out of the public library once for running Syncthing, I guess because the firewall detected it as some sort of piracy tool

WebTorrent [1] can be used to run BitTorrent on the web. It's actually integrated into the Brave browser which is a nice feature. Other browsers might catch on soon.

[1] https://webtorrent.io/

Caution: Don't open this page on a metered connection, immediately starts downloading a 130MB movie file.

Ouch, I understand that it demoes their solution, but with the autoplay that's very insensitive.

WebTorrent is pretty limited though:

> ... a browser-based WebTorrent client or "web peer" can only connect to other clients that support WebTorrent/WebRTC.

(from https://webtorrent.io/faq)

This essentially splinters the world into the bittorrent and webtorrent halves, which makes it far less useful.

WebTorrent is part of libtorrent now, so should be part of all torrent clients based on it, e.g. qBittorrent:

https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123

Not quite there yet. Latest release of libtorrent was 1.2.9, seems it's scheduled for "some branch" after 2.0 (https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/pull/4123#issuecomment-...). Add in some time for clients to actually start using it as well, which is not guaranteed either.

The DHT remains split for now.

If you want a CLI/Desktop WebTorrent client https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent works great.

For some reason browser vendors do not allow JavaScript to connect to any port. So there's no other way.

It was probably phones and datacaps that really did it. Torrents are really only ok on laptops/desktops and the unexpected data usage for customers is much worse than the costs of distributing data.

Steam could probably benefit loads from torrents but they do have extremely good distribution servers already.

In my previous job we used BitTorrent to distribute movies to cinemas. :-)

What an irony! :)

BitTorrent didn't catch on simply because there aren't very many actual use cases for it. The majority of P2P content distribution will always be illegal (due to the nature of copyright), and so the client-server model is much more representative of the real world. It is technologically pretty neat though, and some publishers do actually use the protocol for things like software updates.

Not very many use cases??

Except for: - updates of software. - distribution of public video files. - distribution of install images. - distribution of raw public measurements (ea science data).

Basically BitTorrent is the protocol for any usecase with 1:n (or n:n) with public data (ea. No data access controle is needed).

Never forget that the following is shared over BitTorrent: - World of Warcraft updates. - Linux distribution install images. - haveibeenpowned sha lists.

And that’s just what I personally know. I know there is more.

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