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Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

Way to go, old friend!

P2P technology is important to resist censorship. It does not have an opinion about what content goes through the technology. Like Tor.

The important thing is that it's decentralised, which makes it truly "of the people, by the people, for the people".

Those saying 'Why use P2P apps if you have nothing illegal to share' are the same ones saying, 'Why need privacy if you have nothing to hide'. They're wrong, they're privileged, they're selfish, and in many cases they're lying hypocrites (and therefore dangerous and abusive people).

Long live P2P. The more protocols in active development the better.

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> P2P technology is important to resist censorship

It's important to retain culture too, people who legally own movies, music, etc can't be trusted to actually archive or distribute them properly.

Look how many artistically important movies are not really available anymore and the only old dvd copies floating around are either badly cropped, badly graded, cut or have poor subtitling/sound. The only people who can be trusted to look after these artworks are people doing it out of passion rather than profits.

In 10 years the teenagers growing up today are going to have a cultural blackhole as a lot of the more unusual music they enjoyed no longer exists anywhere online because it was all on spotify, YouTube or soundcloud and they might have gone out of business, not retained it or the creators themselves lost it or moved on.

Music can also be lost to fire, as it was in 2008 [0] (with Universal studios originally downplaying the loss until a 2019 New York Times article revealed its full extent).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

The point is that if everything is in a single giant "library", and it burns down, then everything is losf forever.

But if there are copies here and there, there is much more chance that at least some will survive the centuries.

Eg, single point of failure vs redundancy

>The point is that if everything is in a single giant "library", and it burns down, then everything is losf forever.

What.cd suddenly comes to mind...

That was so tragic.

Now if P2P could only go back in time and get the original Beach Boy's Smile or MBV's Loveless followup finished and released.

P2P is actually mostly preserving movies. I find it to not be an abundant resource for old music recordings/lives.

I've downloaded quite a number of really old live performance of classical music from YouTube, that are practically nowhere else to be found. No pirate version can be found, private bay or the likes.

At least for now, YouTube is a gain in preserving and distributing old and unusual content, not a loss, in the world of classical music. I don't know what happens it one day it ceases to exist, but I imagine enough people would have saved copies of those videos to re-upload to whatever video site replaces YouTube.

Your "in 10 years the teenagers..." part applies even today already. A German rapper I know had released a mixtape 3-4 years ago, but as he had no rights to the beats it was only a mediafire zip upload...

Not even he has the zip or any of the songs, as the files got deleted, managers changed and so on. And this was no mediocre stuff, I loved it!

> Look how many artistically important movies are not really available anymore

Yeah like for example the moon landing videos that NASA deleted by accident. Had they been freely available in hires digitized copies we would still have them. But alas we only have low res copies.

> Yeah like for example the moon landing videos that NASA deleted by accident. Had they been freely available in hires digitized copies we would still have them.

The moon landing videos were made in 1969, and are believed to have been erased in the early 1980s. There was no technology at the time to digitize those videos, nor any compact data formats to store them in, nor users with spare storage for that data.

While true, it doesn't invalidate the grandparent's point. The tapes were easy to lose because they were not replicated.

And they were not replicated at the time because this data wasn't considered valuable, and on a larger scale, because there was not a culture of data preservation at NASA.

(It's not clear that they had the ability to replicate this data, anyway -- the reason it was lost was that they needed to reuse the magnetic tapes for data from another project!)

That's why allowing the data to be replicated is so important if you care about preservation. It only takes a few happy mutants who think some otherwise boring data might be interesting and keeping a copy for themselves.

Again, you're assuming that ordinary people had some way to easily "keep a copy for themselves". This was emphatically not the case. This data was not digital. It only existed as a set of magnetic tapes in an unusual format: 1" magnetic tapes containing application-specific analog data. The number of institutions that would have been capable of copying and storing this data would have been small; it's improbable that any individual, "happy mutant" or otherwise, could have done so at the time.

The notion that any sort of data is easy to copy and store is a modern concept. It was usually not the case in the past.

> Way to go, old friend!

And I thought the Emule network was dead, good to hear they're doing well.

> Those saying 'Why use P2P apps if you have nothing illegal to share' are the same ones saying, 'Why need privacy if you have nothing to hide'.

Couldn't agree more. Everyone of us, including myself, has something to hide. Some of the more extreme motivations behind the attempts to push for more control on communications simply don't stand: "it could be used for child porn" is no different to "it could be used for drugs trading" applied to normal cellphone communications. Just let communications protocols alone, then divert more funding to intelligence technologies and training rather than giving police military weapons.

> Long live P2P. The more protocols in active development the better.

Agreed, though it would be nice if nodes could interoperate with different protocols. In the old days the wonderful Napster OSS compatible client Lopster was rewritten to be compatible with pretty much all known p2p protocols back then, but before it was ready BitTorrent came and became the standard, so it's currently stagnating/dead. http://lopster.sourceforge.net/

MuWire is ahead of you there https://muwire.com/

Like LimeWire and Emule but runs on I2P for anonymity. TOR shouldn't be used for P2P. It's not conceived for that.

Hi, I'm the creator of MuWire. Indeed, TOR explicitly discourages P2P use or sharing of large files, while I2P welcomes it.

I'm very happy to see eMule spring back into life. I believe it's time for a move away from the "torrent site" model and back to more casual approach file sharing.

Slightly disagree, Tor hidden services are fantastic to implement decentral signal/rendevous services with no single point of failure. I'm using this in my app https://cryonet.io

Love the fact that it works in many places where plain UDP solutions fail.

Once two nodes are connected via a Tor hidden service, other p2p channels can be established and are more appropriate to transfere large files.

> Once two nodes are connected via a Tor hidden service, other p2p channels can be established and are more appropriate to transfere large files.

While maybe not in your concrete case, in general this sounds like really dangerous advice - a quick way to open up for deanomyizing attacks?

Hey node behind Tor, send me your IP by requesting this https resource outside of Tor... Etc ?

Yes that is true, I should have mentioned that, this is only a privacy preserving / encrypted mechanism for signalling without a central server, peers are expected to know and trust each other, like family and friends scenario.

The Cryo tool really should be open source. Closed source binaries should not interact with Tor. You are hinting that it leaks the IP over the Tor channel -- the behavior needs to be easily verifiable to the user, and the source should be available so folks can fix privacy or security bugs which can put your users at risk.

None of this precludes the sale of your $20 lifetime license; but you are probably better off selling some kind of support license or other intangible thing and liberate the code.

I'm not planning to open source the complete tool, after all I have a hard time to find similar open source projects which earn enough money (would love to be proven wrong here).

But I fully agree that the security and network stuff needs to be open sourced to be verifiable. My plan is to release the related sources together with the protocol specifications, need to refactor a few things first but this will happen.

There is already a P2P program called OnionShare that uses the TOR network. Never used it, but journalists and activists supposedly use it.

> Those saying 'Why use P2P apps if you have nothing illegal to share' are the same ones saying, 'Why need privacy if you have nothing to hide'.

Agreed. Saying content illegally is certainly a problem, but let's not dismiss the importance of decentralized systems. It certainly helps distributing large files without a central server and point of failure. I seed my share of Linux distros and open source softwares to help with the distribution with my own bandwidth and storage. And decentralization is s big equalizer in power, which allows the masses to share content even if there is someone in power against it.

We need decentralization and P2P protocols more than ever.

I'm gonna frame your comment, it's just great.

> The same people saying 'Why use P2P apps if you have nothing illegal to share' are the ones saying, 'Why need privacy if you have nothing to hide'. They're wrong, they're privileged, they're selfish, and they're often complete lying hypocrites (snd therefore dangerous and abusive people).

Is there a significant populace who vehemenlty oppose p2p?

The fact that some ISPs, and even VPN providers, block p2p connections means that there is a lot of interest in doing so. Not necessarily by the "populace", but pushed by whoever feels their interests are being affected.

"Significant" yes, "numerous" probably not: Richer people with personal interest in upholding IP rights, or who are generally approving of the legal status quo.

Although, on second thought - a lot of people who are not tech-savvy might be convinced by the mainstream media view on file sharing as involving a lot of "piracy" and theft, so maybe that demographic has more opponents of P2P.

Anyone know what the state of the network is these days ? I haven't used it for at least 8+ years, I remember servers drying up but with kademlia that's not really a problem.

I have to think a lot of people left it behind because of all of the malware that was masquerading as something else.

Well, video and audio should be fine either way, right ?

Downloading and running executable files from file sharing networks seems like asking for trouble no matter what the network is.

> Well, video and audio should be fine either way, right?

From what I recall of the time when these networks were popular, that wasn't the case; there was some way to make Windows Media Player download malicious executable files when playing a video file.

Yes, perhaps those people are typically bad, but you know you should focus your criticism on the argument itself.

But I'm choosing to discuss some of the social context to the technology and how it interacts with society and people. People's character and motives directly affect freedoms to use such technology, and therefore the relevance it has to people.

Agreed. I still have my copy of the Wikileaks file thanks to P2P. Still curious what's in there.

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