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TorrentFreak reports on WebTorrent, a project using BitTorrent and WebRTC to transport files:
WebTorrent is a project launched by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford University graduate who has already booked quite a few successes in his career. After graduating he founded PeerCDN, a P2P-assisted content delivery network, which was sold to Yahoo at the end of 2013. Feross then focused on WebTorrent, convinced that it could revolutionize how the web works today.
"I felt that the idea of 'people-powered websites' – websites that are hosted by the visitors who use them – was too revolutionary to keep locked up as proprietary software, and I wanted to do more to push the idea forward," he tells TF. "Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes."
[...] "WebTorrent is the first torrent client built for the web. It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required," Feross tells TF.
Over the past two years WebTorrent has matured into a project that's slowly starting to win over several major tech companies. Netflix, for example, contacted Feross to discuss his technology which they may use to stream their videos. A few months ago Netflix specifically mentioned WebTorrent in a job application, which shows that the video giant is serious about P2P-assisted delivery.
[More After the Break]
Feross believes that companies such as Netflix could benefit greatly from WebTorrent. Currently, streaming performance goes down during peak hours but with WebTorrent this shouldn't be a problem.
[...] Netflix aside, there are already various noteworthy implementations of WebTorrent. The project's homepage, for example, shows how easily it can stream video and βTorrent offers a fully functioning torrent client UI.
Other examples include File.pizza, which uses WebTorrent to share files in the browser. The same technology is used for server-less websites by PeerCloud and Webtorrentapp, while GitTorrent uses it to decentralize source control.
In addition to the examples above, the Internet Archive is also looking into the technology for its video distribution, and another major tech company is considering adding WebTorrent support to their web browser.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @06:01AM
UPnP allows proprietary .torrent-like clients to use the user's bandwidth without their knowledge or consent.
While I like to use Bittorrent whenever I can, the dedicated .torrent clients allow you to throttle both the number of connections and both the upload and download bandwidth.
The proprietary clients I have seen do not even report the upload bandwidth. You can often find a hidden settings menu to either disable P2P or...throttle the download (but not upload).
I have seen one such client knock out DNS; presumably from saturating the upload bandwidth (router said it was fine with the number of connections, but seemed slow to respond).
Combining .torrents with some kind of DRM that prevents file saving just galls me, BTW.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 14 2015, @01:48PM
Well you're right. When I was finishing up the submission I went to the WebTorrent homepage and it started preloading a 130 MB video!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @07:55PM
I looks like WebRTC [w3.org] uses TURN and STUN for NAT traversal, not UPnP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @06:18AM
I want my Internet to be a big truck!
When I watch TV, I don't care about sharing with my neighbors, and you know why? Because I don't watch trendy crap! Because nobody, nobody, is watching the same thing as me! So fuck you, content provider! Build a big fucking pipe and let me download your shit!
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday December 14 2015, @06:20AM
Yes, I’d love to view a website where all the images were replaced with photos of doge by some 14 year old kid. Awesome concept. They’ll probably fix that by having the browser download all the files over and over again until it gets one with the correct hash.
I have a better idea. A browser that only renders HTML, CSS, and images. It will be simple, fast and amazing!
There is just too much bloat with browsers today. People are trying to do everything with it. Soon there will be an embedded virtual machine that will be used to run win32 in the browser.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @06:36AM
Bittorrent verifies all of the file pieces with a (mostly) cryptographically strong hash (SHA-160 [bittorrent.org]).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @06:44AM
If you had obtained your brain by BitTorrent, perhaps you would possess the basic skill of reading comprehension.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tftp on Monday December 14 2015, @07:04AM
Do not worry. It is all but impossible to obtain a good photo of a Doge [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by jamesbond on Monday December 14 2015, @10:05AM
Too late. Among many others, this already works: http://js-dos.com/ [js-dos.com] and version that support win32 can't be that far behind.
(Score: 2, Troll) by FatPhil on Monday December 14 2015, @10:39AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 14 2015, @01:51PM
Is it really abuse to prioritize beginning of files (like uTorrent can already do with torrent streaming)? You can give higher/lower priority to different files in a torrent, why not different pieces of a file as well?
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(Score: 1) by loic on Monday December 14 2015, @03:22PM
+1
How is selecting preferably some blocks more than others is abusing the system? About every single torrent client allows to prioritize files, or even to skip some specific files, and it could probably be extended to specific blocks. The bittorrent protocol does not specify any download order AFAIK. The only prioritizing rule I know of is that it tries to distribute first the less available blocks, yeah, an upload rule.
Oh my god, they use an impure proprietary fork of bittorrent! Burn them!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 14 2015, @04:07PM
I think worst-case behaviour means that after O(N) transfers only O(sqrt(N)) of the N pieces have left the seeder if there are sufficiently many (Omega(sqrt(N))) badly-behaved leechers. Random behaviour would raise this to O(N). Not just that, but as all similarly-bandwidthed peers will get the same blocks at about the time, there will be way more 'have' messages that are uninteresting, so you're decreasing the available bandwidth.
Sure, a few clients having a preference for a particular subset of a torrent, such a track from an album, can be done, the algorithm is resilient to that. However, for the scenarios presented *every* client will be having *exactly* the same preferences, and all of the mathematical modelling that prove the original works efficiently have to be thrown in the bin.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @04:50PM
In a streaming media scenario, the fast downloader will probably stay connected until the video finishes playing (unless the stop halfway through).
I can envision such downloaders seeding for as much as 90% of the time.
If many people stop watching the video half-way though (due to the content, not technical reasons), then the first portion of the video is most important anyway. Presumably trying to "seek" through a boring video will also distribute preferred blocks to some extent.
(Score: 1) by BrockDockdale on Monday December 14 2015, @05:40PM
Poor thing's out of work, now reduced to desperately mentioning bot keywords like WebTorrent on its job applications.
(Score: 1) by J_Darnley on Tuesday December 15 2015, @12:58AM
As I argued elsewhere last time this thing was brought up. This is not a working torrent client. It cannot speak to any other working client. It. Is. Broken.