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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!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.