this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Hello everyone,

I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today's digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).

Thank you for your insights!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

It is not anonymous and suffers network fragmentation. Yet the force of Bittorrent is its large community and mature performant tooling (compared to IPFS).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What the what? More relevant than ever. How is this a legitimate question? I2p is great but adoption is extremely low.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago

I use Torrent daily, I basically never stop seeding what I download to my Plex Server and I also use a Real Debrid account, which essentially caches the torrents to their servers for us to stream through different methods (like Kodi, Stremio, or more recently for me Plex thanks to Riven/Zurg).

[–] [email protected] 63 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I2P is not an alternative to bittorrent, but to IP networks. Essentially I2P is an overlay over the IP-based Internet.

bittorrent can work through I2P just like it can over IP or Tor.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for this clarification

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yes it's very much alive and very important. A lot of industries (like their products: books, movies but also games) are getting restricted, taken away, taking down and removed from other platforms. Old ROM sites are taken down. And platforms like archive.org need to remove all their books.

The problem is, that there is nobody archiving anymore.. because it's not allowed due to "copyright infringement". In the end, all these products like books, movies and (old) games might be gone forever. Next generations will not be able to have access to it. This is what worries me the most. And Torrent might be the only way to fix/solve it. By distributing these kind of material. Especially older books, older movies and older games.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago

Torrenting is a decentralized approach and the corpo parasite hates it because there is nothing they can do about it, short of shutting down the internet lol

Get fuck Disney

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

There are things like torrentio now which lend BitTorrent piracy a more integrated UX, and that has definitely extended the lifespan of its usefulness to me. Torrents rarely max out my line speed these days, mostly because I have 1000X the bandwidth compared to when I first started torrenting 20 odd years ago. But it's still one of the fastest and simplest methods to get any file you want, so I think it's relevant

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

Also your article just says streaming and cloud services are more popular with the masses. Where does it say torrenting is replaced by another piracy method

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (4 children)

A better question is, what would you improve over current way that torrents work.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents' peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent's minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn't practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It’s called private trackers, and they are great.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

I don't see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Make mutable torrents possible.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What’s the advantage to that? I don’t want the torrent I’m downloading to change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I want that. For example you downloaded debian iso version 13 and after some time it can be updated to 13.1. Obviously it shouldn't be an automatic operation unless you allowed it before starting download.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Like the 13.1 torrent being only a patch to the 13 one and listing it as a dependency? Downloading the 13.1 torrent would transparently download the 13 if it wasn't already, then download the 13.1 patch and apply it. But I don't think any of this needs to be at the protocole level, that's client functionality.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I wouldn’t call that mutable, more like version tracking in which each torrent is aware of future versions.

I kind of like that, but you might be able to accomplish it with a plugin or something.

Put a file in the torrent called “versions” or something like that, and in there would be a url that the client can use to tell you if there is a new version.

It wouldn’t change the protocol though, since the new version and old version would still need to be separate entities with different data and different seeding.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

A better question is; What would you change in the current Internet/WWW to make it as decentralized as Torrents are?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (10 children)

I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.

I'm skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like maybe what you're looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.

You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you'd want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.

I'm not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

The profit motive

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago

It's alive and well. My independent research shows that torrents of users are using it for large foss packages, as well as various media.

This duck in a hoodie shows how both technologies can function together. https://hackyourmom.com/en/pryvatnist/bittorrent-cherez-i2p-dlya-anonimnogo-obminu-fajlamy/

[–] [email protected] 103 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Most piracy is either two ancient methods that work perfectly of Usenet or BitTorrent. There is nothing wrong with these methods.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Considering that USENET goes back to the 70s, and bittorrent was invented in 2001, one of these things is clearly ancient and the other isn’t.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

2001 was 24 years ago in 2 days. BitTorrent can drink.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Yeah that’s pretty ancient to me. That’s like saying XP isn’t ancient

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