webtorrent-desktop VS multihash-serialise

- https://webtorrent.io/desktop

Do you have any ideas on what could popularize the technology again?

Made me think of https://webtorrent.io/desktop/

Disclosure: I'm the author of WebTorrent.

It's so fulfilling to see WebTorrent still popping up on Hacker News after all these years. I started the project in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer, and writing hundreds of npm packages including buffer (https://github.com/feross/buffer), simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer), and StandardJS (https://standardjs.com/).

I started WebTorrent with the goal of extending the BitTorrent protocol to become more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent network. Within less than a year of starting the project, I got WebTorrent fully working. And it worked _well_, beating many native torrent apps in terms of raw download speed and the ability to stream videos within seconds of adding a torrent.

WebTorrent never got as much attention as the cryptocurrency projects selling tokens throughout the mid-2010s, even though WebTorrent actually worked and had more real users than almost all of them :) I was never tempted to add a crypto-token to WebTorrent, despite many well-meaning friends telling me to do it. Nonetheless, WebTorrent served as an accessible on-ramp to the world of decentralized tech, along with other projects like Dat (https://dat-ecosystem.org/) and Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/).

But WebTorrent is more than a protocol extension to BitTorrent. We built a popular desktop torrent client, WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/), which supports powerful features like instant video streaming.

We also build a `webtorrent` JavaScript package (see https://socket.dev/npm/package/webtorrent) which implements the full BitTorrent/WebTorrent protocol in JavaScript. This implementation uses TCP, UDP, and/or WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport in any environment – whether Node.js (TCP/UDP), Electron (TCP/UDP/WebRTC), or the web browser (WebRTC). In the browser, the `webtorrent` package uses WebRTC which doesn’t require a browser plugin, extension, or any kind of installation to work.

If you’re building a website and want to fetch files from a torrent, you can use `webtorrent` to do that directly client-side, in a decentralized manner. The WebTorrent Workshop (https://webtorrent.github.io/workshop/) is helpful for getting started and teaches you how to download and stream a torrent into an HTML page in just 10 lines of code.

Now that WebTorrent is fully supported in nearly all the most popular torrent clients, including uTorrent, dare I say that we succeeded? It's been a long and winding journey, but I'm glad to have played a role in making this happen. Special shoutouts to all the open source contributors over the years, especially Diego R Baquero, Alex Morais,

P.S. If you're curious what I'm up to now, I'm building Socket (https://socket.dev). And there's actually a WebTorrent connection, too. Socket came out of a prior product we built called Wormhole (https://wormhole.app), an end-to-end encrypted file transfer application built using WebTorrent under-the-hood (Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26666142). Like Firefox Send before it, security was a primary goal of Wormhole (see security details here: https://wormhole.app/security). But one area where we were lacking was in how we audited our open source dependencies. Like most teams building a JavaScript app, we had a large node_modules folder filled with lots of constantly updating third-party code. The risk of a software supply chain attack was huge, especially with 30% of our visitors coming from China. As most teams do, we enforced code review for all our first-party code. But similar to most teams, we were pulling in third-party dependencies and dependency updates without even glancing at the code (this is something that almost every company does today). We knew we needed to do better for our users. We looked around for a solution to analyze the risk of open source packages but none existed. So we decided to build Socket.

Socket helps developers ship faster and spend less time on security busywork by helping them safely find, audit, and manage OSS. Socket provides a comprehensive open source risk analysis. By analyzing the full picture – from maintainers and how they behave, to open-source codebases and how they evolve – we enable developers and security teams to identify risk from malware, hidden code, typo-squatting, misleading packages, permission creep, unmaintained or abandoned packages, and poor security practices. For one quick example, take a look at the risks we identified in this Angular.js calendar library: https://socket.dev/npm/package/angular-calendar/issues/0.30....

Many!

https://webtorrent.io/faq

Notable ones include Libtorrent[1], Peertube[2], and their own Webtorrent Desktop[3].

1. https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/223

2. https://peertube-viewer.com/posts/2021-02-20-peertube-viewer...

3. https://webtorrent.io/desktop/

WebTorrent

just use https://webtorrent.io/desktop/ and stream the 1080p torrent directly.

When I click on https://synapsemedia.io/ I get redirected to a link like https://ipfs.io/ipns/synapsemedia.io (to use ipfs.io instead of my local node)

You may already be aware that the Interplanetary File System or IPFS is a distributed storage network where computers from all over the world form nodes to share data.

In case of you don't trust them, it gets harder. Especially if you need to have it hosted without any trace to yourself. I'd probably pay a service to store my data on ipfs. You can pay with crypto. But I'm this case there's the question, how will you be able to access it. My thought would be to have a [tails][tails] USB with the necessary software.

https://ipfs.io is the only acceptable file host

I never click GET button, don't even know what it does tbh XD Those four buttons are for choosing which IPFS gateway you want to use. By default I use ipfs.io, if ipfs.io is down then I click the Cloudflare one. General rule is that you pick one gateway if it does not work then another one and so on.

- The gateway (e.g., ipfs.io, cloudflare, w3eth.io, w3link.io) may implement a censorship rule based on local regulations

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/

New to IPFS, both ipfs.io and Cloudflare IPFS are blocked in my region, but I can connect to IPFS using the IPFS desktop app, is there a way to download books at a relatively not too slow speed from anna's archive's ipfs mirror?

Web 3.0 is a third-generation website with decentralized server storage from layer two blockchains like Ethereum, polygon, etc. Unstoppable domains are the first web3 domain platform where you find different domain names. This platform uses a crypto name system called CNS. Unstoppable domains used IPFS (interplanetary File System), the best file protocol that allows computers to store and serve files as part of a giant P2P network. shreyanshjain.crypto is my domain name minted on the polygon network.