I was personally quite sure that trackers and other download sites would be replaced with distributed systems. Instead sites like TPB and others continue to use centralized systems. I'm of course pro distributed & anonymous systems, that's the reason why I've been studying those for years. I'm kind of disappointed how little those are used, if used at all.
When TPB guys said they would make something cool, I naturally assumed they would release a fully decentralized, pseudonymous, anonymising solution, which would replace bittorrent which is inherently dangerous because it leaks so much metadata as well as reveals to whole world what you're downloading. Instead they released something (technically) lame, the piratebrowser. Which just allows accessing their site via Tor (basically working as proxy), even if it's blocked locally.
I really do like Freenet & GNUnet design, because relays do store and cache data, creating a lot of sources quickly for popular data. Many systems have serious flaws, bitmessage is not scalable with it's current design. Most of other fully decentralized systems suffer from flooding, sybil and metadata leaks. I personally played a little with a bitmessage creating over 100k fake peers just for fun and it worked beautifully flooding the network with noise and generated junk control traffic. Because it's distributed solution, up to 10k junk messages were stored on each peer, wasting also disk space. Decentralized design also makes nodes running the system vulnerable unless additional steps are taken to limit resource consumption. After resources need to be limited, then it's a great question what should be limited and how that affects the network.
Like the original article says, it's really hard to come up with solution which wouldn't be bad in someway.
When mobile devices get more and more common, the fact is that it's really hard to beat the centralized solution. Of course the system can be partially distributed so mobile clients can connect to one spot only. Server hubs doing routing and data storage. But basically that's no different to email, DNS and web at all. So no news here either. After all, email isn't bad solution at all. It's secure (if configured correctly) and it's distributed. - Yes, I'm one of those running own email servers, as well are my friends too.
I'm not attacking the original article writer. He clearly has done a lot of job and considered options as well as written clearly and well about it. But I'm just thinking these issues in completely technical manners.
I'm happy to hear comments. I'm just cynical because the distributed systems didn't turn out as popular as I would have expected and wanted.
What I would like to see? A perfect fully decentralized P2P network running as HTML5 App which wouldn't require installation. That would be something which I would rate as pretty cool currently.
BitTorrent Kad is one of the only huge scale totally decentralized systems in use today.
I wonder if it could stand up to a big Sybil attack though? Most of the black hats that could do it don't because they all watch illegal movies and have no motive to attack that network. I would bet you a donut the RIAA and MPAA have talked about it, but actually doing it could expose them to civil and even criminal penalties since it would technically be computer fraud and abuse.
Actually I do think that fake peer injections are used. Sometimes there are some fresh new torrents that can show something like 80k seeds and 100k downloaders. Yet you can't connect almost any peers. It's exctly the attack I used against bitmessage, and was fun to perform with edonkey and emule servers. Worked nicely even before DHT based systems. Basically you could down smaller sites by injecting sites IP and port to peer to peer network, because now all nodes looking for peers would try to connect those sites. Afaik, this has been used to introduce DDoS situations earlier. Especially if client tries to connect hosts multiple times and doesn't immediately flag potential peers which it can't connect. But this is all very basic stuff.
Perhaps the sandstorm project will help? Then your mobile phone talks to your personal server in the cloud, which can more easily participate in a distributed system.
Sandstorm uses the same Linux syscalls as Docker for containerization. It may actually be what you're looking for. Try the demo: https://demo.sandstorm.io
When TPB guys said they would make something cool, I naturally assumed they would release a fully decentralized, pseudonymous, anonymising solution, which would replace bittorrent which is inherently dangerous because it leaks so much metadata as well as reveals to whole world what you're downloading. Instead they released something (technically) lame, the piratebrowser. Which just allows accessing their site via Tor (basically working as proxy), even if it's blocked locally.
I really do like Freenet & GNUnet design, because relays do store and cache data, creating a lot of sources quickly for popular data. Many systems have serious flaws, bitmessage is not scalable with it's current design. Most of other fully decentralized systems suffer from flooding, sybil and metadata leaks. I personally played a little with a bitmessage creating over 100k fake peers just for fun and it worked beautifully flooding the network with noise and generated junk control traffic. Because it's distributed solution, up to 10k junk messages were stored on each peer, wasting also disk space. Decentralized design also makes nodes running the system vulnerable unless additional steps are taken to limit resource consumption. After resources need to be limited, then it's a great question what should be limited and how that affects the network.
Like the original article says, it's really hard to come up with solution which wouldn't be bad in someway.
When mobile devices get more and more common, the fact is that it's really hard to beat the centralized solution. Of course the system can be partially distributed so mobile clients can connect to one spot only. Server hubs doing routing and data storage. But basically that's no different to email, DNS and web at all. So no news here either. After all, email isn't bad solution at all. It's secure (if configured correctly) and it's distributed. - Yes, I'm one of those running own email servers, as well are my friends too.
Final question is, how to protect metadata and hide communication patterns. As I mentioned in my post about Bleep. It didn't impress me at all. http://www.sami-lehtinen.net/blog/bittorrent-bleep-my-analys...
I'm not attacking the original article writer. He clearly has done a lot of job and considered options as well as written clearly and well about it. But I'm just thinking these issues in completely technical manners.
I'm happy to hear comments. I'm just cynical because the distributed systems didn't turn out as popular as I would have expected and wanted.
What I would like to see? A perfect fully decentralized P2P network running as HTML5 App which wouldn't require installation. That would be something which I would rate as pretty cool currently.