Hacker News Reader

Comment by K2h | Hacker News Reader

call me oldschool, but having a huge peak demand is the perfect application for distributed source, like torrent. I know it is much more complicated to introduce P2P and way more risky if it gets poisoned, but it seems to me this underlying problem of huge peak demand was solved 10 years ago.

View on HN

but there is a problem with bittorrent. Most Schools and works places block bittorrent. We would need to fallback to http or any other method that works in restricted places.

I wonder if there's a market for Bittorrent over HTTP? Node.js, websockets...surely it's possible?

All of those are strictly client-to-server, not P2P. You could in theory proxy bittorrent over it, but you wouldn't gain anything over just serving the file from the server.

You can probably write a true P2P client as a Firefox extension, since its API gives you very low level access (raw sockets, for example), but certainly not for e.g. Chrome.

WebRTC[1] seems to be the perfect platform for these sorts of things. It's in Chrome dev channel / Firefox Alpha right now.

[1] http://www.webrtc.org/

Yes, except this is a browser plugin, and no web browsers support bittorrents, so the download is not going to happen unless the plugin user installs a bittorrent updater engine, which probably isn't going to happen.

> and no web browsers support bittorrents

Actually, Opera has native support for torrents downloading.

And because they basically have complete and absolute freedom, it should be possible to build a torrent-downloading Firefox extension if that does not already exist (it probably does).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com