[HN Gopher] The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems
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The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems
Author : CarlosBaquero
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-12-01 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
| CarlosBaquero wrote:
| What happened to peer-to-peer as a technological concept?
| Actually, we still use a lot of that technology.
| [deleted]
| sliken wrote:
| Years ago, most computing devices were desktops. They often had
| a routable IP address, unlimited power, and would happily sit
| passing packets all day. This made things like a DHT practical,
| so you could find your other peers. This made things like the
| early days of skype where except for auth, chat and file
| sharing was p2p. After being online for long enough and having
| a routable IP, you could become a supernode to help less
| fortunate nodes talk to each other.
|
| These days a much larger fraction of computing devices are on
| battery, on expensive networks like cellular, and can't really
| tolerate being part of a DHT. Increasing use of
| NAT/Masquerading makes a harder (and a support nightmare) to
| accept incoming packets from new peers.
|
| One solution to this is to add a "superpeer" to a router
| distribution like OpenWRT, or sell the "plug/wallwart" to help.
| That way a cheap (under $100) computer could build reputation
| with it's peers, accept incoming packets form new peers,
| provide some storage, and keep up with DHT maintenance. Then
| low power and/or expensive network peers could just check their
| "home" superpeer and get what they need quickly with minimal
| bandwidth and power.
| superkuh wrote:
| Smartphones took over as people's primary "computers" of
| choice. And mobile devices, generally, don't even get an IPv4
| address with ports as most are behind carrier NAT. So most
| people cannot participate on the internet anymore and require
| third parties to hold their metaphorical hand when doing
| network operations.
|
| For people still using actual computers with real internet
| connections and ports p2p is still as big, and as useful, as
| ever. It's just that the relative percentage of online users
| with actual internet connections has shrunk. The absolute
| number of people with real computers and connections has not
| shrunk.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Being behind a NAT poses constraints for p2p technologies
| (you need some well-known servers to do the hole-punching and
| act as a relay, but that's not too different from the well-
| know IPs that are needed for bootstraping a regular p2p
| system anyway, except of course, not every NAT are friendly
| to hole punching, and that's a problem as well...) but that
| also has a significant security and privacy advantage: since
| you aren't openly connected to the internet, you don't
| casually leak your computer's IP to the random strangers
| you're interacting with (at least when we're talking about a
| NAT you share with other people, not just your ISP box's NAT)
| and the amount of harm they can actually do to you is
| significantly lower.
|
| In the end I think the internet would actually be a
| significantly better place security-wise for p2p if IPs
| weren't directly routable by default, and NAT with all its
| limitations gives you mostly that.
| dottedmag wrote:
| It became... boring technology.
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