[HN Gopher] The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-01 23:01 UTC)