
BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol - Uncle_Sam
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-p2p-live-streaming-110119/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29
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simias
I hope he builds cryptography and maybe better privacy features in the
protocol from the ground up this time. If wikileaks proved anything it's that
we need a more distributed web, that's probably one of the only things that
could guarantee any form of net neutrality.

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evgen
That is far easier said than done. If the streaming is point to multi-point
then the crypto can get tricky, if you allow people to join and leave the
group at random it gets tricky, and keeping it all working without providing a
list of the participants to each peer is tricky. With BitTorrent Bram started
out with a system that had strong crypto and privacy (Mojo Nation) and
stripped most of it out because it increased the complexity for little
benefit.

Strong crypto and privacy have costs, both in end-user resources and bandwidth
implications. Getting it all correct is hard and if you screw up a little it
is usually worse than starting from the position that privacy and a secure
channel is something that the user has to bring to the table if they really
want it.

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rabidsnail
There doesn't seem to be very much public information about how this protocol
actually works. How does it deal with NAT? Will it work on mobile networks?
Does it require a native application?

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ntoshev
Any p2p requires a native app as the browser can't act as a server.

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ComputerGuru
That is not necessarily true. With websockets, you can write a full-
functioning p2p client in the browser.

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dougb
WebSockets is only TCP. Bram is using his own networking stack based on UDP.

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andrewl-hn
Actually, p2p streaming is patented by Spotify (likewise, p2p voip is patented
by Skype).

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m_eiman
You don't happen to have a link to that patent?

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andrewl-hn-ncp
Here they are (after a small googling):

[http://v3.espacenet.com/searchResults?locale=en_EP&IN=eh...](http://v3.espacenet.com/searchResults?locale=en_EP&IN=ehn%2C+andreas&ST=advanced&compact=false&DB=EPODOC&submitted=true)

Specifically take a look at these claims:
[http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC=US&...](http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC=US&NR=2009019174A1&KC=A1&FT=D&date=20090115&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP)

I'm not really sure whether those are actual patents or patent applications,
but even in later case the chance of them being rejected are very low.

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m_eiman
Priority date 2007, I'd be surprised if there wasn't any prior art by that
date. I know I was working on a P2P streaming system in 2006, for example.

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wibblenut
There are many p2p networks for streaming content - they seem to be popular in
Asia for watching English and European football, and I think many of these
existed prior to 2007.

I'm sure there's a mountain of other prior art covering the concept. It isn't
novel to anybody with half a brain. I was streaming audio in the 90s and
clearly remember thinking about a p2p network then, because of the expense and
legal threats I was receiving. All I wanted to do was enable football fans
living abroad to listen to the local radio station on match days.. I thought I
was doing the BBC a favour by extending their broadcast range! Yeah, I was
just a naive kid. :)

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ck2
So is this going to be an open source competitor to Abobe's Octoshape?

<http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octoshape>

Can it be made to work with Flash somehow? Because that would definitely be a
winner.

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dougb
It probably cannot be made to work with flash (without Adobe's help.) To build
a p2p system like this, you need greater access to the OS than the flash
sandbox will allow. The only way to get this is through a browser plugin.
Octoshape had a special deal with Adobe where the flash player would install
the Octoshape plugin, without the user having to do anything. This was because
the code was signed by Adobe.

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dougb
Sounds a lot like <http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/about/index.html>

btw, I hope he doesn't plan on making money on this. Rinera (now Conviva)
tried and failed. Media company executives freak out at any mention of P2P. I
bet they freak out even more when they hear P2P and Bram Cohen in the same
sentence.

