Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lowglow 3241 days ago
Can someone diff the spec from the previous version? What's the changelog? :)
2 comments
mouldysammich 3241 days ago
The main differences I can see is a change from SHA1 -> SHA2 and also seems to have added official spec for webtorrent.
link
Luminarys 3241 days ago
It also appears to be using a merkle hash tree for piece hashing now along with a few new peer wire messages to support that.
link
phire 3241 days ago
It also switches to a merkle hash per-file and specifies that each file is aligned to the start of a piece, and the size of the last piece of each file matches the amount of remaining data.

This means in large multi-file torrents you don't have to download (and store) the two extra 1-4mb pieces at the start/end of each file anymore.

link
cjbprime 3241 days ago
> official spec for webtorrent

Huh, where do you see that? Not seeing any ctrl-f hits for webtorrent or webrtc.

link
mouldysammich 3241 days ago
Whoops, i skimmed and they mentioned the end user web browser and I assumed they had.

I guess this is why they say when you assume you make an ass out of you and me.

link
kpcyrd 3241 days ago
It would be interesting to see how the new version compares to ipfs.
link
supergreg 3241 days ago
The tree structure seems very similar. It would be nice if torrent clients could interact with ipfs or gain ipfs capabilities. Think torrents that update themselves when the files change (thanks to ipns).
link
sktrdie 3241 days ago
There's already such BEP: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html - "Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items"
link