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by marknadal 2683 days ago
Yes and no, I'm the author of the P2P tech behind notabug.io, d.tube, and other sites, (https://github.com/amark/gun) so I have some experience with this:

- It works as well as WebRTC does. But browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have kept WebRTC crippled. Firefox is doing work to make this better.

- When WebRTC fails (which is like 60% of the time), you have to fallback through a DHT of IPv6 peers.

According to the law, I believe, any one of those peers could be liable.

As a result, anybody who has a consistent IPv6 address or domain winds up needing to run a peer-specific "blacklist" of :( :( :( DMCA take down or else they could possibly be sued or have their door smashed in.

We're trying to make this better by creating a network of WebRTC DHT signaling peers called AXE (check the github for more info).

This will let users comply with the law (even be protected by things like GDPR) and then transfer data directly to their friends (not using any middleman service) and this data can stay protected with encryption (see our WebCrypto wrapper that makes this easy, https://gun.eco/docs/SEA ).

This will be the best way for users to stay legally compliant while not screwing over people's freedom and property-rights.
2 comments
pmontra 2683 days ago
If people will learn that (example) to view videos they must use Firefox, they'll use Firefox. Than Google and Apple will fix their browsers.
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kodablah 2683 days ago
Veering off topic... I haven't found WebRTC to be that crippled by browser vendors. The fact that Apple didn't just give it the middle finger actually surprised me. I use it successfully for some things and lament that some users fall back to TURN (blame the ISPs), but w/ the webrtc adapter it works well. I too was experimenting w/ distributed signaling of late w/ IPFS [0]. That is quite crippled as well.

I'm not too concerned w/ end users' troubles with the law in a P2P sense. Even though the laws are ridiculous, it would be another level of ridiculousness to apply them to peers in such a system, akin to making Tor exit nodes and relays responsible for following this or the GDPR.

0 - https://github.com/cretz/webrtc-ipfs-signaling

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