On 04/07/2014 03:50 AM, ChaTo (Carlos Alberto Alejandro CASTILLO
Ocaranza) wrote:
Hi,
An answer to the "single point of failure" of having a URL to pull the
content is to use a secure distribution mechanism.
I agree that would be nice, but the more important point is that two of
the dev teams pulled the code from github and shut down their web site.
Project X is being bullied of the net. Project X is free software. How
can we as a community protect Project X and its development?
-Jonathan
I think a great candidate is BitMessage, which I have been using for
some months now: https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page
BitMessage is a secure peer-to-peer communications protocol that
allows you to broadcast a message (or receive a broadcast message)
without revealing your IP address.
Cheers,
On 04/06/2014 11:41 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
Hi list,
Can some tech liberator out there versed in javascript and video
streaming please take over the popcorn-time project? It looks like
it was developed pseudonymously by at least three teams now which
have all disappeared (probably due to pressure from Hollywood).
If you haven't heard of it, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time
Why should this interest you?
* Licensed GPL v3
* Has the most user-friendly interface I've seen in a piece of free
software
* Runs on GNU/Linux, OSX, Windows
* Streams downloads efficiently and uses Bittorrent to seed while the
user watches (with no setup or intervention by the user)
* Accessibility. Looks like the project is getting bullied with a
game of whack-a-mole, probably due to pressure from Hollywood. AFAICT
there is no new technology being used-- the original devs used mostly
pre-existing libs to make something that is easy to use. What
everyone on this list can do using Transmission and VLC can now be
done by non-experts.
How to stop the game of whack-a-mole?
There needs to be something like a "popcorn kernel" team. It should
use exactly the same API as the software currently does, but just
have a place where the user can type in an address from which to pull
the content. It'd be pretty easy to host a tracker with one or two
public domain titles and test with that. Then if a site like
archive.org decides to adopt the YTF API to access its public domain
videos, users can just add that address and start streaming the
content. (And again because they are also seeding this helps out
archive.org, so it's a win-win.)
That would remove the only controversial line of code-- the url of
YTF-- so that anyone who wants to improve the software may do it
without being bullied. Also, if there were a well-known organization
dedicated to hosting and defending free software that could host the
repo and front page it would lower the risk of a rogue, suspicious
site putting up downloads with malware in them. (And each time
Popcorn-time gets resurrected at some new domain that risk increases.)
The original code is still on github. Not sure about the other
incarnations. It's worth noting that there seemed to be quite a bit
of activity on each incarnation (bug fixes, improvements) so it might
be worth it to try to find a link to the most recent incarnation.
(And since it's git it should be easy to audit the changes.)
I really wish I knew javascript and node.js. Then I'd just do it
myself. :)
Best,
Jonathan
--
ChaTo (Carlos Castillo) <http://chato.cl/>
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