Enter the ever evolving world of peer to peer using Javascript. In this talk we will push the limits of what is possible today using BitTorrent, streaming, and Javascript.

There will be demos and MAD SCIENCE.

• » Copenhagen
• » Github
• » Twitter

Transcript

I'm Mathias. I live in sunny Copenhagen. Also known as Mafintosh. That is the way to get in touch with me. We are going to talk about 3 things today. Javascript, bittorrent and a little bit of mad science. Stag Vm represent. Whoe. All right. So, we are on a tight schedule. We are going to dive straight into it. What is bittorrent? How does it work? How many people have heard about Bittorrent? All right. Usually when I ask this question, what is bittorrent? People tend to think this one thing. Which is not completely untrue. It is a bit sad. Actually bittorrent is just like way more than this. Application is way beyond piracy. So, yeah, let's talk about how it works. Normally when you fetch a file online it could be any file. Video of this talk. You have the scenario where you have a server and you trust this server and you go to the server and do send me this file. Yes, here is the file. It is kind of nice. It is super simple and nice. A diagram with 2 things on it. Awesome. What's the problem? Well, what happens when 1 million clients come in. We want to watch the video. I don't know if you saw the Apple keynote. They had this experience zozer The server is like, sending the files to everybody. It is going okay. You can see some of the iPhone things going on. One natural thing that can happen, the server explodes. It is not really viral anymore. How about we improve that? And a simple way would be to have every client send data to eachother. It looks like this. We call them peers. They are sending and receiving data. Swapping data around. That's awesome. This is what we call P2P. I mean, there are problems. Because, now we are sending data from arbitrary people. Getting data. How do we know that no one will come in and be like, this is the other talk that nobody likes. Coffeescript talks. So, there is a simple solution. Take the file. We split it into equally sized pieces. Half or 10 megs. And hash them. People know what it is. Digest. So, we can just get a piece from everybody. Assuming we had these hashes. If the hash doesn't match, it is a bad peer. Throw it away. We have to take this list of hashes, what we call torrent file. And we put it on the server. It needs to distribute that. That's pretty nice. But it has to do with the problem. You need people to talk to, to get the stuff. How do we do that? Well, dht. Distributed hash table. You know what it is? All right! So, it is basically a table that is dristributed. So like a table, you put a key and value in. And you can get the things that are stored, you get the values back. We can just do something like this. Take the torrent file and hash that. A hash of hashers. 20 byte thing. We store an address. If we want to find out to share this file, we do a list of keys. On the torrent file and we get peers back. Supersimple. And the bittorrent Dht is huge. Crazy. There are around 10 million nodes. The database at any time is a database where you have 1 million nodes distributing data. You need to take the 1 million people down to bring it down. The biggest database out there. It is how it works. It is pretty simple. All right. So, let's move on. So, bittorrent is good for distributing a bunch of data. There is a huge amount of data on bittorrent. That's cool. But wouldn't it be cool if we could access all this data instantly. That we don't have to wait to download all the data? If we can make a bittorrent stream? It would be cool. So, how can we do that? All right. So, streaming bittorrent means that we have these pieces, each equal pieces. We fetch the piece we need. If someone wants piece 5, we get piece 5. You have a peer with piece 5. You ask that peer to give it. Again this introduces a problem. This guy can become evil. And start being slow. We are not getting our data. If this peer is slow, we are not streaming. That is a problem. Luckily it is easy to improve this. We fetch the piece from multiple peers. We take the top 5 peers. Rank them based on speed or something. And we fetch the same piece from multiple people. If one of the peers becomes slow, we can detect it and swap him out. With someone else. That's pretty cool. This gives the scenario where we waste bandwidth. We are fetching the same data more than we need. It doesn't really matter. It is for critical pieces. Only for when we have a... It turns out it is a good algorithm. As a module. That's what we do these days. It is called torrent-stream. It is a node module that allows you to fetch data. And do this nice thing. Where you just patch a torrentfile to a constructor. You get the list of files in the torrent. You can create streams right away. You can do random access. 10 files. Whyf wait? It is transmitting data when it is ready. What can we use that for? It turns out streaming is pretty big on internet. It is a billion dollar industry. There are huge players out there. People like Netflix. And as it turns out that during peak hours when everybody is trying to watch House of Cards it consumes 1/3 of internet traffic. If you think about this number. Fucking huge. 1/3 of the internet! What? So, natural conclusion, wouldn't it be cool if we take it if we use P2P. Instead of Netflix? I implemented this, peerflix. It is a program that streams video using P2P and Bittorrent to Vlc. I try to do a demo of that. It is a live demo. So, things might blow up. There we go. All right. Just do like peerflix You pass it a torrent. What it will do now... Go out and start fetching data from peers. What you will see, it is on my screen here. This is actually streaming now live, no caching. This is like a video. Documentary. We can even do cool things like skip in the movie. Even though we are streaming. Hopefully. (applause) so, yeah, that's pretty awesome. And this gives us, I was watching the worldcup a couple of months back. Germany won I think. It was noticeable. Where you had a game a lot of people were watching. The quality, their online broadcasting dropped. We can flip this around and do something opposite. The more are watching, the better it runs. We can actually increase quality. Which is crazy. The more people watch, the better it runs. It is really cool. And I mean, this is streaming video. I have seen it before. There were some guys built a UI on top of my thing. Popcorn time. I don't know if you know it. To work around this video. It can become a gimmick. I like to try to push things. It takes us to the next segment, mad science. So, when you are in the space li little while you get the realisation. We can stream anything out there that is on bittorrent. Which is kind of cool. So, week ago I was preparing for this talk. And I need some cool datastream. So I went on Wikipedia to try to find some good datasets. Googled around. It hit me. Everything on Wikipedia is on bittorrent. There is a torrentfile containing everything on Wikipedia. It's huge. So, I implemented Peerwiki. It is a program that allows you to browse Wikipedia using bittorrent realtime. I am going to try to demo that. It is bleeding edge. I'm crossing my fingers here. So, what it does now is, it is connecting to Dht finding Wikipedia. It creates a webserver. That runs on this thing. So, what you are seeing here is the Wikipedia article, using Bittorrent. There is no centralized server. This is peer to peer. If wou went to went to Wikipedia, please give us money. Because of the servers. We can even click the links here. Hopefully. So, there is latency involved. It needs to get out and fetch this link I clicked on. So... (applause) i mean like, this torrent is crazy. It contains everything on Wikipedia. Even the assets. This picture. I don't know if you can see it. That's a file in the bittorrent thing. That is fetching when I browse. There are so many things happening here. It is like, we are reading this article. I know what is going on, it is like crazy. Again we get the property. The more people browse this page, the better Wikipedia runs. It is awesome. So, let's try to stop that before we kill the network. There is actually, the first use case for bittorrent. It turns out like, all of Linux is on Bittorrent. And it is the case we hear. You should download Ubuntu using Bittorrent. There is virtual box. It allows you to spin up VM. Using an Iso file. A Linux Iso file and virtual machine. What if we could somehow take virtualbox and max it use bittorrent instead. What if we can make it on the streams. Actually, it is lame. Because virtual box already has a nice feature, it deals with files. What if we didn't do anything to virtualbox. What if we somehow made this thing, that would make bittorrent transparent on your machine. And then make everything appear as regular files. A bittorrent file system. It is colled torrent-mount. It allows you to take any bittorrent file. The Wikipedia one. Could be any of the files. And pass this to the prograr. It will create a virtual file system, Fuse. A thing that allows you to build filesystem in userspace. And you can browse this using a browser. Let's try to do that. I need to open a finder. So, I just run Torrentmount. And pass the ubuntu image. Downloading from 40 peers. I can go to my finder now. I don't know if you can see it, it is there in the finder. It is an abstract file. We are still downloading. We can boot up virtualbox. That was the wrong one. And I can go in and create a new virtual machine. And I can find storage. I can click on browser. What I usually do. I can click, open finder. And select this iso file. Launch virtualbox. It is launching... So, what is happening here... (applause) i don't know if you can see it. We downloaded 80 MB so far. I should select German. Because we are in Germany. It is like the Ubuntu install thing. I see we have a little bit more time. We can even do more fun things. I should probably shut it down. We can also take stuff like, we can take the torrentfile. Mount that. And here is the video. An mp4. I should be able to... Open this with Vlc. It is not even there yet. And it is playign. It is live streaming in. From Bittorrent. And actually, this gives us this nice property. If we skjip in the file and try to find some dialogue. Hopefully. If we just... Wait for someone to speak. You see there are subtitles there. It is because Vlc is seeing, there is another file in the torrent, the subtitle file. That file is also on Bittorrent. What is happening, torrentmount says, you want to read the subtitle file, let me try to fetch it live. And stream it back to Vlc. Vlc doesn't care, it is reading it like a regular file. You get this really transparent thing. Where programs don't know what they are doing but reading files. Awesome. Yeah. That's Torrentmount. That's it for me. I am already interested in talking Node, Bittorrent, JS, anything. Find me at the hallway or at the party before I get too drunk. Or after, how mad the science should be. You should check out these cool things. Webtorrent, went into alpha. Trying to do this thing. But only in the browser. Using no native things. That's going to be crazy. There are substacks, That we hacked during our conference a while back. Let's take Google Maps and put it on Bittorrent. We don't need Google maps. That's it. Thank you. Edit transcript via pull request.