Building BitTorrent into the browser is a bad design. I tried and measured it. It makes the browser even more bloated and busy and less responsive and vulnerable to crashing than it currently is, which is a leap in the wrong direction.
It's much better to run just one BitTorrent client as a separate process, a system service that all other programs can share and access via local http (through a data channel configured by url parameters, and optionally a control channel for monitoring and on-the-fly configuration), not built in and tied to one particular app like the web browser.
That's how Red Swoosh and Bittorrent DNA worked: They acted like a local web server, and any web client could simply open a url and start downloading the content, which would be delivered as it was received. BitTorrent DNA had an option of trying to download the chunks in order as much as possible, so it was better for watching streaming video. But they were competing products, you would not want to run both at once.
The point is that every app knows how to fetch files via http, and doesn't need to know a thing about BitTorrent. So the Red Swoosh or BitTorrent DNA service makes BitTorrent look like http, and you don't have to modify the web browser or link in any native libraries or bloat and degrade any apps.
Akamai acqui-hired Travis Kalanick (yeah that insufferable überbro) and his Red Swoosh app because it was a threat to them, to keep it from cutting into their profits, and unilaterally lowered their prices for TomTom to keep us from using BitTorrent DNA instead.
This is why most web browser tried and abandoned the embedded approach years ago, and why AWS/Cloudflare/Akamai/etc loath to support p2p hosting:
DonHopkins on April 16, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Spotify Starts Shutting Down Its Massive P2P Netwo...
When I worked for TomTom, I developed and tested a system for distributing maps via BitTorrent.
I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [1] [2] [3] [4]
TomTom's Maps are perfect for BitTorrent distribution, because they're large (1 Gig and growing) and lots of people in the same region need to download the same map at the same time. And it would have been a wonderful legal and practical example of a legitimate use of BitTorrent to point to when companies like Comcast try tricks like blocking BitTorrent traffic.
I visited BitTorrent in San Francisco, and discussed it with Bram Cohen. Their technology seemed ideal for our purposes (it worked a bit like Red Swoosh / FoxTorrent), and they quoted me a price per gigabyte to distribute content over their BitTorrent DNA network, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than we were paying to Akamai (this was before the made BitTorrent DNA distribution free).
A couple days after that meeting, I stopped by the Akamai booth at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and asked them what their prices were for using the Red Swoosh technology they'd recently acquired. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Red Swoosh, gladly told me about his technology and answered my technical questions. (I had previously been looking at Red Swoosh and FoxTorrent, before it was acquired by Akamai, and it would have been easy to integrate with our xulrunner based product, TomTom Home).
Akamai's sales people refused to quote me a price, despite repeated requests, so I told them the price BitTorrent quoted me, and told them we were ready to start testing as soon as possible, and asked again if they could at least give me a ballpark estimate of how much they would charge for distributing content via Red Swoosh, and when we could start testing. They muttered something about not having come up with a pricing model yet, but that I could get into their beta program, whenever that started, which they also would not state.
I was somewhat skeptical about Akamai's support for Red Swoosh, dedication to P2P technologies, and motivations for acquiring Red Swoosh, since P2P technologies are such a huge threat to their business model. It was getting a lot of attention before they acquired it. I was afraid that they might have just acqui-hired Red Swoosh simply to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it. And I was afraid that if and when they finally figured out how to charge for it, it might not be such a great deal after all.
So I went back to Amsterdam, integrated BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home (the desktop app for managing content and downloading maps on your TomTom device, like iTunes for TomToms instead of iPods, which happened to be implemented on xulrunner (the Mozilla "platform" that Firefox and TomTom Home are build on top of -- which Mozilla eventually lost interest in supporting as a third party application development platform).
It was easy to integrate BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home, it worked well, and I performed a successful beta test with a bunch of users across the world, to measure how well it worked, how long it took, and how much it would save.
Then I did an analysis of the Akamai logs to figure out how much money we were spending on customers downloading maps, how long it took, where they were downloading them from, and how much money BitTorrent DNA would save us.
For example, Australia would have really benefited, because their connection to the outside world and Akamai coverage was terrible, but their internal connection speed and bandwidth was excellent, and everybody in Australia wants the Australia map, of course.
It turned out that BitTorrent would save TomTom about a million euros the first year, and more each year, since TomTom was distributing larger and larger maps, more frequently by subscription, and of course they hoped to get more customers over time. (See: http://www.sadtrombone.com ...)
But then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Akamai unilaterally lowered the prices they were charging TomTom, saving us a lot of money immediately, presumably to prevent us from switching to BitTorrent (after I had made a bit of a scene at Akamai's GDC booth, in front Travis Kalanick and their sales people, about just having talked Bran Cohen and acquired a quote and beta testing agreement from BitTorrent, and insisted that Akamai tell me what their prices were and when we could start testing -- that may have motivated them to unilaterally lower their prices).
So in the end, TomTom middle management decided to can the BitTorrent project, in spite of the fact that it was the TomTom founder Pieter Geelen's idea in the first place, and he'd been micromanaging the entire project and user interface all along, to make sure it would not just save us money, but also not have a negative impact on usability or customer perception.
There are some important non-technical issues to deal with that Pieter wanted to get right: making it easy to use, setting the defaults right, explaining what it is, getting consent from customers to use their upload bandwidth (since they may have to pay for it, have an upload cap, or want to use it for other ahem purposes), and clearly explaining what benefits customers get from it (not leaving the impression that it's just to benefit TomTom financially, at the expense of the customer), and revealing the possible costs and risks.
We put a lot of effort into that part of it, and I don't think it was going to be a problem. It seems to have worked out all right for WoW and Spotify (in retrospect, up to now).
It was disappointing that TomTom didn't use BitTorrent, but I can certainly understand Akamai's mortal fear of it, and I'm still skeptical that Akamai may have bought it just to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it, and didn't really mean to roll it out practically and economically, and develop it to its full potential.
Years later, Akamai now has something called "Akamai NetSession", that may or may not be related to Red Swoosh -- I don't know much about it or how much it costs. Can anyone else comment on that, please? [5]
BitTorrent between TomTom (i.e. mobile) devices? Sounds like a terrible idea. Am I missing something? Users pay good money for upload bandwidth. Far more per megabyte than TomTom would pay to use an ordinary CDN.
DonHopkins on June 9, 2019 | parent [–]
Oh no, not on the device, but the desktop computer you plug it into via USB. So it can download maps while the device isn't connected, over your home internet connection (but probably not your phone), overnight or whenever.
Yes, it was not appropriate for situations where you had to pay for upload bandwidth. We were very careful in designing the gui to disclose the fact that it would use your upload bandwidth, explain the possible costs and benefits, let users opt-in if that was ok with them, monitor the download status, and switch the BitTorrent feature on and off.
TomTom real time traffic prediction system depends on users trusting them enough to opt-in to uploading anonymized trip measurements, so it was very important not to do something that broke their trust by abusing their network connection.
TomTom had an "iTunes-like" desktop content management and device control desktop app called TomTom Home, which was implemented in xulrunner (the underlying framework of Firefox and Thunderbird, kind of a predecessor to Electron for writing cross platform desktop apps in JavaScript with C++ XP/COM plugins).
The first thing I tried was to make an XP/COM plugin out of the LibTorrent library. That worked ok, but the idea of increasing the size and complexity of what was already essentially a web browser with a whole bunch more complex code that does lots of memory allocation and networking all the time, didn't seem like a good design. This was long before Firefox supported multiple processes, so the same app handing bittorrent would bloat the app and degrade the user interface responsiveness.
However RedSwoosh, FoxTorrent and BitTorrent DNA all ran in separate processes that just handled all the BitTorrent stuff, and that you could talk to via https (to stream the file with a special url, and retrieve progress telemetry on another url). And it's incredibly easy to integrate xulrunner or any web browser with those servers via http, so no C++ XP/COM plugin required.
Another issue is that you don't want every application to have its own BitTorrent client built in, or you will trash the network and disk, since otherwise they would compete for resources. It needs to be a centralized a system service, shared by any app that needs it.
BitTorrent DNA worked nicely that way. And it could fall back to the CDN to download at full speed if there weren't enough seeders.
MaxBarraclough on June 9, 2019 | root | parent [–]
> not on the device, but the desktop computer you plug it into via USB
Gotcha.
P2P-with-failover-to-CDN is what Spotify famously used to do.
Do you even need the top chart when you open the app and every other day it's either a Scopely property or Monopoly Go?
It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.
Perhaps some of them annoyed the President's illegally-appointed mega-donor, if they spoke out against giving root access to all his unvetted junior flunkies.
Maybe all the extra features and scaffolding helped when he first started building it... But I'd bet that raw Claude Code and Codex are smart enough now that they make things worse.
Presumably, that was a response to other storefronts/launchers appearing, which means the competition did force them to change behavior. Companies don't give up revenue without cause.
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Topically—the whole reason for the login walls was to fulfill the requirements of their Google/OpenAI data deals. OpenAI wanted to pull up the ladder behind them.
It's a very typical failure mode for publicly-traded companies. For a CEO to have the incentive to do something that will kill their company, in a few quarters' time—in exchange for a one-off windfall that will boost the stock price, CEO compensation, &c. Short-termism at the "eating the golden goose" level.
> [May 2024] "In its IPO prospectus, Reddit revealed that it has contractual agreements to license its data to customers including Google worth a combined over $200 million. And, in its first earnings report as a public company, Reddit reported a 450% year-over-year increase in non-ad revenue, attributable mainly to those agreements."
> "Reddit stock was up 11% in extended trading following the announcement of the OpenAI deal."
Really not surprising given the history of sloppy coding, elementary authentication mistakes, outsourced "support", and anecdotal reports of horrid internal culture over the past few years
The average user didn’t and doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. When I used Facebook more heavily, I would routinely see memes passed around where people were alarmed to discover Facebook has a license to use+reproduce their photos, and posted legalese on their walls which they believed would revoke that license so Zuckerberg can’t steal them.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
If Automattic funded the PHP Foundation with 8% of their revenue [1], like what Matt Mullenweg asked from companies using WordPress [2], the PHP Foundation would have lots of money.
> Imagine how great an Instagram MCP would be. You could create your own feed algorithm (such as the OG algorithm: just pictures from friends based on when they posted). Users would be able to filter out all the influencer content and ads Instagram throws on them. But Instagram would never do this.
This is why I don't understand why MCPs (or in other words open documented APIs right?) are being pushed so much.
What's the value in e.g. Amazon opening up their APIs to competitors, lowering the cost of scraping their data? Or allowing their consumers to more easily analyze dynamic pricing? Isn't the whole point to steer people towards closed proprietary apps that work in walled garden that prevent reverse-engineering and any kind of modification?
I think it's only a matter of time, like the build-up to the financial crash in 2008 or the dot-com bubble. There's currently a huge amount of money being bet on the big AI tech companies without any real sense of return. And the companies like Oracle that are funding data centre build-out are sitting on unused GPU stock.
Recently, the Australian AI firm failed to secure an IPO [1], [2].
OpenAI is looking to go for an IPO despite shaky revenue [3], [4], [5], resulting in a stock drop for companies like Oracle invested in OpenAI [6].
Anthropic is in a similar situation: looking to IPO despite shaky finances [7], [8], [9].
The companies involved are all investing in each other and trading money between them leading to circular investment [10].
I generally agree with the prevailing commentary here, i.e. that automating app development and maths proofs may not be as world-changing as the Artificial Intelligentsia purport / “fear” it to be.
But also, upon more reflection, it occurred to me that if we’re able to create a competent humanoid robot, that could legitimately be world changing in some good and other very bad ways. The scary part is that I don’t believe there’s any major physical / energetic barrier to this. The hardware exists, the power supplies are light enough. The only part that’s lagging is the software and motion contols; the intelligence. The part that is experiencing breakthroughs at an accelerating pace.
What if a highly intelligent and physically competent robot were available for the price of a cheap car, say ~$20k? What if that robot were competent enough to cook, clean, assist the elderly, move things around, assemble and disassemble things, etc? Billions of jobs would be displaced, or hit with a very concrete maximum wage.
Many white collar jobs, while still at risk for displacement as well, benefit from barriers like IT integration and data privacy hurdles, and the fact that corporate higher-ups simply prefer to communicate with humans.
But most blue collar / manual labor jobs have almost the opposite condition: humans introduce risk, and generally don’t enhance anybody’s “experience” - see people’s somewhat odd acceptance of higher fares for a Waymo vs an Uber. [1]
I don’t think we’re there yet, but the fact that we are rapidly accelerating our trajectory toward that world should be at the least, unsettling.
Astra uses[1] a new-for-frontier-models technique, recurrent depth. It has a section of layers in the middle - I'll call it R while the other sections are P (prelude) and C (coda), to match Geiping 2025 - which gets looped. So instead of the sequence of layers involved in the forward pass looking like P->R->C, it instead looks like P->R->R->...->R->C, with the model's effective depth being notably higher than the number of layers. This is basically a cheap way to get some of the effect of stacking more layers, without having to pay the cost of having more real layers that need to be trained.
Increasing effective depth like this is bad for safety because it can ruin CoT monitorability: the reason why looking at the model's CoT actually gives you info about what the model is thinking is that the model can't do enough thinking in a forward pass alone to solve complex tasks, and hence has to do multi-step reasoning in CoT. The more thinking the model can do in a single token's forward pass, the more opaque the model's reasoning is, and the less reason there is to believe that what it writes down in the CoT has anything to do with reality.
For Astra specifically, the impact seems to be limited to a moderate monitorability hit, like the concerning result from the model card that Astra is notably better than any model before at solving problems under the constraint of not mentioning the answer in the CoT. The really bad scenario, however, is that this may create a race to the bottom where OpenAI and Anthropic feel the need to use more recurrent depth in each generation to not get outcompeted on capabilities, completely bricking CoT monitoring for both model families. Or, worse, the pressure to compete might push them into one of the worse techniques, like training on the CoT[2], or eliminating human-readable CoT and letting the model think entirely in neuralese.
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> As for why NPR in particular, when Glass tracked down one of the kids to ask, he was given the kind of unvarnished answer that a middle schooler would give: “Um, I think we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.”
