Torrent files are slowly being replaced by magnet links. The next problem is that most browsers don't understand magnet links, so unless you have a BitTorrent client installed, the links won't take you anywhere.
So it might be interesting to think about embedding a small BitTorrent client in the browser to handle magnet links. It would need to be embedded because once the torrent's finished downloading you want to unpack it and view it in the same browser window where you clicked on the link.
From a practical perspective, I think that the use of magnet links with an embedded browser is an interesting way to make certain documents harder to censor, as a supplement to the web but not in place of it.
I'm not sure that anyone has proposed this, but remember that the majority of users' active web browsing experiences are not concerned with the retrieval of static pages, but instead making specific requests that are handled and packaged by the web server before being sent to the user. (Just accessing Google's main page isn't very interesting, it's access to the search results from their database, which we get by interacting with the main page that is important. Reading a news site typically gets you a set of articles drawn from their database on demand, that are formatted to create the page as you see it.) This means that the BitTorrent approach is useful for accessing static documents, but not (in general) for what we would consider web browsing. There are therefore three problems with this BitTorrent-style approach, The first is the standard bootstrap problem -- how you get that first link into the system. This wouldn't seem to be the main issue, as a 'seed' link could be bookmarked for long-term availability. (I imagine it would be harder in practise, but let's leave that problem there.) The second is that it's trivial to censor BitTorrent at the protocol level. Web browsing is easy to censor as well, but the average user's view is that the web is equivalent to the internet. If you block the web as a whole then you will upset all internet users. Blocking BitTorrent as a whole is much less of a concern. More subtly, BitTorrent is reasonably trackable and would leak the information of who is accessing what -- not something you really want for access to documents that your powerful adversary is trying to block. The third. and really the major, problem is that if using BitTorrent in this way actually results in using the traditional web for traditional web usage, and BitTorrent, either via .torrents or via magnet links, for censored or blocked documents, then you haven't actually moved a long way from simply having a BitTorrent client integrated with your web browser. That simply results in the method of bypassing censorship for static documents that is already widely in use today. Joss _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE