Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

293 132 2 years ago

github.com

synctext12• 2 years ago

Tribler founding professor here, AMA.

2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.

troyvit• 2 years ago

How well would tribbler work for disseminating content, such as a documentary, that might get a person jailed if they put it out on more mainstream social media?

synctext12• 2 years ago

Whistleblowing documentary spreading in Europe or upper Americas might go OK with solid operational measures such as open wifi war driving, etc. China, Russia, etc: nope.

CapitalTntcls• 2 years ago

Hi, I'm curious about your alternative model for capitalism. How does it aim to change the logic of capital accumulation? Since companies are driven by profit, the entire system revolves around capital growth and competition, which ultimately leads to the emergence of monopolies and billionaires. How does your model address these issues?

synctext12• 2 years ago

We simply iterate on Linux and Wikipedia work.

The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.

Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.

By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].

[0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...

__MatrixMan__5• 2 years ago

I want to see your project succeed, and I'm probably not alone. What kind of help do you need?

synctext12• 2 years ago

We love to have more help! Hardest part is debugging.

So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/pull/7926

thejohnconway• 2 years ago

I’m curious about the rewards/tokens aspect. Is this done using cryptocurrency (you mentioned bitcoin, urg, upthread), or something else?

hanniabu7• 2 years ago

They smartly aren't answering b/c of how hostile HN is to crypto.

Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.

DRosario3• 2 years ago

Have you checked out Farcaster? https://docs.farcaster.xyz/

FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.

pyinstallwoes7• 2 years ago

Any service built on cryptocurrency is a terrible idea for the future; there exists no such thing as scarcity in cyberspace.

zadler• 2 years ago

Hi I’d like to try plugging into Tribbler as a content backend for beastie.fi, which seems to have similar goals.

ajb• 2 years ago

Do content creators currently make any income from your platform? If so, what are the statistics of this (best, typical, etc)

jszymborski• 2 years ago

While I can't say I've really used Tribler a lot, I've been following the project for most of those years.

Thanks for working so hard on a such an admirable project.

digdugdirk• 2 years ago

Could this be run in the browser (via wasm, lets say) as a base layer service to build decentralized versions of twitter/facebook/etc on top of?

Qem2• 2 years ago

Time to test tribler again. Great project. I installed it 3-4 years ago. Looked great, but I couldn't get it working properly, because IIRC it required two open ports, one for regular torrent protocol, another for their content discovery protocol, and my VPN provider allowed only one port available to forwarding, per user per IP.

synctext12• 2 years ago

thnx Qem for you enduring patience!

We're now multiplexing everything on 1 port. If you use our Tor-like decentralised onion routing feature that works. Sadly, in normal mode we need two forwarded ports. Both Libtorrent download lib and our decentralised gossip requires their own port. We gossip about trust, content discovery, and torrent health.

Qem2• 2 years ago

Thank you all Tribler developers. Your project is awesome. With today Internet siloed in, projects to re-decentralize are a critical need.

inSenCite• 2 years ago

This is a super cool project (first time I'm hearing about it), great work to everyone involved!

Is the intent to have multiple tribler-like instances serving different (content) domains or more of a one-spot search that content providers can serve their content through? I ask as I'm wondering about how you foresee this "degrading" as it scales as that is where most current content platforms fail apart as they try to grow/maximize audience.

synctext12• 2 years ago

Glad to hear it! Indeed, most platforms have a central point of failure somewhere. Note that Bittorrent swarms never get overloaded, we use that same technique: extreme decentralisation.

With increased load that website, discovery server, or load balancer gets overloaded. With Tribler we decentralised everything to the extreme of Bitcoin and Bittorrent. So there is no "degrading", as long as the freeriders are somehow detected. See our 2007 architectural documents [1]

[1] https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/Concurren...

runeks• 2 years ago

Earn seeding tokens

How can this be possible in a non-centralized manner?

__MatrixMan__5• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't it be possible? My friends know what when I show up to a party, I usually bring a drink or a dish or something. There's no centralized database for this, they know because they've eaten and drank those things. We don't use tokens to keep track of this, but we could. The situation seems similar with seeding.

It's just not commonly done because you have to build and maintain a web of trust for it to to work, and that's often a level of user responsibility that's hard to cultivate. But if you need that web of trust anyway (e.g. for filtering out ads ad other disinformation) then you might as well use it for consensus about who is a good citizen and who is not.

(I have no idea if this is Tribler's approach, it's just on my mind because I've been designing something quite like Tribler, and it's my approach.)

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

It’s pretty easy to build an emission or reward schedule into the rules of a decentralized network

when the software that nodes are running see another compliant node, they expect for it to be rewarded so they all conform to the additional issuance of tokens

you just need to make sure that sybil attack attempts improve the network, as the attacker adds more nodes to earn more

hanniabu7• 2 years ago

With blockchain, but HN would hate to hear there's a usecase

fwip• 2 years ago

It uses Bitcoin

hanniabu7• 2 years ago

They said it's not

We have something much older then Bitcoin

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40159144

_nalply• 2 years ago

Corporate has learnt to misuse honorary or voluntary non-paid work in the software ecoystem and grabbing power.

For example one big media outlet could adopt Tribler. At first everyone rejoices because it is recognition but what if it turns out to be an attack? How is Tribler resilient against taking over from Corporate?

Of course, it's Open Source and everybody can fork. But still, could an attack be possible?

ccvannorman• 2 years ago

reminds me of "EEE" for incumbents to destroy new platforms; "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"

hkt2• 2 years ago

Always lovely to see projects like this. I used it years ago after thinking "surely there must be some kind of tor-like thing for bittorrent" and lo and behold, there was tribler.

At that point hidden seeding and downloading were both done via tor-like outproxies, eg, out to the regular internet. I recall talk from the issues page about intra-tribler media, eg, anonymised from end to end - does anyone know if this has been achieved?

synctext12• 2 years ago

Yes, you can do end-to-end encrypted hidden seeding. See technical docs (slightly outdated) [1]. Everything in Python was too slow. With Rust implementation we get 10x the speed, 160 Mbit/s anon tunneling.

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Hidden-Services-Spec...

ementally• 2 years ago

Great project, but can the devs comment on https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December...

[tor-dev] N reasons why the spooks love Tribler (Number N' will surprise you)

amenhotep• 2 years ago

ECB and random.randint, wow. I'm not sure any dev comment could redeem crypto sins like that in such a project.

tribler2• 2 years ago

Deadly mistakes from 2014. Full redesign and new Rust code.

simcop2387• 2 years ago

Looks like there was a discussion back then on the github issues, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1066

EDIT: Had a chance to look through it now, looks like they addressed all the concerns back by 2015

i.e.

1. Replacing the custom crypto code with more standard libraries (looks like they settled on NACL/libsodium's implementations).

2. Switched to AES-GCM and then later ChaChaPoly

3. Fixed up the tor protocol issues too.

Probably more but there's a lot going on.

jazzyjackson4• 2 years ago

Are you suggesting the subject line is inappropriate? I just thought spook meant spy (probably the only audience to whom strong encryption and anonymity actually matter) I guess there's an older more offensive meaning.

hgyjnbdet• 2 years ago

Last I looked at tribler it was an attack resilient torrent/tor-like network client. Now it's a micro-economy for media. That's a pivot!

aldeluis• 2 years ago

The use of Tribler was problematic in my case because it uses a random torrent cache that was instrumentalized for lawfare after a political problem with my public employer in Spain. I was accused of having pedophile content on my computer after the prosecution's expert selected the corresponding torrents and downloaded them. It seems there are always pedophile torrents in a random sample of torrents.

The political problem was that I refused to alter statistical data for a "scientist" that wanted to publish that women after abortion develop mental health issues. They search my job computer for something to kill me and found tribler cache.

https://www.publico.es/actualidad/rioja-paga-estudios-salud-...

It was hard. Lost job, six years under juditial prosecution... at the end, the case was dismissed, I could show that the torrent cache was not personal, but the damage was great.

Be careful if you are an activist or have political involvement. I'm unaware of the workings of the current version, hope it encrypts the torrent cache somehow.

nextaccountic3• 2 years ago

Why does tribler automatically download random torrents without user intervention? Is it just to perform distributed search?

In this case, it downloads random torrent _metadata_ right? How could the case be brought with just metadata? Regardless of whether the torrent cache was personal or not, if it was just metadata it still didn't contain anything illegal

jazzyjackson4• 2 years ago

linking to illegal data may be prosecuted as distribution, even if you're not the host

if you're contributing to a distributed index where people are searching and retrieving material thanks to the meta data on your drive, IMHO that's pretty close to distribution

1oooqooq2• 2 years ago

here's the thing with law, it's not code.

if they argue nonsense and the judge buys, it's that.

law enforcement uses hashes of bad content. torrent conveniently uses hashes. the expert can argue if you have the hash you have the content because how torrent works.

the judge that accepted the argument about how torrent works but refused the argument about how tribler or freenet etc works should be disbarred imho.

doctor_eval• 2 years ago

“Problematic” is perhaps the biggest understatement I’ve ever read. Sorry that this happened to you.

amelius2• 2 years ago

Did you consider that it might have been your employer who tricked your Tribler software to download the illegal files in the first place?

thomastjeffery• 2 years ago

There's a lot of focus here on the alternative economy part, but I think that's way less interesting than the rest of what this tech offers.

What we really need is alternative moderation. The most fragile/vulnerable part of traditional torrent trackers is centralized forums. It's also the most problematic aspect of social media. A successful decentralized alternative to content moderation would drastically change the world.

wizardwes• 2 years ago

Interesting, but I wonder how feasible this actually is. The closest thing I can think of is the ability to selective defederate in things like Mastodon or Lemmy, where the host of your instance can do broad sweeps of moderation by essentially blocking instances that don't fit your instance's stance. The issue is that any moderation past personal blocks amd filters requires leaning against an authority, whether that be algorithmic, democratic, or our traditional style of moderation. And really, that's, in a way, what people want, someone who can handle removing unfavorable content before it gets to you most of the time. I'd love to hear ideas counter to this though.

James314• 2 years ago

Does the Tribler Client automatically turn my computer into an exit node?

FearOfTheDuck• 2 years ago

spxneo• 2 years ago

What is the onramp/offramp process for the tokens used in this micro-economy?

If somebody seeds Independence Day 2 and by some miracle becomes the most seeded movie, how does that somebody cash out his tokens?

If somebody wants to download Independence Day 2 what and how is it being converted into tokens?

yobbo• 2 years ago

The goal here seems to be to incentivise bandwidth-sharing, but this is not the main problem.

For a "decentralized youtube" to ever make sense, the problems that need solving are how to compensate content-creators/owners, and how to prevent piracy.

chottocharaii• 2 years ago

Two problems: - Incentivising decentralised infrastructure (this solves that) - Incentivising content creation (completely different issue, will always require a political solution, and cannot be solved by technologists)

heycosmo4• 2 years ago

I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.

The idea that $10 for a digital copy of an album that is already on youtube (or a friend's harddrive) should be a viable business model is weird to me in this day and age.

I have recently been wondering about a threshold-based "media economy" where creators don't actually show us anything (except for clips or samples or low-res versions, etc) until they are guaranteed a certain amount of income. It's basically kickstarter. A musician makes an album, goes on kickstarter and asks for $10,000 to release it. Once $10k is reached, the songs go up on a server, or are released on bandcamp, spotify, or any of the usual channels. Additional money beyond the threshold can be made, but it will be as difficult as it is now. But they have already reached $10k (set by them) so everyone can feel good that the musician has earned what they feel they deserve.

I'm sure there are many problems with this. For one, many artists aren't creating just for money. They want to show us their creations, and with a threshold, they would have to hold back until it is reached (in the case of musicians, they might not even be able to play a new song at a show until the threshold is reached, b/c smartphones).

There may be a critical mass problem, too. If two artists are similar and one releases immediately while the other waits for the threshold payment, the latter may drift into obscurity. There must be some allure to the withholding, though?

What other problems kill this approach?

Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.

tw04• 2 years ago

Could it work for open source software, too? Make your thing, don't share it. Demo it, ask for the release payment, then put it on github.

I think it would be far more reasonable to put the source into escrow, to be released when a threshold is met. I've seen closed source vendors do that when they're smaller to ensure a large customer is not left high and dry should they go bankrupt or be acquired by someone who kills the product.

I don't foresee anyone being willing to see a demo of a piece of software, then writing a check for it before using it. In the closed source world you pretty much ALWAYS have to do some sort of POV/POC before anyone will buy your stuff.

Eisenstein2• 2 years ago

Plenty of creators make a decent living selling their content digitally. Once you democratize the tools and distribution, you remove the media companies that traditionally take the lions share of all the money. In the traditional setup a few business people and a few artists get rich and everyone else is broke. In an economy where the creator distributes directly via digital then a bunch of people get decent incomes. The second option is the better one, IMO. Once we do away with the notion that creating art could make you rich, then it become less necessary to make sure that we have some centralized way to collect money for art.

synctext12• 2 years ago

Agreed! Direct distribution will completely re-shape the content landscape, I believe. Probably starting with the most dysfunctional industry of "producing" music. The intermediaries are borderline parasitic there.

We now have "Decentralised AI" working in the lab last month. So also the new music discovery, recommendation, fuzzy keyword search, spam filtering can be realised with full decentralisation (in principle). See live demo of our toy example [1]. Broad writeup [2]

[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi [2] https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-showcase-decentralized-...

heycosmo4• 2 years ago

I think I agree with you, but democratizing distribution is still orthogonal to the piracy problem. On the one hand, I'm more likely to pay an artist if the only official way I can get their art is to purchase from their website. On the other hand, the first digital download from an artist's website may go right to a torrenter, or youtube. Is self-distribution accompanied by the task of chasing youtube takedowns? Sounds not fun.

A pre-release payment directly addresses the issue of piracy. Piracy just doesn't exist if the content isn't out there.

corimaith• 2 years ago

The problem with kickstarter is that alot of creators end up not fulfilling their pledges, even as they receive far more than they asked for.

To be fair, that's more for risky ambitious projects like mmorpgs that even AAA devs fail at.

heycosmo4• 2 years ago

I'm mostly thinking about creations that are already done and can somehow be vetted, either by demo, samples, trial version, or by a reputable reviewer that gets a sneak peek.

joshspankit• 2 years ago

What other problems kill this approach?

The copyright regime.

Artists (especially music) are currently navigating a very tight legal landscape where the works they are producing might get flagged as infringing even if they took every reasonable precaution. For example: sounds that sound similar to an existing sample, or note progressions that are fiercely defended by companies who use the residuals as their primary income source.

This can cause an issue if the artist releases a work and does not receive enough to defend themselves in court, especially as the work would now be very hard to take down and the artist may even have trouble stopping the income from coming in.

Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while and I think there are some notable wins esp. around the Patreon model where artists can know the eventual payout before they start making. I think it has amazing potential as most content becomes “free” anyway and it would make it so much easier for fans to share openly netting in more plays, more likes, and more fans.

heycosmo4• 2 years ago

Source: I’ve been thinking about this “everything is released for free once the artist is paid” approach for a while...

You should start a "media label" then. Take a cut of the threshold payment for (1) vetting and reviews of unreleased art, (2) distribution costs of the digital media, and (3) legal assistance for artists against copyright trolls.

throw10920• 2 years ago

I think many proposed solutions to the creator compensation problem end up glossing over a fundamental difficulty: once an easily-distributed work (like anything digital) is in a consumable state (and thus copy-able), it becomes basically free.

You've re-discovered the purpose of copyright laws.

motoxpro• 2 years ago

Yeah, it might be easier with digital, but once Mickey Mouse gets drawn and becomes popular, drawing him again is super easy for the random artist who can say it is "theirs" and draft off of the millions of dollars Disney spent marketing. Hence the need for copyright.

Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media

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