Feross Aboukhadijeh

It's so fulfilling to see WebTorrent still popping up on Hacker News after all these years. I started the project in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer. I started WebTorrent with the goal of extending the BitTorrent protocol to become more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent network. Within less than a year of starting the project, I got WebTorrent fully working (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317441). And it worked _well_, beating many native torrent apps in terms of raw download speed and the ability to stream videos within seconds of adding a torrent. WebTorrent never got as much attention as the cryptocurrency projects selling tokens throughout the mid-2010s, even though WebTorrent _actually worked_, and it had more users than almost all of them :) I was never tempted to add a cryptotoken to WebTorrent, despite many well-meaning friends telling me to do it and cash in. Nonetheless, WebTorrent served as an accessible on-ramp to the world of decentralized tech, along with other projects like Dat (https://dat-ecosystem.org/) and Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/), playing a role in getting people excited about decentralization. But WebTorrent is more than a protocol extension to BitTorrent. We also built a popular desktop torrent client, WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/), which supports powerful features like instant video streaming. We also built a `webtorrent` JavaScript package (https://socket.dev/npm/package/webtorrent) which implements the full BitTorrent/WebTorrent protocol in JavaScript. This implementation uses TCP, UDP, and/or WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport in any environment – whether Node.js (TCP/UDP), Electron (TCP/UDP/WebRTC), or the web browser (WebRTC). In the browser, the `webtorrent` package uses WebRTC which doesn’t require a browser plugin, extension, or any kind of installation to work. If you’re building a website and want to fetch files from a torrent, you can use `webtorrent` to do that directly client-side, in a decentralized manner. The WebTorrent Workshop (https://webtorrent.github.io/workshop/) is helpful for getting started and teaches you how to download and stream a torrent into an HTML page in just 10 lines of code. Now that WebTorrent is fully supported in nearly all the most popular torrent clients, including uTorrent, dare I say that we succeeded? Not only that, but we helped the JavaScript ecosystem a ton by writing hundreds of npm packages including buffer (https://github.com/feross/buffer), simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer), and StandardJS (https://standardjs.com/). It's been a long and winding journey, but I'm glad to have played a role in making WebTorrent happen. Huge shoutouts to all the open source contributors to WebTorrent over the years, but especially Diego R Baquero and Alex Morais who were critical to WebTorrent's success.

JavaScript style guide, with linter, & automatic code fixer. The easiest way to enforce consistent style in JavaScript projects. Installed 4.3 million times per month.

Prevent malicious open source dependencies from infiltrating your apps. Socket dramatically improves your open source security posture by detecting and blocking the attacks you don't expect – malware, install scripts, hidden code, typo-squatting, and more – which aren't caught by traditional vulnerability scanners.

191 million downloads per month! With browserify, simply require('buffer') or use the Buffer global and you will get this module. The goal is to provide an API that is 100% identical to node's Buffer API. Read the official docs for the full list of properties, instance methods, and class methods that are supported.

- concise, node.js style API for WebRTC - works in node and the browser! - supports video/voice streams - supports data channel - text and binary data - node.js duplex stream interface

Lead maintainer of WebTorrent, the first torrent client that works in the browser. Connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.

Today, Socket helps tens of thousands of developers to ship faster and spend less time on security busywork by helping them safely find, audit, and manage open source software at scale. Most developers use Socket through our popular GitHub integration – Socket for GitHub – and they love it! But what if you use another source code management system like GitLab or BitBucket? Or what if you want to integrate Socket into custom test or CI scripts? Or what if you just like using the command line? That's why we're so excited to preview a brand new way to use Socket today. Introducing the Socket CLI Preview!

Do you know what’s really going on in your node_modules folder? Software supply chain attacks have exploded over the past 12 months and they’re only accelerating in 2022 and beyond. We’ll dive into examples of recent supply chain attacks and what concrete steps you can take to protect your team from this emerging threat.