I’ve been pondering the need for an alternative to Youtube. Preferably one that was Peer-to-Peer and NOT subject to either government nor corporate censorship as is Youtube.
Seems others were also thinking that way, and the result is something called “Bitchute”. h/t to John Silver here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/scraping-noaa-and-cdiac/#comment-78459
So I took a look. With all of about 5 minutes on it, I’m liking what I’m seeing. An interface reminiscent of Netflix (with lines of images and you pick what looks interesting. I’m going to explore their search functions next.)
So how do you get it installed? Well, I had to do exactly nothing. That’s right. Nothing. I just clicked on an image at their website and it is running the video. I’m using the Chromebox as it is good and fast on videos and, well, my monitor is a DVI monitor and doesn’t do HDMI audio, while the Raspberry Pi and Odroid seem to not like doing HDMI video with 2.5 mm round plug audio (or I just have not cared enough to figure out the how of it… figuring I’ll just get a real HDMI monitory someday instead… and having the Chrombox all of a 20 second boot away as an option…)
So here’s their web site: https://www.bitchute.com/
Take a look. Drive it around. Let your comments be heard. You all can kick it around the block faster than “just me” can.
I’m not seeing any option of an “embed” code, so this is an interesting video I’m watching about Asia and Turkey. I’m going to do the “just paste it” and see what happens:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/BLUfdozga-w/
In this first episode of China Watch Peter Lee looks at two key geopolitical developments: the realignment of forces across Asia as Syria winds down and the focus shifts to Central Asian and Uyghur militancy; and the emergence of the North Korean nuclear program as the key security issue in East Asia. It’s a time of transition, uncertainty, and questions as to how the United States under Donald Trump will handle the challenges handed to him by the outgoing Obama administration.
Looks like interesting comments too:
Joey Ragone • a month ago
Thanks Peter.One quibble: didn’t the US and its Gulf allies create ISIL? Israel trains them and Turkey buys their pilfered oil. What about those infamous airdrops?
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aBallerDotCom Joey Ragone • a month ago
I always said the first display of any form of ISIL/ISIS is the people that killed Gaddafi. Yes, the US created them. You can tell by the video of Hillary Clinton getting the news of Gaddafi being captured. She first shrugs it off and claims she doesn’t believe it because there have been false claims before. Someone hands her the blackberry again and her reaction is “Wow, Gaddafi has been killed.” and she starts laughing. Then she tries to hide her joy and goes back to doing her interview.
I found this video on YouTube. Also the people that killed Gaddafi look like a very early organization of ISIS without a leader. It started out as just a group of people with no morals and it was just a wild bunch of guerrillas. Now they seem to have organization and a leader that they follow and are willing to die for.If you look at how Gaddafi was killed and why you will find some interesting information about the United States. You will probably also find how the US CIA tricked Saddam into becoming a dictator to later go to war with him. It’s also good to note where Libya was when Gaddafi was around and the state Libya is in now. Any way, Gaddafi was captured only because his motorcade was attacked by a US drone. This lead to his capture because it drew the attention of the guerrillas on the ground. Hillary was the SoS at this time. This is the real reason the Obama Organization is being called the creators of ISIS.
Well, “just paste” gives a live link, but not an embed. “Some assembly required” I think.
From their FAQ:
How did this idea come about?
Throughout 2015 and 2016 several prominent YouTubers reported a loss of video monetization when covering certain topics or for having particular opinions. YouTube claimed this was due to tighter enforcement of existing rules, even if true this will restrict the type of content that gets made and is a form of censorship.
Here we believe people should be able to express their opinions and choose their topics. If existing services cannot allow that, then let’s make some that will. The question is, how to disrupt a platform as well established as YouTube? It cannot be on their terms; we think we might have an answer, decentralization by torrents and tailored matchups for monetization. *More on the monetization to come soon.
Rather than needing massive data centers with humongous bandwidth costs, torrents depend on many people sharing videos from their home computers. While this has been possible for many years through bit torrent, bit torrent applications have steep learning curves; this site aims to make the torrent experience seamless by working entirely in the web browser.
These next lines are live links on their site, hit the FAQ link to get the content:
The Revolution Will Not Be YouTubed – The Corbett Report, March 2015
Youtube Responded, But It Gets Even More Confusing… – Philip DeFranco, September 2016
Making Sense Of YouTube’s Great Demonetization Controversy Of 2016 – Forbes, September 2016
YouTube removes influential conservative website’s channel – Fox News Tech, January 2017
Back to the text of the FAQ:
How is this torrent greatness even possible?
BitChute is powered by WebTorrent. WebTorrent is an independent project started by Feross Aboukhadijeh in October 2013 and is the first torrent client that works in the browser. YEP, THAT’S RIGHT. THE BROWSER.
I cannot overstate the importance of WebTorrent. The Internet is full of centralized monsters and WebTorrent is the magical sword we will use to slay them.
You can find out more about WebTorrent here: https://webtorrent.io/faq.
Can I host a torrent on my site?
Yes, the more the better. Otherwise, this project is just another YouTube wannabe. We will eventually have tools and tutorials to assist and encourage this. Torrents take on a life of their own and can operate independently of any web site that indexes them. Your website can be another index as we work towards a decentralized Internet.
Is the bit in BitChute because of BitCoin?
Not really, we will probably integrate the blockchain and bitcoin in some way but the ‘Bit’ is in honour of BitTorrent. Unlike Youtube this is a p2p network, you can host content as well as watch. I do plan to make a video to explain this a lot better.
Where can I get a channel and upload a video?
This site is still under development. Channel access has been given to some early sign-ups but general access is not yet available. We’ll update you as soon as this changes. In the meantime, you can still browse, like, comment and subscribe to existing channels.
Todo list
This site is still under development.
I took out the list because it was generating more email questions than we have time to answer right now.
Feature wise we are trying to create a comparable experience to YouTube.
Do I need a special browser to use this?
Right now this will work in Firefox and Chrome. Apple Safari is expected to work later this year when they complete adding WebRTC, MS Edge is currently unsupported.How many users does this site have anyway?
We currently have 5254 registered users. Please do add one more here.
December 23rd 2016: 1
January 11th 2017: 100
January 15th 2017: 1000Thanks
James Evan Pilato and James Corbett who have been saying for years, “create your own platforms and media.”Apollo Slater for the chats about creating such a site and design input. Apollo is currently working on a monetisation platform which will be integrated here.
Well, you can make that 5255 now… or maybe not, I’m not “registered” yet, whatever that means.
In Conclusion
I’ve pointed out before that attempts at control of the Internet just result in flowing around the obstruction. Here’s another example.
I’ve not done a big search of YouTube alternatives, just stumbled into this one and recognized the method was the right one. There are likely others, and you are encouraged to list any that have promise.
For now, I’m going to be wandering this site and looking at what the content leans toward at the moment. Once my site scrapes of several TB of Climate Data complete, I may well add their server function to my DMZ server board (the Orange Pi). I’d not mind at all being a part of the Video Torrent bypass of all things censorship…
I also need to figure out how to do embeds, if possible. They have a ‘share’ dropdown (with the sideways V with round dots on the end symbol, lower right corner of video) but it only connects to “social media” options (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Redit, Google+) – all things I don’t do. Hmmm…. P2P “Social Media” is something I might do… maybe that has promise… Hmmm…
With that, I’m off to P2P Video Land.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Oh My… Looks like we’ve hit the exponential knee on p2p stuff…. From the link to their underlaying tech: https://webtorrent.io/faq
Note the large number of “source code” links and that it is all P2P. Looks like the era of Central Authority and Censorship just got kneecapped…
Howdy, EM – The most serious concern I have about p2p, is what happens when some child molester loads up the p2p network with child porn and it ends up on my machine?
With most p2p like bittorrent, you only get what you choose to share. That is you pick something to look at and it gets downloaded to your machine, and you in turn share it on.
Only identity hiders like TOR have you washing other random stuff through your machine, and that tends to be transitory.
While I can imagine a counter case, I don’t know of any software that actually does that. (Though I’ve thought through how to do it “for that day” when it becomes necessary – then I’d store the blocks disbursed to multiple machines as encrypted fragments. TCFS the Transparent Cryptographic Filesystem already does that…)
So unless this is implemented in a peculiar way, it ought not be a problem. Since generally folks who care about this kind of stuff enough to write the code, are more paranoid about Authority than I am, I’m generally comfortable with their design choices.
Oh, though it is something I’d like to look into. How the underlaying webtorrent code actually works. Since it is based on the bittorrent model, I would expect it to be the same, but it needs verification.
The idea behind Bittorrent is that one party puts up a file, and a pointer to it. That pointer can be shared out ( when you click to download the lorrent link…) Then you advertise that you want FOO to all the folks who currently have FOO (or any part of FOO). It then becomes an n x n swap of blocks between all holders of the blocks.
In theory, the original poster may only hand out each block one time, since once it is handed out, that party can then share it on to others. Eventually everyone gets all the blocks from someone, and they all continue to share it out, until you remove it.
Notice that at no time did anyone get any block from any file other than the one they chose to download.
This works particularly well for things like new releases of a video or music or software or anything where there is a sudden burst of downloads on release day. (Why it was originally invented…)
TOR, on the other hand, is all about hiding contact trace and location information so all blocks of anything get sent through many random hands before arriving where they are wanted. Though it doesn’t get kept on the intermediate nodes, so you never have the whole picture either…
TCFS is different still. Blocks are encrypted with redundancy and stored across many machines. A “quorum” must enter their pass codes to allow the file to be reassembled and decrypted at the display node. Oh, and you can’t tell how many levels of files exist or if you are only seeing the camouflage layer… Also you must compromise the passwords from the whole quorum size to see any of the stored data. One or two folks can’t do it (unless you had a quorum of 1 or 2 which would be kind of silly).
At any rate, I’m interested in all this stuff so tend to follow it some. Generally it just isn’t a problem with someone sticking stuff on your box that you didn’t choose. (BUT, if they did, I think that would be a workable defense as there was no motive, no participation, no knowledge of it, and no permission given. Essentially a fraud was perpetrated on you.)
But it does pay to read the “how it works” docs… or the source code…
Gee… Looks like a new TCFS exists: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tcfs4/
though the original tcfs.it address looks to be expired. Guess one would need to hit the wayback machine for the details. Guess the university folks who developed it have moved on to other interests.
A person can learn. People do not. Who remembers the creation of Anders Brevick? Youtube, Twitter, facebook – they are the kings of their realms. But they are pushing an agenda that people are not always buying. So alternatives will arise to service those disenfranchised by the agenda of the kings. That is what makes the Internet so valuable. There is no monopoly and cannot be. For when the kings get dictatorial, people move on.
Welcome Bitchute! A welcome addition to the tyranny of the kings.