I was just setting up remote runners for TankieTube when I had an epiphany:

I could ask comrades to volunteer their own computers! quagsire-pog

That way those who can’t or don’t care to donate monetarily could still contribute.

How would it work?

Conceptually, you can think of it like a crypto mining botnet. Except it transcodes videos for the community instead of producing heat for individual profit. And it’s voluntary ofc.

It can run on any operating system with an internet connection. I’m going to use my gaming desktop and at least one VPS.

Tech level required: comfortable copy-and-pasting things into a CLI.

OpSec considerations: negligable as far as I can tell. There is no P2P involved. Your computer talks directly to the TankieTube server using sicko-to-HTTPS communication. The server would see your IP address, but that’s always the case on every website.

Thoughts?

Edit: Email TankieTanuki@pm.me if you want to help beta test a machine. I could use help creating a docker image too because I’m not experienced with that (I still prefer to do everything with Bash scripts).

Would Cygwin be the way to go for Windows users?

  • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Ffmpeg is used by everybody so you’d hope people are looking at it, but I’m sure there’s security bugs in there, and probably plenty of them, since it’s C parser/decoder code, probably the most dangerous kind of code. I think web browsers do some kind of sandboxing around ffmpeg, plus web browser restrict the kinds of formats they support, but ffmpeg (and peertube?) supports a lot more, many of which will not be audited/fuzzed to the same degree.

    Ideally this would be sandboxed so much it can’t call anything but read(2) and write(2). I have no idea if any of this software does any sandboxing at all.

    Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?

    Maybe, depends on the what exactly you’re worried about. There’s potentially political actors that might be interested in fucking with tankie.tube, whereas you can’t really target anyone specifically with bittorrent. Also the attacker knows exactly what software will be used to decode the videos, which makes this easier to exploit. I assume that videos can get uploaded to tankie.tube by basically anybody, and those videos would be sent out to be transcoded on random people’s machines?

    If you assume tankie.tube (maybe peertube in general) is just too small to be on anyone’s radar, then that’s probably fine.