but there is a problem with bittorrent. Most Schools and works places block bittorrent. We would need to fallback to http or any other method that works in restricted places.
All of those are strictly client-to-server, not P2P. You could in theory proxy bittorrent over it, but you wouldn't gain anything over just serving the file from the server.
You can probably write a true P2P client as a Firefox extension, since its API gives you very low level access (raw sockets, for example), but certainly not for e.g. Chrome.
It is too expensive. 1TB of bandwidth costs about $120. A project like adblock plus will be consuming about 3 - 4 TB a month which will add up to around $450 a month.
Adblock list subscriptions are maintained and hosted by individual people who do at their spare time. They mostly pay for the servers out of their pockets. As one of the co-author of popular adblock list, I wouldn't want to break my bank to pay for S3 hosting. Our current solutions works out and when we reach our bandwidth limit, we could just simply buy addition TB of bandwidth at a much cheaper price than S3.
Btw, i just made a rough calculation using AWS simple monthly calculator. So correct me if I am wrong about S3 pricing.
Terabytes per month? That's insane. That's a million users (I can believe) downloading a megabyte (I can't quite believe). It appears my patterns.ini file is 600K, or about 150K compressed, so if I download it 30/5 = 6 times a month, that's... a megabyte. Wow.
