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The Centralization of BitTorrent Networks
Writes writes writes writes "A group of graduate students from the University of Washington have posted a a new independent report about the extent of centralization in regards to BitTorrent communities. The report indicates that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active, even despite their large degree of centralization (and perhaps exposure/liability). Furthermore, the report attempts to determine if the torrent communities follow the 80/20 rule, by measuring the Long Tail of torrent distribution."
So seriously, is BitTorrent dead?
No. Well, we don't think so, at least.
That should have read, "is BitTorrent for Warez dead?" And no, it's not, but it probably won't appear like suprnova.org did again...
Is BitTorrent dead? No, it will never die. Just as FTP for Warez dwindled and other transfer services took over (IRC, Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent, foo) it didn't kill it. FTP, IRC, BT, foo, all have valid reasons for existing other than warez.
BT though, above all the others, is actually really useful for trasferring large files quickly. Yeah, it's not good for the long term but I'm sure someone will come up with something that will make the protocol attractive for use outside of the Warez arena.
It's just that the warezkids are all about picking up new tech and using it. It's their nature as they are generally tech oriented.
I wish I could be a grad student and publish a bunch of bullshit with graphs and get my degree!
...when the **AAs drop the shoe on these new consolidated nodes. People who operate central repositories for torrent links are setting themselves up for a C&D.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
This isn't really suprising.
Whether it's FTP ip's, P2P network names, or in this case centralized BitTorrent servers, it all matters on who has access to these sites and how much exposure that site has.
If say SuperNova was a registration only site it might have stayed open for another couple months. If say SuperNova was a registration site which only registered friends and known people, there's even less of a chance of being taken down.
Any large publicly available distrobution method for illegal digital products will attract the attention of the authorities and be brought down. Small, regulated, private networks will continue to run despite a crack down. This has always been true.
But than, for the authorities, it really is more important to take down the larger sites not eliminating the problem.
-Teiresias
Sure people are easily tracked who use bit torrent. I doubt they really care. Bit Torrent allows easy ways to find files. It may not be mainstream easy, but it is very easy to use. You can get tons of movies/music/tv shows/warez with little effort, much easier than tracking down ftps and getting access from someone/ using kazaa and hoping what you download is really what you think it is, etc. People want easy access to filez! THey don't care about getting caught
Would it not be an ironic twist if the media companies adopted BitTorrent to distribute shows. Maybe the next supernode will be a Sony site.
I had thought that the more recent statistics showed something more like a 5/90 rule...
Their search engine was actually pretty good (it's down right now due to excessive traffic). It shows details about the torrent like what files are inside, the speed of the tracker etc. Quite useful.
Underholdning.info
Safer for warez that is.
I used to get a few warnings from peerguardian when downloading files. Since Suprnova disappeared, I haven't got one. Not that I actually download a lot of stuff, so this could be explained by statistical error.
Do any slashdotters know of any good Bittorrent websites.
Since suprnova went down I've mainly been using http://www.thepiratebay.org/ but any others would be greatly appreciated.
What are you, 10? Get back to class. And don't forget your tinfoil hat. And yes, the kids make fun of because you are actually a loser.
This would help reduce the liability of centralized 'link sites'.
Sure, you can still be tracked once you hit a tracker, but at least the source of the links is safe.
And before you shout ' freenet is slow', getting a simple BT link from FN would work well. Thats what FN is designed for.. Small bits of data..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...to a few a Torrent "communities" and feel pretty safe.
First thing is that the communities don't share warez and big mpaa releases, just stuff you can't find elsewhere. Sure we are centralized but no one is going after people who share documentaries and obscure stand-up.
Are they?
Beware however... some torrent sites are selling out to scam artists. Take this site for example - they hosted DVD's to "Appz" and sold out. I assume it's now a MPAA dragnet.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I very recently used BitTorrent to retrieve a couple of popular Linux ISOs. The performance was horrendous. Yes, my client was properly configured and the firewall was configured correctly. While over 200 peers and 60 seeds existed in the swarm, my download rate was an abysmal 20-30KBps. My upload speed, on the other hand, was a nifty 110KBps. (You're welcome.)
This may seem like an isolated situation, but, I find it to be the case more often than not. Occasionally, I will experience a fast download but, only rarely. I realize that BitTorrent may be a good/only source for illegal downloads but, it was supposedly designed to distribute load and increase performance. For me, BitTorrent rarely meets its design purpose. In most cases a reliable FTP server offers better performance.
So, I question BitTorrent's usefulness and whether it will last for its originally intended purpose.
We (Distributed Systems group at the University of St. Andrews) presented a paper at PGNet 2004, available at:
http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf
which shows (Figure 10) that 75% of BitTorrent users don't upload as much as they download, or put another way, the majority of the uploaded data comes from 25% of the users. I don't have time to work out just how much of the data each section is responsible for, but the numbers are interestingly close to the 80/20 rule.
I don't have time to run the numbers right now, but I wouldn't be too suprised to find that 20% of users uploaded 80% of the data...
(I am the submitter, as you can see from my email addy) The article statistically proves 4/90, but did so to see if the 80/20 rule applies.
This was also posted earlier to TotalFark (and was not greenlit). The link said: "BitTorrent Networks have Long Tails. Your dog to get tail envy"
ROTFLMAO
it seemed to me like those guys had placed emphasis on domains, but is it not possible that multiple domains may point to a single site?
for example, with suprnova.org's multitude of mirrors, it's really a single site that uses many domains, so it doesnt seem fair to me to say that 10% of the domains having over 90% of the files is a big deal, and is very skewed towards centralized locations.
Enjoy an e-piphany
Does the 80/20 rule imply that in P vs NP,
NP = 4P ?
You're right, but you need to learn to express your point in a less inflammatory way.
If you are like me and believe that sites which simply trade hashes of illegal files should not themselves be illegal, you might want to consider heading over to www.lokitorrent.com and making a small donation to their legal defense fund.
Who knows - if one site acheives the budget to stand up for themselves in a legal battle, it might set a very welcome precedent.
From TFA:
First of all, it should be noted that the dataset was from early December, and thus preserves the distribution of torrents before the recent site shutdowns.
So, you may want to try reading a little more closely next time. In no way does this article indicate "that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active".
Slashdot moderators, mind RTFAing before publishing submissions?
The reason why the "extra long tail" is so amazingly long is because the authors are merging two different types of BitTorrent usage. BitTorrent was designed for legitimate content, and for content distributors to run their own trackers. For example, my tracker is used just to distribute my own projects. Distribution is off the main website, with only one torrent shown. This is an example of BT's legitimate use, and even the largest legitimate BitTorrent sites pale in comparison to the piracy sites. There, you'll see much higher numbers of torrents, and few servers that only distribute small numbers of torrents.
We already have a good centralilzed, standard directory called DNS.
.torrent files by using TXT records to point to URLS of trackers. Querys can be made against it for finding movies and such, with little effort.
We can use the existing standards to publish
The person housing the DNS server could be held liable. Any centralized system has this problem under current US LAW.
And don't think about using the FREE dDNS servers. They already have provisions in their ToS that prohibit you to use them for this very purpose.
Geez, how much hard-earned money should people give to others who get busted for infringement / contributory infringemet?
And, here's a thought puzzle for you:
When it comes to sharing music, lots of people seem to aruge that it's ok because they only do it to help decide whether to buy the CD.
Do people who BitTorrent movies then go out and rent/buy it afterward?
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
But, I am familiar with how to use BitTorrent and where problems can occur. I sit on a multi-megabit high-speed pipe (bidirectional). The BitTorrent client was set to limit upload speed at 110KBps, the client's default. I did try lower upload limits as well as limiting the number of connections but, it didn't change anything with the download performance. After the download completed (12 hours) I opened up the number of connections and removed the upload limit. Leachers enjoyed upload speeds of 600KBps until the up/down ratio hit 3 and I then removed the seed.
I remain unconvinced about BitTorrents abillity to meet its design goals. Whether that is due to BitTorrent itself or selfish users, I don't know, but performance isn't what it should be and it seems to be getting worse with time.
(Disclaimer: I'm not endorsing this method - just making an observation)
People can always search for torrent files on gnutella or edonkey2k. Of course, not many people know about this, but it's always like that.
Adblock, FlashBlock
Informative.
It is true that the closing of Suprnova.org was a mighty blow to the availibility of torrents, but it changes nothing in the long run. In a few weeks there will be a new uber-big torrent directory. Actually, there already are a few.
.torrent files are very small and easy to spread. Finally, even if every peer has a slow dialup connection, a broadband downloader can still reach some very respectable speeds. Not to mention that most of the clients preform superb error checking on each peice of data.
/. posts.
In my opinion, BitTorrent is still a new and wandering technology. It is being employed in many different way and still has plenty of undiscovered potential. It is already an excellent way to cheaply distribute free software (i.e. linux distros). It is also a great way to distribute 0-day files with minimal liability and cost.
BitTorrent is still the best way to get less-than-legal new (...brand new) tv show episodes, movies and multi-platform games. There are many reasons for this. Namely, it spreads liability across hundreds or thousands of individuals, not a single server. Secondly,
As a protocal, BT is perhaps the most promising for large file distribution. There are some faster, and some even less centralized protocals, but in the end BT beats them all.
If you are concerned about BT's future as a method of underground file distribution: worry not. The torrent underground has its roots firmly planted in IRC. In fact, some of the best sites for well seeded torrents are just web-front ends to IRC channels (i.e. tvtorrents). BT will exist until something better comes along. That is the way of things.
note: this is not directly in response to the articles, rather it is in response to some of the other
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
I have my BT client software configured to limit the u/l bandwidth. It's ABC (found at sourceforge).
They were talked about on /. earlier this week (or was it last week?). They decided to fight the RIAA when issued a Cease and Desist and are taking donations.
They also happen to have a bunch of torrents worth taking a look at.
This is just a thinly veiled attempt to download porn and movies over torrents with no legal repurcussions :)
yeah, the only reason people associate BT with warez is because of the RIAA and MPAA, so are these people telling me that they believe these two trusts?
Anyways, yeah, funny how people ignore the legit uses over the bad uses.
It's human nature to find the wrong use for something first.
Wasnt BT used for distributing linux iso's originally?
... it's really hard to meet the 1:1 etc. requirements unless you get there early.
... I can stay up and be prepared to feed that 90% downstream but that just means more people with an incomplete RAR/ZIP/AVI whatever.
... for example, keeping a torrent open should count for 4% an hour, so that if you keep the torrent open for a day after you've finished downloading, even if no-one feeds from you, you still get credit for making the torrent available.
The number of torrents I start downloading and then find that there's no more seeds etc. so I get 90% of a large file and then I'm stuck
And if I get to a download late, I can sit there and download, say 100Mb fairly quickly from all those nice seeders (say 10 seeders and just two new downloaders), but then anyone new that comes along has 12 sites feeding and since 10 have 100% and then there's me with whatever I've downloaded so far, I hardly ever get a chance to feed downstream, so I sit there for days and never get anywhere near 1:1)
There needs to be a better way of rating people who want to be good torrent users
There's an easy-to-use wrapper for bit torrent available here. It allows grandma to simply click once on a link and download the torrent... even if she didn't have bit torrent installed.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
20% of the time you do something useful; 80% you spend checking updates on slashdot.
I think their paper is not very clear
.torrent file is different from having a tracker serving the torrent so...What are they talking about, torrents@trackers or torrents@index_sites?
"...we found that the long tail was really quite long. 87% of the sites had a small number - under 100 torrents - hosted at that domain.
This tells you a couple things: First, it's obviously easy to host a torrent file. Simply uploading a torrent file into a directory at some ISP is no big deal."
Wait. Hosting a
From the words above ("simply uploading"), it looks like they are comparing sites hosting files (like suprnova) and not real trackers (like lokitorrent) but later they say
"Large BitTorrent communities sometimes require usernames and passwords, and the crawler simply can't access those files."
So now it seems they are talkin about trackers...
IMHO Too much confusion in their document, trackers and indexes are not the same thing (even though MPAA & RIAA couldnt agree with me) and i think that studying both could lead you to different results
I'm working on a decentralised, searchable version of BitTorrent called BitTrickle. If you're a Python hacker, please consider lending a hand - it's probably only a day's work for someone who knows the BT source code.
HERE is a torrent of all the torrents on the former Supernova
don't need to go anywhere else
As an admin of ShareConnector which was recently taken down for a legal invesitagtion, I have an opinion on BitTorrent and why it hurts the P2P community:
Most other major P2P networks keep files shared for long after their initial demand. BitTorrent does not. Infact only a few weeks after a release, a tracker can be completely dead.
Secondly, trackers are always dying, and when replacing a dead tracker it isn't always easy to not have to start over.
If everybody used BT, it would be near impossible to get your hands on a movie that's a few years old. Sure, there are occasional reshares, but not for rare files.
Thirdly, Centralization is not a always a bad thing. It helps files get shared more efficiently because rogue clients cannot trick their peers. Most eD2k clients use both the Overnet (decentralalized) and the eD2k (centralized) network, and I have personally found it much easier to get rare files using this, and I still download/upload at max speed so I know I couldn't be beating it with BT.
I'm not saying other P2P networks are perfect. Take eD2k for example... Most newbies to it don't understand what they're doing and get a low-id (firewalled connection), then don't add enough files for it to be efficient, then complain when it's so slow, and give up using it.
I'm not saying 'Don't use BT', and I'm not trolling, I'm just suggesting that people atleast share their files afterwards on other networks so that people in the near future will still be able to get that file they wanted.
It's sad how people still thinks P2P is used solely for warez no matter what.