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Decentralize BitTorrent with Kenosis
UnderScan writes "Eric Ries, writer/programmer/CTO, authored an article 'Kenosis and the World Free Web' at Freshmeat [Owned by Slashdot's Parent OSTG]. Kenosis is described as a 'fully-distributed peer-to-peer RPC system built on top of XMLRPC.' He has combined his Kenosis with BitTorrent & removed the need for a centralized tracker. He states: 'To demonstrate Kenosis's suitability for these new applications, we have used it to improve upon another peer-to-peer filesharing application that Just Works: BitTorrent. BitTorrent does one thing incredibly well. Using a centralized "tracker," BitTorrent manages efficient distribution of data that is in high demand. We have extended BitTorrent, using Kenosis, to eliminate this dependence on a centralized tracker.'
See also the Kenosis README for details on using Kenosis-enabled BitTorrent."
n. Christianity
The relinquishment of the form of God by Jesus in becoming man and suffering death.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
How is the RIAA and MPAA supposed to stamp out bittorrent if you guys keep improving it? Where's your compassion?
Then this falls a bit short of the "killer p2p app" moniker that it *almost* deserves.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
QUite useful, of course! We could distribute spatial-data, and Wi-Fi locations to PDAs and laptops in this way. There are metric tons of useful applications for BT and K.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
One of the problems with BitTorrent is that the trackers themselves can get overloaded with too many clients. If this system can eliminate something like that happening then that'd definately be a good thing.
;)
That being said, the busiest torrents I've seen are for copyright-infringing material, so I guess it's still a boon for piracy.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
This is an important step, but it still does not hide the user's IPs from the *AA.
From the Article:
It does not address problems of anonymity, privacy, or distributed data retention, although we hope to address these issues in future versions.
It's fun to see how book-writing hackers act.
;)
What, you mean, by using the right tool for the job instead of language snobbery?
I think I found a defect.
This thing doesn't make any fucking sense.
I was really excited by this slashdot story, because I think something like this could be very very useful. I have to say that I was disappointed a bit by the download.
No docs or pointers at the top of the tarball.
One of the READMEs on the site says try "test.py" for an example, which seems to just hang.
Elsewhere it says to fire up bittorrent
trackers and clients.
There clearly is a lot of work that has gone into this, and the idea sounds really promising, but it looks like it needs a better end-user documentation before it's ready for primetime.
Continuing reading, you can see that it's possible to directly have a torrent reference the network. The kenosisp2p.org bit is only for legacy clients that wouldn't know what to do with a "new" tracker location.
Omnes stulti sunt.
(I am one of the authors of Kenosis.)
We are planning improvements to Kenosis in a number of areas such as better integration with BitTorrent, a more distributed BT tracker, simulation of larger Kenosis networks and making Kenosis work over NAT.
We'd love help with any of these or other areas.
Please join the mailing list to get involved.