Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released

wintermute1974 writes "After sitting at a stable release of 3.4.2 since last spring, Bram Cohen's official BitTorrent client has been upgraded to version 4. In addition to its existing, rock-steady functionality, BitTorrent now sports a new queue-based UI. The revision details are on the BitTorrent site. Packets are now marked as bulk data too, which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data."

Comments

Good to see progress...

[ratsnapple tea]

The OS X client is still at 3.4.2. Is anyone working on an update? (I'd offer to help, but I don't program :p)

Re:Good to see progress...

[Coryoth]

The OS X client is still at 3.4.2. Is anyone working on an update? (I'd offer to help, but I don't program :p)

It's in python so you should be able to just grab the source and use btdownloadcurses.py in Terminal.app (or whatever it is). Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?

Jedidiah.

Re:Good to see progress...

[rsmith-mac]

Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?

In all seriousness, it's a Mac. The userbase is not going to accept an application that doesn't have a "pretty GUI" because the GUI is much of what the platform is about. Just see OpenOffice for an example of software that's underutilized for its lack of an effective Mac GUI.

Re:Good to see progress...

[BrookHarty]

I use the command line under screen on my mac, in fact, I ssh into my mac more than sit at the desktop. My wife will be playing World of warcraft on it, and I'll just ssh for irssi/bt underscreen.

There are alot of new users that see what OSX is, a kick ass unix box with a great multi user desktop.

Re:Good to see progress...

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Azureus runs just fine on OS X as an Aqua application. It's probably the best OS X BitTorrent out there.

Re:Good to see progress...

[mrchaotica]

There are alot of new users that see what OSX is, a kick ass unix box with a great multi user desktop.

Yeah, and I'm one of them -- but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate a good GUI too!

1/3rd of all traffic?

[Anonymous Coward]

stop all the downloadin.

Re:1/3rd of all traffic?

[ZackSchil]

Help Computer.

Re:1/3rd of all traffic?

[wheany]

I don't know much about computers.

But...

[TheKidWho]

Does it have an FM tuner?

The 'bulk data' tag

[Raindance]

Since it's a decentralized standard, we'll need other clients to mark packets as 'bulk data' as well to get full benefits in routing from this. Since companies are starting to use BT commonly to distribute files in-game (or will, shortly), their code will need to be updated too. So, no magic bullet but a step in the direction of creating a heirarchy of data packets.

I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?

Or will this not be a big deal at all?

Probably some of everything, I suppose.

Re:The 'bulk data' tag

[ip_fired]

I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads?

I don't think they'll choke "bulk data", because many other protocols mark their data bulk as well (ftp being one of them, if you have a modern client).

It is very helpful to ISPs to have the bulk classification, so that their more time-sensitive data (ie, VOIP) doesn't get clobbered when someone starts using bittorrent.

It's not like it's difficult to choke bittorrent traffic anyway, just look for communication on ports 6881 to 6888.

If they do, it'll just make everyone remove the bulk flag, and then there will be no easy quality of service queing.

Link and Changelog

[perlionex]

The actual link is to the download is here.

The changelog:

# 2005-03-07: 4.0.0 is now available.
Changes since the last stable release:

All new queue-based user interface Many options are now modifiable from the interface, including upload rate Lots of other interface improvements Extra stats are visible, for those who like it Remembers what it was doing across restarts New .torrent maker "btmaketorrentgui" replaces "btcompletedir" Better performance, as always License has changed to the BitTorrent Open Source License Torrent fields are correctly created and interpreted as utf8 Too many little things to list

A few technical notes, for those interested:

Single port: launchmany can seed and client can download many files from a single port and thread Interface now uses GTK instead of wxWidgets BitTorrent packets are marked as bulk data to make traffic shaping easier

Re:Link and Changelog

[NuclearDog]

I'll translate the preamble to English...

• The BitTorrent client and updates/etc are all covered under this license.
  
• The license is considered a valid open source license.
  
• You can give it (the software) away just by itself or on a cd/in a zip with multiple other programs. You don't have to pay royalties.
  
• You have access to the source & binaries.
  
• You can modify the source & fork the program.
  
• Any modifications made to the program have to be licensed under this same license.
  
• Use it however you want, but there is no warranty provided.
  
• If you sublicense the code, you can charge for warranty/support or for offering indemnity for your customers, but the source must remain free.
  
• If you file a patent claim against the BitTorrent software, you lose all rights under the license (right to re-distribute, etc.)
  
• You can re-license any works you create based on the code, but you have to license it under an OSI-approved license that is compatible with this license.
  

(Note: This may not be 100% accurate, IANAL, I am not responsible, etc, etc.)

Re:Link and Changelog

[Storlek]

The GPL and BSD-like licenses are at least understandable for a non-lawyer.
I can see how people can't understand the GPL; it's fairly long and "lawyery" looking. But the BSD license? It's about six sentences long! It pretty much comes down to "do anything you want with it, modify it or don't, distribute as source or binary, we don't care, as long as you give credit where it's due, don't use our names to endorse your product, and don't blame us if something goes wrong."

Re:Link and Changelog

[petard]

fwiw, it's basically the jabber license with a couple of the restrictions lifted.

HTH,

petard

Azureus rocks...

[patniemeyer]

It's Java based and seems to have every useful feature you can imagine:

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

I haven't checked out the new official client yet, but Azureus has always been way ahead of the pack and I assume it still is. (Things like fast restart, nice visualizations of clients and file pieces, etc.)

Pat

Re:Azureus rocks...

[slavemowgli]

BitTornado is another nice client, with the added benefit that it's not written in Java. Not that I've got much against Java personally, of course, but it's quite a resource hog that I'd rather avoid when possible.

Re:Azureus rocks...

[MicroBerto]

Yes, Azureus does rock. It seems that the development has slowed down a bit recently, since the 2.2 series release.

This makes sense though, because it simply works incredibly, and they're probably working on some bigger things now for a new version. It's stabilized quite nicely, better than any closed-source software out there lately!

Re:Azureus rocks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately BitTornado runs in Python, which can get almost as slow as client-side Java when you have a lot of stuff running. I'd recommend the pure C++ BitComet.

Re:Azureus rocks...

[dk01]

Yes Azureus does rock. Some of the features that have been around for a while are its support for pluggins. The one that seems to be most popular is its RSS feed reader. It monitors and filters RSS feeds for files that a user wants to have downloaded. This makes going on a several day vacation quite a bit easier. I use it to download my latest Al Franken Show from Air America. -dk

Re:Azureus rocks...

[uhmmmm]

If you're downloading a lot, the overhead of running the one instance of Azureus needed to do that beats that of running, say, the dozen instances of the the official client, hands down.

Re:Azureus rocks...

[Matt Perry]

I'd recommend the pure C++ BitComet.

The fact that BitComet has downloads of MPAA movies queued in their screenshot don't help to legitimize BitTorrent. I'm not bashing BitTorrent but I am bashing the BitComet people for not putting up a less incriminating screenshot. We're having a hard enough time convincing lawmakers that there are legitimate uses of BitTorrent and that they shouldn't outlaw P2P without making their case for them.

Trying to get more users?

[ProdigySim]

It looks to me like this new client is adding alot of the features other clients added in themselves. The main part being the configurations from a GUI. Perhaps he's trying to get everyone using HIS client, so there's more control over the populus of BT users?

Irony.

[DarkHelmet]

http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html

Is it just me... but does anyone else find it ironic that there isn't a torrent available for downloading Bittorrent?

Re:Irony.

[cdsr]

would you like to download winzip.zip too?

Great! I Love BitTorrent.

[Murdock037]

Because I hate going to the theater to see... uh, Linux binaries.

bulk data

[vespazzari]

is bulk data what fat chick pr0n is being referred to nowdays?

ABC

[Anonymous Coward]

has had a far better interface and featureset for years.

Re:ABC

[CammieCrookston]

ABC is nice indeed. If you are an advocate of BitTornado, but prefer a single window for all of your downloads, ABC is the client for you. (It uses BitTornado as its core, so you get all of BitTornado + extra features + a single window).

Different License

[Raindance]

Also of note is that BT 4.0 is using a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License.

It's complient with the Open Source Definition. Not huge shaking news it seems like.

Bulk data?

[IntellectualCritic]

Packets are now marked as bulk data too

Can somebody explain what that means?

I'm assuming that's not like bulk mail over the internet. I'd hate to accidently download viagra when I just when a torrent file.

Re:Bulk data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's look at a few options vis-a-vis protocols that make use of TCP-IP. You have, for example Voice over IP (VoIP); Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); File Transfer Protocol (FTP); Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP); Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP); Internet Relay Chat (IRC); and Secure Shell (SSH). (This list is not complete, but it's for illustrating the point, not to list every damn protocol on the whole Internet.)

Now, taking these one at a time. VoIP has certain needs: it needs a certain amount of bandwidth, and its data must be transferred within a short period of time, or it becomes unusable. A VoIP connection is generally held for of the order of minutes, so quick setup of a connection is not a high priority. HTTP needs quick setup/teardown, because you have one connection for each file (typically kilobytes in size; yes, I know that later versions of HTTP can transfer multiple files within one connection), but latency is not a huge concern; bandwidth might be, depending on the data. FTP is an interesting beast: low latency and low bandwidth for commands, but high bandwidth and don't-care latency for data. Setup/teardown times not a major issue. NNTP needs high bandwidth, but latency is not a concern at all. SMTP usually needs low bandwidth, and latency isn't a major issue, as long as the message gets through. SSH needs low latency, but bandwidth needs are generally low.

You have a relatively small pipe to the rest of the Internet. There are high demands on this pipe. How do you decide what gets pushed through, and what gets dropped, or delayed until later?

BitTorrent marking its packets as bulk means that quality of service systems can say "These packets aren't of major importance; they can be deferred until later". So the short-term throughput of BT is reduced, for the benefit of others who need the pipe for applications like VoIP (for example). When those other applications reduce their demands, BT is able to transfer its data.

The understanding is simple: the urgency in the transfer of data via bittorrent is low, so if bandwidth is at a premium, the routers can drop, or throttle, the bittorrent data to make room for high priority data. It's the same principle as FedEx uses: if you have stuff that needs to be moved FAST, you pay a price premium, and it gets moved on the next plane, bumping off some low-urgency, low-price cargo to the plane afterwards. If there's a lot of high priority and low priority traffic, such that the low priority traffic is building up faster than it can be moved, it's time for FedEx to buy more planes, or start not accepting low priority traffic -- or, in the ISP business, to buy a fatter pipe.

Hope this helps.

Re:Bulk data?

[Spy Hunter]

if bandwidth is at a premium, the routers can drop, or throttle, the bittorrent data to make room for high priority data.

No. In order for users to voluntarily mark their packets as "bulk data", there has to be a benefit for them. That benefit is supposed to be higher overall transfer rate. The tradeoff is higher latency. So a router that receives a BitTorrent packet and a VOIP packet at the same time would send the VOIP packet first to reduce latency, and queue the BitTorrent packet for afterwards. But if the queue is full it would *not* preferentially drop the BitTorrent packet because that would reduce throughput. In fact, if the queue has many VOIP packets, the router should preferentially drop incoming VOIP packets, because it would not be able to send them with low latency anyway. This limits VOIP throughput, which is fine. In fact that's the result we want: VOIP = low latency low throughput, BitTorrent = high latency high throughput.

At least, I hope this is how ISPs implement routing for packets marked as bulk data, because otherwise it will never be adopted.

Re:Bulk data?

[Deven]

In order for users to voluntarily mark their packets as "bulk data", there has to be a benefit for them. That benefit is supposed to be higher overall transfer rate.

No, the benefit is that their Internet connection remains usable for interactive traffic instead of slowing to a crawl due to the BitTorrent traffic. (The overall transfer rate is likely to be the same either way.) You don't stop using the Internet just because you're downloading something, do you?

If you're not using your connection for anything else, BitTorrent can max out the bandwidth, with or without the bulk data flag. If you have other traffic, the TCP/IP stack will have to make room in the stream of data for those other packets sooner or later -- and when those packets go through really won't affect the final download time because latency is of little importance. However, it may be critical to the other traffic, so it's best to label the bulk data to keep it from being prioritized before more urgent packets.

Really, the only reason not to use the flag is because such traffic could be easily singled out for blocking. However, such action would be foolish, since people would just stop marking the data as "bulk" if that caused it to get dropped. This would cause all the bulk data to be transferred as if it were time-critical interactive traffic, defeating the value of the flag altogether. (Email can be marked as bulk email, but do spammers use that flag? Of course not! They know they'll be blocked.)

It's best for everyone if all bulk data is labelled, the routers prioritize it intelligently, and nobody blocks bulk data transfers.

BitTorrent Open Source License

[IvyMike]

Dear Lazyweb:

This version of bittorrent is licensed under the BitTorrent Open Source License. Could you please compare and contrast this with other open source licenses for me?

Thank you, Lazyweb.

Great news...

[jedimark]

Now if only I could convince my stinking ISP that downloading linux ISO's is not illegal :-)

Marking Packets Correctly

[Red Pointy Tail]

I hope packets are also marked with the evil bit too, which is significant considering that most of all Torrent traffic is currently evil data.

Control?

[Chuck Chunder]

Look at the licence, it seems to me that's the "control" is something he certainly isn't overly interested in.

He probably just wants to offer a product he can be proud of, maybe so people will appreciate his work and choose to support him.

Linux needs a gui alt to azureus

[Sark666]

I've tried to like azureus, and I actually still use it as there is pretty much no alternative gui wise in linux, but I really wish there was.

Basically it brings my system to a crawl. Java vm (and yes i'm on 1.5) feels like a pig imo. We need a native gtk/qt gui that's in c/c++.

And please don't be a smartass and point out there is the basic gui that the official comes with. It's way too lacking. AFAIK, the only way to throttle is by using the ncurses one. Never mind that you can't set ratio's (I set all of mine to 1:1.), or bind all torrents to one port instead of needing all open. Pretty much all of the other clients do that now, except the official so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

So as you see, there are quite a few things lacking in the official client. I've checked freshmeat periodically but couldn't find anything for linux. I know there is bitorrando and some others but they require access to a mysql server wtf?

My windows friends used to use azureus and didn't fair much better performance wise but now they pretty much all use bitcomet.

I don't mean to knock the azureus team, cause as it is they've made a pretty good functional gui, but java just brings the performance down too much.

Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus

[greg_barton]

If you have a 3D video card, try activating opengl acceleration in java. From the script launching azureus, add the following command line property:

-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true

This will activate the opengl pipeline for Java2D calls. (Swing uses Java2D for all rendering...)

Re:yep

[commodoresloat]

why bother with Firefox when we've got Safari?

You misspelled "Camino".

Initial impressions...

[Rexz]

Installer doesn't give any indication it's installing until you get a "Finished!" box. No choosing paths, no status indicator, nuffin.

Two donation nag screens.

Steals .torrent file associations.

No scraping the server for total seeder/peer numbers.

No moving completed downloads. No advanced seeding rules. No selecting of individual within a torrent. No download speed capping.

25mb memory usage running just one torrent.

Nothing excites me about this client. I look forward to its apparent efficiency increases being incorporated into Azureus et al, though.

Re:Initial impressions...

[shadowmatter]

There isn't much improvement to this client that will carry over to other clients. That is, this is not the second version of the BitTorrent protocol, as explained here. Bram has been pretty mum on the second version of the protocol, although the official developer forum has had some heated debates over how some of these features should be incorporated and what their parameters should be (note that, although at times heated, purely constructive ;).

So if already content with Azureus or BitComet or whatever, nothing to see here... Move along folks.

- shadowmatter

Re: Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released

[yrogerg]

To be honest, I haven't been waiting at all.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The official client has been miles behind most of the unofficial ones, and as far as I know nobody with any sense uses it anymore. And as far as I can see, this new version only makes it slightly less inferior. So why does it matter that it's been released? For that matter, why was it even made?

I don't see the point in reinventing the wheel as far as clients go when there are far better alternatives already out there. Let other people write the clients, and concentrate on improving the protocol.

Re:GI JOE PSAs

[Wescotte]

Might as well link to the joke so...

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=gijoe-c om puter.mov

and more can be found at

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/gijoe.html

It's one of those were either you laugh your ass off or become disturbed at the amount of free time people have. Personally I laugh my ass off.

Re:Idea: Streaming Torrent

[parcifal]

This is already happening, wired even had an article on it, and the advance comes from the porn industry which has a number of contributions to the internet to its credit.

Why The Official Client Matters

[EventHorizon]

1. There is actually no RFC or other detailed documentation for the BT protocol. The unofficial clients were all written based on the source code from the official client (and more recently, based on the source code of other unofficial clients). IMO Bram should create a formal RFC, but that is pretty unlikely (he's not interested and the IETF is probably too conservative to do p2p).

2. Sadly the python clients are the only ones usable on 64MB virtual private servers. Most of the unofficial clients are platform-specific (Win32, GTK+), or require a bloated JVM that has no chance of working in less than 128MB.

I find it tragic that noone has released a high quality POSIX C client. Maybe the OpenBSD guys will eventually get around to OpenBT?

Re:Hmm

[stratjakt]

eXeem is a sloppy piece of crap, and a thinly veiled vehicle to get spyware and malware on your system (whse).

Slashdot staff should be ashamed to have promoted it like they did. They did 2 or 3 articles about it, as if it were some great tech sent from the heavens.

Besides the fact that the very notion of it is what's wrong with the internet, and why the government will eventually regulate the hell out of it. The entire point is to trade warez. I did an eXeem search for linux, and didn't get one result - so don't give me some bullshit about slackware isos. Society are like kindergarteners, they had a little freedom, and blew it. Now we're all going to be grounded.

Actually, is that why michael left? It wasn't long after he "wrote" a couple "eXeem is great! get your warez on eXeem!" articles that he left.

Re:yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Second-rate, late, half-baked software that makes all of your books, all of your magazines, all of your movies, all of your newspapers, all of your music ... and that also sequences your DNA to help keep you alive. And, just for fun, does any aspect of your life depend on Oracle or Sybase? Does your employer use either of them? Do you use a bank, for instance, or do you ever buy airline tickets? I ask because in the past 2 years, both Oracle and Sybase have switched to Mac OS X exclusively for the development of their products.

It always makes me laugh when people shit on the Mac, because it just goes to show that they don't understand just how much of their world depends on Macs.

Re:GI JOE PSAs

[mixmasterjake]

here's the dude in chicago that makes 'em

http://www.fenslerfilm.com/

Re:Looks Slick

[r.muk]

From http://www.torrentocracy.com/blog/archives/2005/02 /bram_cohen_unde.shtml
Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent at Stanford.

Update: 3/7/2005, The torrent in this entry was just audio only, but Thomas Winningham has gotten permission from both Bram and Stanford ("Stanford holds copyright on the material but returns the copyright immediately to the speaker, that is, Bram. Get him to agree and go ahead.") to post their video as a torrent on Prodigem. Cool! Updated again since that video posted seems to only have the first 10 minutes. Anyway, the audio is below, or just check out my notes.

Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent yesterday at Stanford. I had planned to make video from it available, but the video I captured somehow got corrupted (boo Panasonic). I salvaged the audio from the video and have released that via a torrent under a creative commons license (with Bram's approval). The audio is a bit low. It's okay, though, as I didn't realize that Stanford would be making it's video available to the general public (though in crummy windows streaming format). Here are some notes:

- Academic setting ... so how to benchmark/measure bit torrent
- benchmarking is hard because it needs to be like the internet (buy a bad router)
- key problem among swarming software is how to get everyone involved to maximize upload, people don't realize

- Single seeder problem
- must be careful not to at first trade with people who are likely to disappear

- Bit Torrent extremely non-cooperative
- each peer in it for himself
- tit for tat
- editorial note: isn't this cooperative? Peter Kollock: tit for tat as the optimal cooperative strategy

- How to deal with people behind and not behind NAT

- Centralized tracker is needed to produce randomized graph so as to avoid
network segmentation
- gossip (peers telling peers about other peers with content) very easily segments the network such that pieces of the content get isolated into islands

- Choking Algorithm
- sophistication
- people like to pretend it doesn't exit
- lots of use of made up magic numbers
- eg. how long to wait for reciprication?
- motivation opaque
- methodology (the traditional approach) is Bram firing up a client and observing behavior
- lots of room for study

- TCP does not look like RPC calls (BitTorrent treats TCP like a black box)
- don't avoid making a state machine, because no matter what you'll end up with a state machine anyway
- why threads are a bad idea

- Magic numbers
- makes them up based on what works
- pulls them from his "magic ass"
- if you need a magic number feel free to ask him for one

- Estimated Time Left Algorithm
- never gotten any fan mail on how well it works
- lots of effort and thought put into making this work sanely
- any time you see a computer telling you time left it is lieing
- research needs to be done on better algorithms
- would gladly place your better algorithm into bit torrent
- problem at end about going down 2 seconds per every 1 second
- tradeoff between smoothness now vs. smoothness later

- Current Transfer Rate Algorithm
- its a mess
- very important for tit-for-tat to work

- Bad idea to be downloading too many torrents at one time (e.g. 5)

- Peers at first never randomly tried new connections
- added optimistic unchoke to solve this
- if new person recipricates then continue
- otherwise move on to the next person
- may unchoke 4 or 7 clients depending
- it's voodoo
- nobody has seriously studied this

- Piece Selection Algorithm
- trade off between finishing the piece you are currently downloading vs going after a more valuable piece
- priority is currently finishing a piece you started even if many others have it
- downloading from the beginning of the content for everyone is a maximally bad strategy

Q: Who has w

Re:Favourite torrent sites?

[tooth]

You forgot to add:

Yours truly,
The MPAA

Unix Gurus

[Mark_MF-WN]

A lot of the old Unix research gurus in university positions switched to OSX. I can't count the number of professors I've had who would set their Mac laptop down on the front desk, ssh straight into their home or office computer, and run their slides and code demos remotely.

The idea of OSX as just a pretty GUI is a gross disservice. I wouldn't touch OSX (or any other proprietary OS) with a ten foot pole myself, but credit where credit is due.

Re:libtorrent

[keytoe]

While it doesn't include much in the way of a client, there is another C++ based library called - um - libtorrent (as opposed to LibTorrent mentioned above - note the caps) released under the BSD license. It doesn't really include a client (just a 'demo' CLI client that shows how to use the lib), but this is slashdot and we should all be able to write our own clients using other peoples' libraries, right?

When I started writing my OS X client (Shameless plug: Hurricane. Early beta.) I shopped around for BT libraries and found libtorrent to be better documented than LibTorrent (Sheesh - could that naming issue be any more confusing?). Also, the developer community seems very receptive and active - always a good thing!

Cool Features? Sure! It runs all torrents over a single port in a background thread, offers configuration and stats for damned near everything BT can do, 'fast resume' data for quickly restarting a download and various other niceties.

And great documentation - a rarity for an OSS project ;)