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Azureus Decentralizes Bittorrent
BobPaul writes "While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"
After upgrading a few hours ago, I opened up the appropriate UDP prts as requested (pol;itely I might add) & watched the number of clients that I was trackerlessly connected to rise from ~50,000 ot more than 76,000
I've used it for a long time now, but the latest itteration just seems to go beyond the call of duty.
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This kind of thing is not new ANts P2P is a decentralized, encrypted anonymous protocol that works in the same way as BitTorrent. From the page "ANts P2P realizes a third generation P2P net. It protects your privacy while you are connected and makes you not trackable, hiding your identity (ip) and crypting everything you are sending/receiving from others." Why not give that a try?
I gained a lot of respect for Java apps when I tried Azureus for the first time. It was at least 6-7x faster than the official client or Tomato Torrent on OS X, and it connects to way more hosts for me. Like I said, I'm on OS X, so I've never tried exeem.
Making it easier to get to torrents is all well and good, but let's keep in mind that most of the *legal* stuff available through bittorrent is easy to find as it is.
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It also looks like they integrated Tor into the client, which should lead to fairly interesting results. When a client as popular as Azureus has anonymity built in, I think some people might be angry.
When the **AA see an IP address downloading from an infringing torrent, they direct their lawsuits towards the account holder for that IP. This puts people running Tor at risk of being sued. Is "It wasn't me, it was another Tor user" a valid defense? Are people going to be held accountable for the traffic that passes through their Tor server?
I was also interested to see they included 'Joltid Peer Cache (JPC)' - in their words "Joltid Peer Cache (JPC) is now integrated into Azureus. For users whose ISP support this, JPC should allow faster downloads, while helping the ISP reduce its bandwidth costs. The JPC Plugin is safe in the way that your ISP won't know what you are downloading, and can't use it to spy on you."
Given that torrents are supposed to account from anywhere between 30-70% of all internet traffic, depending on who you believe - this could go a long way towards easing bandwidth consumption issues. Of course, I have no idea how many ISPs are actually using this, the website http://www.joltid.com/index.php/peercache/ is rather limited in it's information, and a google for the name reveals that there is still some question over the legality, so a lot of ISPs are keeping their heads down and using it on the quiet.
For flash traffic, such as a new game demo being released - or even torrented anime, which often sees in excess of 10-20 thousand people downloading it within 48 hours for the more popular series, this could save ISPs a lot of money.
I've just completed a Master's project on incorporating Reputation Management into BitTorrent. The idea is that if you give file slices first to people who are likely to stay connected and share, it will increase the overall bandwidth of the system and eventually increase everyone's performance. My simulation results show an average speedup of 5% for everyone in the network (good citizens get up to 15% speedup). I don't have a website, but if anyone wants to contact me about getting my research into the spec, I'd be happy to send you the paper.
clenfest@yahoo.com