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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?"
... but the RIAA/MPAA lawyer teams don't need to start hiring again just yet.
does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?
I'd say it "limits" it's effectiveness, not negates it. It's not really de-centralized if you still have to rely on sites like suprnova in order to search for stuff, is it? This is a major reason why BitTorrent hasn't completely dominated eMule yet.
But since this removes another potential point of failure in the network (the tracker), it is still a good thing(tm).
I don't think Exeem has anything to worry about.
Torrents could be distributed in the swarms too. Possibly according to user preferences if the swarm has many torrents/many types of data. Could get really nice. We do need a python version though..
/. :) so i don't know if this is supported.)
(Cant access the linked sites due to company policy (they allow
Bad Pirates
Whatcha want, watcha want
Whatcha gonna do
When sheriff RIAA come for you
Tell me
Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna dooo
Yeaheah
CHORUS:
Bad Pirates, bad Pirates
Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
When the RIAA come for you
(Repeat)
When you were twenty
And you had bad traits
You go to College
And learn the golden rule
So why are you
Acting like a bloody fool
If you get hot torrents
You must get cool
CHORUS
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.
Go Away! Not for Sale
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?
This is a little like Shareaza.
Shareaza has support for Gnutella, Gnutella 2, Edonkey and Bittorrent. As it provides a "bridge" between these networks, it means I am able to search for torrents from the two Gnutella networks, and edk. When I have this torrent, I can open it using the bittorrent part of Shareaza, and if that torrent is down, Shareaza will still hash the torrent and attempt to download the appropriate files from the Gnutella and eDonkey neworks. It's a nice idea, and really unites all the various p2p methods, using each method's strength to give an all round solid result.
I'm surprised that it's taken Azureus this long to catch up, and I'm sure we'll start to see a lot more bittorrent clients either offering their own solutions to this issue, or as in the case of Shareaza, using existing p2p networks to give backup to the Bittorrent protocol.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
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.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
How will the trackerless stuff interact with sites that require login? In the normal case you would login to the website and after that the tracker only allows you to connect from the same IP, but does the new trackerless thingie allow anyone to connect to these swarms? Might be (way too) good way to get past share ratio requirements.
" or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"
No the lack of search is exactly what differentiates the BitTorrent network (though its not really a network is it? It piggy backs off webservers) from other P2P apps.
The bittorrent client BitComet has been doing this for a long time now.
Simply what it does is shares lists of peers between clients for matching infohashes...
It dosn't nessecerely decentralize it or remove the need for a tracker, as you need to get at least 1 ip from a member of the swarm (who has a compatible client)
It can help to get new peers if a tracker fails half way through, but you still need the initial peers ips from a tracker or similar.
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?
You MUST install java 1.5 on linux.
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 heard about eXeem a while back when SuprNova disbanded... the creator's next project or something. I also heard that it was being backed by spyware companies... so I haven't jumped to try it out. Could someone who has tried out eXeem give their thoughts about it?
Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people. - James Russell Lowell
BT is not anonymous, nor are these attempts at decentralizing BT. They are simply a match-making service pairing off peers. Ants (and Freenet+++) try to create an anonymous network, which means acting as data proxies.
That means
a) helluva lot more complexity in terms of making it work
b) lots of complexity in making it actually anonymous
c) massive loss of bandwidth due to proxying data around
Judging by the website:
"NOTE: The only way to speed up the ANts connection system is to let the net grow. Only with a reasonable number of high speed peers (i.e. peers that handles up to 30 connections) properly configured (firewall, ip etc.) initial connection can be easy and fast. So don't care about connection speed by now... let your node run and it will find peers or they will find it! DON't ASK TOO MUCH TO A NET MADE UP OF 20/30 peers..."
I call shenanigans. The demand will scale with the supply, in fact you start running into MORE problems with finding content on a large network, not less. See Freenet. Oh, and I hope the actual number of nodes is higher. With that few, you can map out the entire network and analyze it apart almost no matter how brilliant the software is...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
maybe because of this line: "But the truth is, 99% of gun use is against people"
.1% is against people. I don't know where the hell you live, but whatever city it is - I promise the number of hunters in that area outnumber the number of people who shot a person in that same area by at least 100 to 1. Here at work with me (in NY, no less), about 1/4 of the people hunt. Not a single one of them has ever shot a person - oddly enough, having been in the military I am the one here that comes closest.
I'd have to venture a guess that 95% of gun use is against targets, 4.9% is against animals, and less than
unless that city is Bagdad....not many animals around there, and lots of people shooting each other.
Basicaly, they don't realise it, but they are coming full circle, and the outcome is just going to be a another eDonkey network. Which means, why not just use the existing one.
Here goes one reason: 9500KB pieces
Another: MD5-class hashes
The eD2k network uses oversized basic blocks and weak reference block hashes. Wasting up to 9.28MB because someone sent a bad bit is somewhat wasteful. So far, I have yet to see a torrent with >1MB pieces. Since MD5 is EOL, it is very likely that undetectable corruption exploits will appear in the near future (ViralG?). Killing legacy eD2k would be a good thing - those oversized blocks need to go, hopefully to be replaced by a scalable recursive tree hash.
I find it in-fucking-credible that Slashdot editors are willing to post an item that includes comments to the effect of: "gee, I hope [insert name of software/network/strategy] allows us to easily replicate the behaviour of [insert name of some other software/network/strategy that has previously been shut down for basically doing nothing but providing a system for people to easily infringe copyright, and more often than not charging users to do it]!"
BitTorrent is great. p2p is great, in general. But continually highlighting how great it is for piracy (yeh, regardless of how lame the RIAA/MPAA are) just puts more negative attention on it and further affixes the concept of "p2p is bad" in people's minds, rather than what they should be thinking.
I don't know if slashdot editors actually are willing to edit posts rather than just put them up (I can see reasons for doing it and reasons for not doing it), but this post would have been just super without the last sentence.
I doubt it. Look at Battlestar Gallactice, which was downloaded left/right/up and down around the globe. It still managed to get renewed.
Nah, I think it's because Enterprise didn't know what direction it was going.
Exactly how long does this decentralized system take to recognize that someone is no longer connected, don't want to talk and (especially) has perhaps handed the DHCP IP address to the next person? I think I'll give it another try, but if I get results like last night I'll either disable that feature or give Azureus the boot.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Let's get some perspective. 266MHz isn't "a year or two" ago, it's been SEVEN YEARS since Intel released the P2 @ 266mhz. I have a 233MHz from that era, and you can barely even run Firefox on it (IE runs "OK"). Furthermore, 1997-1998 would be the era of Java 1.1 and 1.2, which were significantly slower.
These days, and since the year 2000 with the release of Java 1.3, Java UI's have been very usable. And Java is much faster than Python; it's comparing mixed mode dynamic compilation (Java) vs. interpreted (Python)! Pysco's JIT release in 2003 may have sped things up somewhat, but it's far from mainstream.
As for running on a 266Mhz machine, what's "plenty" of Python apps? Were they all graphical? I think you'd find graphical Python to be pretty pokey (pyGTK or what have you). Command-line Java is pretty fast.
-Stu
Seriously, if you want to know why Azureus is so damn cool, just click on the new "swarm" tab on a running torrent. Ye gods, but that's beauty! Perfectly abstract, instantly comprehensible, informative in realtime, mesmerizing as a screensaver. You have to respect the kind of people who'd think up something like that.
(Karma bonus turned off because this is OT, but damn, I just had to say that.)
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
A lot of peopld shoot at targets just for the fun of it, not really doing it to learn to shoot people or animals. Clay pigeons for example. A very large number of people participating in that sport do not hunt, and it certainly doesn't train you for defensive (or offensive) shooting against human targets, but people still do it and have fun nonetheless.
Shooting can be FUN. Not violent. It's an activity that takes a lot of skill to do right. Learning windage adjustments. Learning the temperment of your weapon. Recording datasets and adjusting your loadings to shrink a target group. Bedding the action or recrowning a barrel. There is a lot of work to shooting accurately, and a lot of people enjoy that activity just as an activity, with no ulterior motive (no more than any basketball player, football player, or golfer has).
That's where I think the gap exists. There's a large group of people out there that have the unwaivering belief that guns are out there only to kill people. Target practice? Oh yeah they're training to kill people. Hunting? Yeah they're just satisfying a violent streak. They'll break and kill people eventually. Self defense? They're just looking for an excuse to kill people.
Despite so much evidence to the contrary you still have people with the severest case of tunnel-vision I've every seen.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Good point, you should have done it rather than posting about it.
Here are some statistics for your hungry little minds.
From the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence
Digging a little deeper, from the Department of Justice
And from the Burlington Free Press
Not a direct comparison, but it's hard to find numbers detailing the number of times a gun was discharged at a person versus discharged at an animal or target. Nevertheless, it's pretty apparent the original poster was incorrect. The vast majority of shooting in the US is not at people, but at animals and targets.
So, back on topic. The analogy was not a good one. A closer analogy could be made for handguns (handguns are not designed for hunting, but a lot of people do use them for target practice), but it still wouldn't be a good one.
With any amount of insight, it should be obvious by now that pr0n and w4r3z are the main force driving the demand for bandwidth and other hardware.
Whatever your stance on copyright issues and such, the fact of the matter is that the technological revolution that has put a PC in most any home in the so-called developed world COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without piracy. What we call "p2p" today is just a relatively new way to do the same thing that has been going on since the floppy disk became standard.
I used to swap floppies via snailmail, long before any normal person had a modem at home. Which was perfectly cool, since neither RIAA, MPAA, BSA or whathaveyounot were legally allowed to inspect mail. I used to get thick envelopes full of floppies from Iceland, Finland, Germany, England, Italy, all over the place. And sent full floppies back. Chock full of warez from such fine groups as Pompey Pirates, Automation, Bad Brew Crew and others. I'm sure there are representatives for the "I used to bang rocks together to get ones and zeroes"-crowd out there who are getting ready to jump in right now and claim to have been trading fortran code written with a quilt pen for making punchcard nudie pics decades ago, or whatever.
Where would the PC be today without warez? Would 200GB hard-drives would be standard in workstations at this moment, if it weren't for good old warez? Would "Doom" have been a success if almost every kid on the planet with a computer had a pirate copy? Would people buy graphics cards twice the price of a standalone games console if they had to buy every title they wanted to play? Would the PC so completely dominate the computer games industry if it weren't for piracy? Would CD-burners ever have gotten into the home?
I can't say. Probably not. What I do know is that digital piracy has had a significant impact and has made all of us "consumers" spend our money differently. We have for instance neglected to buy as many copies of Britney Spears' ".. baby one more time" as we did Michael Jackson's "Thriller". Which you can interpret together with estimated downloads on p2p networks and say "kids aren't buying music any more, they're downloading it for free instead". Or you can try to grep reality and see that most kids spend their money on a lot more things now than they did. There are more shiny objects of desire to aquire than yesterday. The stars are standing shoulder to shoulder where before there were only a few, and when a star fails to sell any records, a new one is there before you can say "overhyped musically insignificant crap". Not only music artists and cinema tickets and rentals are avaliable any more. DVDs, cell phone content, handheld games, computer games, console games, online games, and so on.
I bet a good portion of the people who fail to show up at the screening of whatever "kung fu cop" movie is screening at the moment are at home watching something really good that they would have NEVER heard of were it not for piracy, like for instance this really good Thai martial arts/action movie which you would probably have never come across if I had not given you a tip: Ong-Bak.2003.DVDRip.XviD-VALiOMEDiA
(if you're l33t you'll know how to find it, if you're n00b you'll have to make some friends who can teach you how to be l33t. An excellent way to make l33t friends is to host an FTP server with loads of disk on a fast static link.)
The freedom of piracy means that people are able to experience the state of the art, even if they aren't aware of the product, can't afford it, can't find it, or maybe even are too stingy to buy. But so what, because through this sharing of data people are discerning the crap from the useful. People are recommending things to each other. Quality prevails in piracy, because it is natural selection. As people discover the new possibilities of various pieces of technology, they start to desire it. This sort marketing cannot be bought. For the companies that have good products at affordable prices and with good avaliability
Does anyone have a clue what this I2P techonology is and how the azureus plugin incorporates it into bittorrent. Thanks.