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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
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?
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!
" 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?
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.
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