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Trackerless BitTorrent Beta Posted
jgarzik writes "BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta."
Will this eventually leave the BSA and others with no BT tracker sites to shut down, so that their only option will be to go after end users or to DOS the P2P networks themselves?
See you in Guantanamo, "Bram".
Towards the Singularity.
I hate it when I squeeze harder and things start to slip through my fingers.
Is it just a coincidence that this enhancement has come the day before the new Star Wars movie?
If you lower the cost of entry to producing a BT release, won't that mean more .torrent file swimming around? With the increase of different torrents everywhere, won't that dilute the power of BT?
Is it legal to post only in questions?
More specifically, how can you connect to a torrent download if you don't know where to start? Isn't the starting point the same as a tracker?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
I wonder what's going to stop **AA from shutting down the login servers. Sure, there might not be trackers to shut down, but a network is no good if nobody can join it. How do you expect to find out who your "peers" are otherwise?
How does this work... how do you find peers to download from? Are they included in the .torrent file? IF so ain't that a big risk... if MPAA start collection peers informations? I guess it's encrypted but it can always be broken.. anyways if anyone have more info on how it actually works please inform me :P
I'm really glad to see this coming in the mainstream BitTorrent client. At the moment it can be hard to use the distributed tracking system because of its dependence on Azureus as a client. A lot of people have been making noise about this, and hopefully now that its in the main client, the developers of the other BitTorrent clients will make implementing support for this more of a priority.
Business Voyeur
I think we'll see two things:
1) **AA will squirm for a while
2) **AA will work harder than before to moniyor and restrict user rights on the internet, via congressional purchasesing, er, I mean lobbying.
I think #2 will ultimately be futile in that it will not slow their loss of control over media content distribution (and copyright violation) but it will make life unpleasant for many...
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
The azureus implementation has support for 'magnet' links, which allow you to simply exchange a small link and download the .torrent file from the other peers directly. Search on keywords 'magnet btih' for examples, though they're not commonly used yet.
how can you connect to a torrent download if you don't know where to start? Isn't the starting point the same as a tracker?
There's an A-end and a B-end seperated by some amount of time. Say 1 minute. At the A-end, you start your search for the torrent. The search continues for 60 seconds until the torrent is found at the B-end. The torrent data is then loaded at the B-end which is picked back up at the A-end 60 seconds prior. From your perspective, it happens instantly.
The searches are also modular in design. So you can actually include a second search at the B-end. So at the A-end, you might actually get back a second result for something you didn't even know you searched for.
Don't worry about the noise in the attic. It's just birds.
Plenty of geeks with big pipes to host trackers for linux releases...
But lets say your band releases an album online, or your movie club makes a film... You've only got a geocities website and the desktops of your members.. With tracker-based BT you had to talk someone into running a tracker for you... With tracker-less that limitation has been removed.
This is realy the cat and mouse game at it's best. BitTorrent is getting better each day. While the RIAA and MPAA is closing the hosting website, Attacking ISP from around the globe, etc.
Is this a combat to the death ?
I guess nothing will beat private exchange ? (DRM)
What's needed is some kind of distributed HTTP overnet that works; that can handle dynamic content semi-intelligently, and MUCH faster than freenet/frost sites.
Power to the Peaceful
Actually,
It's kinda handy if the tracker goes down. Additionally, if you don't want your torrent to operate in this distributed fashion you flag the torrent to not operate in distributed mode.
It's more like a hydra in this fashion...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The only good reason for trackerless torrents is to prevent the **AA from shutting down infringing filesharing. I am a fair-use advocate, but I don't see the legitimate purpose to trackerless torrents that cannot be fulfilled by trackered torrents.
Um, now people with shared hosting, blog sites, and free or included web space with their ISP or Yahoo Geocities / Angelfire / etc. (or otherwise are unable to set up a tracker) can now publish videos and other large files with bittorrent without trashing their TOS limits. Sounds legitimate to me. How many of these types of sites has Slashdot shut down by pointing to them?
"I hate it when I squeeze harder and things start to slip through my fingers."
Let's leave your sex life out of this.
This doesn't seem to accomplish much in the way of providing anonymity if everyone in the swarm still had to go through the same starting node somewhere.
.torrent file without having to connect to a tracker (which you may not hae access to).
.torrent without needing a tracker.
I don't think the idea was to make an anonymous torrent; I think it was to make it easier for bloggers and websire owners to post a
Joe Six Pack wih webhosting can now post a
Then rather shortsighted you are. If I take a home video and want to share it with my friends and family, previously I would have had to upload it somewhere and spend money on web hosting. Now, with trackerless BT I can easily share this file without having to worry about web hosting or running a tracker. I just have to email the torrent file to people and run a BT client on my machine.
Legitimate file sharing doesn't only include large organisations "sharing" files with their customers/users. There's a whole other side to it as well that you've most conveniently forgotten about in your rush to share your misplaced sarcasm with the world.
It's the classic question. How do you make "make"? How do you untar "tar"? How do you decompress "gzip"? How do you compile "gcc"?
.Z and non-compressed forms, as well as a shar file. tar is distributed as a shar file. etc. etc. etc.
...
The answer in all cases is to work around the problem by not storing the code in the format it supports. eg: make comes with a shell script to build the binary. gzip is distributed in
BitTorrent isn't all that large, so there isn't much to be gained by distributing it that way. It's best at file packages in the multi-hundred megabyte and larger range. The largest BT download is only around 1 MB
I just learned about Distributed Hash Tables this past semester and thought they were really cool. On the bittorrent page linked in the blurb, it mentions the use of a DHT in order to do the join/lookup required for locating peers.
l e for more info on them and links to example DHT implementations (such as CAN, Chord, and Kademlia).
If you are interested in how it works, you can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_tab
Essentially:
It is now easier, though not any more secure, to offer files. The creation of torrents and trackers is now rolled into one - but there's still location information in it.
It's implemented. It doesn't hide your ID, so illegal users still have the same problems.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
OTOH, the lack of centralized control means that trackerless BT will likely be vulnerable to a new class of attacks that could make it possible to disrupt the download of a file you don't like. So, ironically, warez groups might stick to running trackers for attack resistance and Linux providers might move to trackerless for the scalability. It all depends on how scalable and attack-resistant trackerless downloads turn out to be.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
All this work for a less than honorable cause. Just think what could be if all this human effort had been channeled through a charity, say Habitat for Humanity, your local food bank, or teaching someone to read.
Inefficient network use also leads to waste of money - which could be used for charity. And you're forgetting of a fundamental right that all humans must have: Freedom of speech.
There are a lot of people--I can't say whether this is true of the BT developers or not, as I don't know them--who are interested and drawn to projects that have a hint of subversion as well as technical challenge to them. Given the popularity and rate of development of such projects, this seems rather obvious.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
People have lives OTHER than charity, as your presence here proves. As for this being less than honorable, that's the eye of the beholder. It's like the VCR, guns, or deep fryers. They can all be used for good or for evil. Just because they can be used for evil doesn't obviate they're good potential, nor should we ban them because of their potential for abuse.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
This is how Kademlia works:
.torrent file has a 160-bit info hash embedded in it, derived from SHA-1. Now substitute the message above for the .torrent file, and the message key for this info hash -- you are now routing .torrent files to their closest nodes. These nodes, in turn, can be the tracker. If a node knows the 160-bit info hash of a .torrent, it can find a tracker by placing this hash as the message key in a lookup message and finding the closest node, which must necessarily be the tracker.
Nodes randomly generate either 128 or 160 bit node identifiers. An identifier uniquely identifies a node on the network. Traditionally, they are computed as just the MD5 or SHA-1 hash of your IP address (this is to make it harder for clients to select exactly what identifier they want, which could help them target certain files for takedown... more on that later).
In Kademlia, the idea is that messages routed through the network are identified by a message key. This is, as well, either a 128 or 160 bit value. The goal of Kademlia, and every other DHT (Google for Chord, CAN, Pastry, etc.) is to route a message to the node whose identifier is "closest" to the message key. In Kademlia, the distance between a node identifier and another node identifier, or a node identifier and a message key, is computed by simply XORing the two and treating the result as an unsigned integer.
Each node maintains (roughly) a routing table containing nodes that match successively-longer high order bits with itself. For example, node 0100... maintains an entry to a node starting with 1..., a node starting with 00..., a node starting with 011..., and a node starting with 0101... Note that in terms of distance by XOR, the first node has a distance of 1..., the second with a distance of 01..., and so forth. Thus, nodes matching more high order bits are closer to you in the identifier space.
So if you are node 1010... and you receive a message starting with 0111... You should have some node in your routing table that differs in the highest-order bit, that is, it starts with 0... Say its node identifier starts with 0000. You route the message to that node. If you compute the XOR between your node identifier and the key, and this node's identifier and the key, you will see that this node is approximately twice as close to the key as you are.
Now this node differs in the second bit: 0000 vs 0111. In its routing table, it must have some node that matches in the first bit, and differs in the second: that is, starting with 01... If the message is routed to that node, we again cut our distance to the key by approximately 1/2. This process repeats until we find the node "closest" to the message key.
Routing in this manner takes log(N) time, and each node on the network maintains log(N) connectivity. Note that there are well-established algorithms for nodes joining and leaving the network, of which the former takes log(N) time as well.
So how does BitTorrent fit in? Here's what I'm assuming: Each
You can do other neat tricks, too, like keyword searching, load balancing, and whatnot (see eMule -- it uses the Kademlia DHT for its serverless system). Other DHTs work in a similar manner. I'm a little confused as to why everyone uses Kademlia, when there are better ones out there. (Accordian, for example, is truly state-of-the-art.)
Plenty of resources on DHTs can be found at Project Iris.
- shadowmatter
The new Bittorrent protocol was designed by the same developers who designed the original TCP/IP protocol in the 70s. But this new protocol has a decidedly "edgy" feel to it. Below is the "handshaking" procedure. There are a few similarities between it and SMTP:
client1: gimme the warez
client2: who's askin'?
client1: me, mutherfucka
client2: well, your story checks out - here's da shit.
I know what you're thinking - how will they handle flow control? The trackerless developers also thought of that:
client1: the shit's comin' slow - speed it up
client2: get off my back, bitch
client1: don't make me bust a cap in yo' ass!
client2: all aight, all aight... sheee-it.
But when this gets ported into bt-i2p things really start to roll.
I am actually hoping somebody will make a plugin so azureus will act as an i2p router and not have to rely on and externally configured app.
Distributed tracking AND total anonymity let the party begin
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
Bittorrent's beta release is not really trackerless. Instead it implements a distributed tracker very similar to the one used in Azureus. In fact, both make use of the Kademlia distributed hash table routing algorithm, but both implementations are different just enough to make them incompatible with each other.
This begs the question, why wasn't this beta postponed until its implementation could be made compatible with the already existing distributed tracker implementation in Azureus? Both projects are open source and both are written in high-level programming languages: Python and Java respectively.
Hmm. How does one use a deep fryer for evil? Open a KFC?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The *AA can still nail you for being a distributor of unauthorized Copyrighted material if you use Bittorrent. You are of course giving out copies to other users; so all the *AA needs is a list of IP addresses that are in the swarm. Granted, the *AA hasn't really done this. But if there's one thing that they have shown is that they are extremely motivated to find people who are involved, and hit them with a bill for a $2-3K settlement.
With an economic bounty like that, the only thing the Lawyers of the *AA are lacking is a way to automate the technology. From what I hear, that technology is coming. Supposedly some of it is in beta test now.
The only defense one might hope for in the U.S. is a scheme which added plausible deniability. That's not here yet with BT; and even if implemented, would undoubtedly result in a slowdown of downloads.
Personally, I think your best bet if you are concerned is to use an offshore ISP.
Well, I've done habitat for humanity too.
A week in 96 degree sun building houses for the homeless.
AND I also like BT.
I agree the artists need some money to keep working. I disagree that they won't write or create new art unless they get millions of dollars. I really disagree that the middlemen who do nothing that can't be replaced by BT should get rich. I donate money to artists (via magnatune among others) where I know the artists are actually going to see a majority of the money and I've established that I like the art.
I also try some stuff, don't pay for it, don't bother to delete it but never listen to it again.
There is now more quality songs/art/tv shows/movies than I could watch/listen to if I spent every day from waking to sleeping consuming it. Only monopolies are holding up the prices- but the glut is coming and prices will drop.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This drives me fucking nuts.
Y is an activity that saves lives, such as buying vaccines. X is a frivolous activity such as buying a DVD. People don't live their lives choosing Y instead of X every time because you end up with no life of your own.
And you only whine about it when X happens to be something that reminds you of the need for Y, or when Y suddenly occurs to you and you want to make a point. But every single time you buy a goddamn DVD, you're choosing X over Y. That's how life works. Every cheap novel you buy is a child who dies because you didn't spend the time to go out, find her, and help her. Come to terms with this before you start tossing it out as a random argument against a given X.
And why does Bittorrent even remind you about the need for charities? I mean, you've got a strange set of connectiosn going. I mean, pointless artwork in Central Park, sure, but why on Earth do you jump on a random technical project like this?
(Score:-1, Flamebait)
Oh, right. Some people. So there's a 50/50 chance you're flamebaiting or that you've just got a weird set of things that trigger thoughts of Y for you. Either way, spend some time thinking about these issues; it'll do you good. Maybe think about the kids dying as you sit there. Think about that each time you speak with righteous indignation about what people should be spending their time on. I'm not even telling you not to say what you're saying. I'm just saying give it some thought.
$10 can buy vaccines to absolutely save someone's life. With what rationale are you buying a DVD with that $10? I know why I do it. Do you?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I don't know why a trackerless mode was chosen, I thought that the efficiency of BT is due to the centralized tracker. I think it would be better to provide redundancy to the tracker function by adding a super tracker functionality.
.torrent file is the real problem in hosting files. Its not as easy as just providing one directory and every file in that directory gets shared. Ofcourse there are benefits also to the .torrent file when we want to serve a whole directory as a single torrent. An approach where both kinds of things can be done will be better than a single method.
Actually the centrallized tracker is a very important thing. It decides who downloads what. Without the central tracker the effort will not be that synchronized.
I was expecting the development to be towards making the tracker redundant, with creating a super tracker, that would track the tracker.
Also the
Also the Emule has it better that it can determine that multiple names of a file are actually the same file, based on the same Hash.
I would think it would be better to have super trackers track the trackers, with multiple super-trackers tracking the same tracker. And each super tracker would be tracking multiple trackers. Super trackers would provide the search capabilities, and would share tracker information among themselves. They would also provide tracker redundancy. They would also be able to determine if the different file names are in fact the same file, and merge several trackers into one.
I think the peers with good bandwidth and with maximum completed parts would become the tracker. The benefit of being the tracker would be that you get the file faster, because the tracker would obviously give itself the benefit. Then when the tracker has completed its own file. A new tracker would be selected.
What do people here think?
Hmm. How does one use a deep fryer for evil? Open a KFC?
Oh what? Like YOU'VE never heard of a deep fried a baby. Sure, sure. All of those KFC and and french-fry lovers like to stand up and say that a ban would be against their best interests, but even they know the primary reason people get deep fryers is for cooking babies.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.