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Completing BitTorrent Decentralization
Njaal writes "With BitTorrent going trackerless, searching for and distributing .torrent files is a natural next step. The Socialized.Net (TSN) is a pure P2P search infrastructure which facilitates P2P searching and distribution of .torrent files. It comes complete with an Azureus (and Firefox) search plugin. TSN is written in Python and is made available under the GPL. Note that this is part of my PhD thesis, and is as such meant as a technology demonstrator."
yay for eveolution. a great product getting better is alwways good news.
Stupid people hurt my head.
I'm interested as to where this will go.
Note that this is part of my PhD thesis, and is as such ment as a technology demonstrator
really means:
Pleassseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee don't sue my ass.
liqbase
This is going to make the MPAA and RIAA angry. No longer will they be able to shutdown whole torrent sites like they did with Lokitorrent and suprnova. This type of network would be almost impossible to control.
and get a connection refused...
anyone else having this prob from the firefox plugin?
Though the author is just a student, this is positive. I also applaud his consideration for Firefox first. What will it take for him to consider "the other" browser? Next, let me look for a torrent of the other newly released movie. I guess slashdotters know it.
Since when does P2P == stealing? Some people use it for copyright infringement, yes, but I regularly use it for downloading linux isos and legal media (Art of the Saber rocks).
All this means for me is that I can avoid doing too much damage to the hosting servers, which can only be a good thing for underfunded open source projects and the like.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
But the whole point of trackerless P2P is. For legitimate P2P (e.g. downloading FC) you don't need all this.
The Raven
"The file isn't a valid Azureus plugin."
This kid is just askin for trouble.
go Python!!
Its a technoligy designed to facilitate in the distribution of media , if you choose to abuse it then thats your fault .
Many people do use the technoligy to distribute copyrighted materials , many others use it to distribute GPL software and linux distros (which is how i get all my distros , via bittorent)
Having a system like this decentralises the network further , which is a brilliant thing as bandwidth is expensive , this will take the load off many networks if it picks up.
Celebrating the freedom to share is more apt , what you share is up to you (and any consiquences there of).
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
If you can share a binary file with N people, then you raise the risk of being detected by by the **AA a factor of N as well.
What, you mean Konqueror?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If this technology works as advertised (and obviously that has yet to be seen) it will only really work by the kind of mass adoption created by inclusion in the standard bittorrent clients. This is how the Azureus distributed database has worked out so well, because of the existing userbase being rolled over seamlessly to its inclusion by default.
If Azureus or other clients decided to include functionality like this, it would effectively leave programs like eXeem dead in the water and provide BitTorrent users with a closed 'single-stop' solution for finding and downloading files.
Business Voyeur
Is it just me, or is General Grievous a moron?
General Grievous is an overrated mediocrity, just like Boba Fett.
C'mon, you know having a Xerox machine in a library is just askin' for some heavy-duty intellectual property theft. They should probably confiscate pencils and paper at the door, too.
400%Growth in nodes known, went from 4 to 18, wonder how many there is i n a hour :)
Too bad one has to reboot az/ff to use the plugins tho
As I'm sure it's been said before, BitTorrent has many legitimate uses as well as P2P in general. It's all in how it is used. Just because a tool can be used wrongly, doesn't mean the tool is bad. This world has become so litigious that authors of software now have to be concerned with whether they will be sued when publishing their works.
And yes, copyright infringement is a form of theft.
Now that BT has decentralized tracker and decentralized search, it appears that the only remaining advantages over ed2k (e.g. eMule) are the tit-for-tat algorithm and smaller complete block size before one can begin uploading (256 KB for BT vs. 9500 KB for ed2k).
Nobody likes a spelling Nazi.
To try it out search for superpi, let's flood this thing with CPU bench screenies :) :)
Property is theft. (Sorry I can't call it anything else.) "Intellectual property" is not only theft, buts it's slavery as well.
I think it's high time that K-Meleon got more attention.
one which helps me download pr0n faster.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Trackerless torrents and search technologies like this seems to be changing BitTorrent into a conventional p2p system. Can anyone explain the diffrence? Is it just a regular p2p system with a highly efficient segmented downloading system?
Property is theft. (Sorry I can't call it anything else.)
If you'd learn some synonyms, you could call it acreage, acres, assets, belongings, buildings, capital, chattels, claim, dominion, effects, equity, estate, farm, freehold, goods, holdings, home, house, inheritance, land, means, ownership, plot, possessorship, premises, proprietary, proprietorship, real estate, realty, resources, riches, substance, title, tract, wealth, and worth.
The webpage fails the "google test" of providing a search box on an uncluttered mainpage.
Eh, trackerless P2P won't aid IP theft much.
"IP theft"? How can you "steal" an IPv4 address? Do you mean "source address spoofing"? If you mean "copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement, trade secret infringement, or right of publicity infringement", then please be more specific.
The thing that would really blow the lid off would be an anonymous, fast, and simple to use P2P system.
There are tradeoffs in any engineering problem. Good, fast, and cheap: pick two.
Why is it so difficult for people to understand that P2P is NOT stealing. There are a lot of legitimate uses. Like downloading Linux ISOs and....some (just a little bit) porn
Then you can just use links like tsn:sith.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Damn straight.
One day, maybe browsers will have BT clients built in by default so that BT will be available to the masses of sheep.
.torrent search?
Given that, how long could it be before google has a specialized
--
If you'd learn some synonyms, you could call it acreage, acres, assets,...
That's only true if connotations are unimportant. For me, nothing quite carries the "punch" of the word "theft." YMMV
Anyone else having trouble installing the azureus install?
Kahless2k
Ok bad pun i know .. .
this gives us a redundancy Admins can only dream of in other areas.
The fact that you can have your files spread over a massive number of computers spread across the world is the way of future file distribution. The load changes from a constant one on your server to a one off (well perhaps one day) of uploading it , then as soon as you know it the file propigates itself across the p2p network allowing for speeds unatainable in the classic server-client model which is still prevelant
The bandwidth saving is amazing compared to even the torrent/tracker system (which already shaved a hell of alot of bandwith use).
Way to go , this is the eveloution that has been needed for years , Arguments for the facilitation of copyright infringing material asside (which has hapend on every file distribution system since the Tape , )
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
It is worth noting that every P2P software distributor sued by the RIAA has used built-in searching. Built-in searching is really the big thing that separates the internet from what people commonly call peer-to-peer networks (even though the internet is itself a P2P network).
With the conventional internet, you were stuck using a centralized search engine which is easy to censor. To censor a network with built-in searching, you have to censor the whole network.
wow, this is a pretty weak PhD thesis!
Not everyone. If the author went away and s/ment/meant/ his whole thesis he might have gained an extra page or two with almost no effort.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
http://localhost:8002/LeChuck/addquery?sourceid=Ko nqueror&Operation=Add&submit=Search&Timeout=5.0&Ke ywords=\{@}&Expires=15&scope=Global
Remove any spaces that Slashdot added, and go to settings:/Network/WebBrowsing/ebrowsing and add it. I suggest using tsn as the shortcut.
You can then use tsn:Good Eats style urls anywhere you want.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
On google, do a search like:
"whatever filetype:torrent"
and you'll get links to torrents. Of course, a torrent-specific search could be more optimized than that, but even this often gets you what you want.
So what you are saying is celebrating any form of advancement of file-sharing technologies == "encourageing theft" (or since what we are arguing over involves copying, copyright infringement? Did I read this correctly, or not, and if not, please clear things up.
Argue? It has been clearly been legally established in 1985, and several times in the past decade that copyright infringement, as illegal as it is, is copyright infringement and nothing else. Philosophically it has also been argued against calling copyright infringement anything other than that as well, but that I will leave to open interpretation.
]
People who do lable GPL violators "theives" when also making the statement that copyright infringement is not theft in other posts, well, they are hypocrites.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Sounded like Borat...kept waiting for a national anthem and stories about his dead wife
"If you'd learn some synonyms..."
Or, instead of learning, he could call it those by copying and pasting straight from reference.com like you did?
G2/Gnutella.
GPL violaters aren't commiting copyright infringement, they are violating the terms of a licensing agreement.
Ever wondered why is bittorrent faster than other P2P networks like eDonkey or overnet? This is because there is no built-in decentralized search engine. Users have to download one of the files that are available to them, and consequently more people download the same file at a certain time. The result is that you get the files faster.
P2P could even replace things like classified ads or directories. Share a picture of your car with tags set appropriately and anybody can search for it.
neither is this, its purpose is to be able to find torrents, nothing more.
If anything it makes the **AAs job a lot simpler because they can use the search too...
That's their problem. I mean I feel bad for the grunt workers in IT, but as long as corps or individual owners care more about money than whats down the road, then they deserved to get hit with a truck (linux).
I only blame myself for all the years I put off going to unix (linux). Everybody out there knows there are very good alternatives to the proven monopoly, m$.
I dont' try and preach unless I'm asked to, because m$ people dont' care (about anything but themselves usually, after all this is a cultural thing for sure).
I am getting ready to get involved with projects like Wine which will probably be the type of programming that will be the final death-nil to m$.
The War (should not be) on how we can convert those that dont' want to be converted, but against a company which has cost untold amounts of money, frustration and time for those involved with it at ever level since it's inception.
m$ is not only bad for business, it is bad for just about everything else on the earth, because it stifles freedom, cooperation and technological advances for The People.
It is this m$ *philosophy* of sitting back, knowing that all (almost litteraly) pc's sold *HAVE TO HAVE* their piece-oh-trash os installed (by legal agreements), that is at the heart of what us earthinks need to counter with a better alternative.
If that aint' commie-ism, what is.
-- dont' hate me cuz i'm ugly.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Download the windows installer from http://www.socialized.net/files.html Install it. Download the azureus plugin and extract the torrentsearch folder to C:\Program Files\Azureus\plugins\ Restart azureus.
This is very interesting (though I would really like to see more info on how it works I only saw one paper). However while perfect for a PhD demo it seems in the long run it would be better to build a fully distributed system from the groun up. I seem to remember freenet doing something similar but I don't think they ever implemented searching.
In particular by building both searching and trackerlessness into such a system from the groun up one could benefit from a clean elegant metaphor (both searching and the components of file retrieval could be retrieving a key from the p2p network). Of course the math of making sure queries are done efficently is pretty damn hard (I expect each node would need to keep a map of the nearby nodes and the network 'distances' between them and some weighting).
However, if you could make it work it would be great (and not just for illegal activity). This essentially realizes the dream of allowing content access to subsidize server bandwidth.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
There's already wma, flac, and ogg! (But your point is well taken.)
Well perhaps not quite. However, this is where web technology is headed.
While one benefit of P2P is psuedo-anonymous file hosting. That is if I wish to spread some information I need not set up a webserver and be easily traceable (ideally once everything goes trackerless). Another one is the fact that the consumers of information can provide the bandwidth for the resources they consume.
The benefits for open sourceesque projects cannot be underestimated. Running community sites like wikipedia is very difficult as they need to pay for lots of bandwidth and server space. A well designed P2P system would turn every user of a resource into a partial server. This means it is no more expensive to provide information a million people want than to provide information 10 people want.
Of course some issues such as file ownership permissions need to be dealt with. However, this is exactly the sort of technology that is needed to realize the great leveling capacity of the internet and turn non-profit groups and individuals into just as important media distribution entities as major corporations.
I fully expect this to change the world.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Which is, I believe, exactly the point the grandparent was making. They aren't commiting copyright infringement, they are just violating the terms of the GPL.
The point is, they aren't thiefes in either case.
Thus, someone who argues that someone who commits copyright infringement isn't a thief, but someone who violates the GPL is, is a hypocrite.
Efforts to turn a great distributed download acceleration technology into a shady decentralized p2p search and file sharing system like Kazaa are bearing fruit.
Yes, this freedom has been celebrated for 150 years. The freedom to steal slaves from the plantation, that is. Funny thing was, slavery wasn't about stealing property, nor free markets or commerce, nor incentive, nor rewarding people for their efforts, or even profit, it was about controlling and manipulating other people for greed.
Funny, you'd think that after 150 years people would learn a thing or two about bullshit rights, like the "right" to own slaves, or more recently the right to coericevely restrict what people copy.
Well, save your anger for God or something - I didn't make the universe the way it is giving information completely different characteristics than physical property. And in all truth, I'm not even the one who is creating the consequences for those who are too foolish or stupid to accept that there is a very notable difference and that means something in the real world.
This is not a troll. I've never laughed more on slashdot.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Many people do use the technoligy to distribute copyrighted materials , many others use it to distribute GPL software ...
Huh? Are you trying to make it look like GPL software isn't copyrighted? Who the hell are you? Some *AA dick, or just an ignorant dick?
If there is something worse than asshats (*AA and lackeys) spreading FUD, it's when people try to look like they know what they talk about continue to spread the very same FUD! Please STOP!
What are you some sort of a moron who can't differentiate between copyright and the ideals of the GPL which is copyleft , it meerly falls under copyright laws . Get a clue and troll harder next time ,Yawn next
Thank you, Evan. Good times for my favourite browser. You know Ivor Hewitt just added a Firefox-style adblock plugin to Konqueror too?
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Port advertising instead of service advertising.
I haven't come across this idea elsewhere, so, please let me know if you actually do it ;)... I would if I had a server handy, it's an easy project.
One centralised server can be used as a central tracker for P2P, or anything else, with no legal implications. The idea is simple. Your server doesn't advertise services, it advertises open ports.
Let's say my awesome new p2p program uses port 23145. On starting up, it sends a packet to central server saying "my port 23145 is open". When someone else asks the server for someone with port 23145 open, there's a chance they get my IP address in return. When I have enough connections, I send a packet asking that I be delisted.
Obviously there need to be controls against spoofing, etc, but the application is so simple that these are pretty easy to do.
Because the central server stores nothing more than IP/port pairs (plus timing and security stuff), there is complete deniability. You have no way to tell which program people are running, either on the server or the client. And you never see any application data whatsoever. It's just as useful for legitimate apps as for legally difficult stuff.
Problem solved. Any program can find other instances of the same program without nasty legal questions being raised. Admittedly they'll have to check the identity of the other program on connection, but they should be doing that anyway...
I'm assuming you mean that you get ISO's for you distro's by bittorrent; or is there a distro that all the files are hosted entirely on bittorrent, including updates, etc?
Define Pedantic ;) , now thats what i call pedanism
ANyone have a torrent of the installer? It's dogslow/slashdoted already.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Why can't they write these things in C like any civilized programmer would. .jar on it. Prolly written by Jar Jar .
I am not sure I trust a file with
How about that. While this may be a nice extension to bittorrent, this doesn't seem to be breaking new ground in CS.
Just another argument that having a PhD doesn't really mean much.
Excellent joke, but only Konqueror users will get it!
Oh well, what the hell...
As for Azureus, I don't see the problem with restarting. It may be a bit slow at first, but it quickly picks up.
As for Fireofx... Thats where the Session Saver extension comes in handy! My new favorite extension.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This would make BT superior to eMule in every aspect.
Not quite. eMule still has the huge benefit of "you cannot control what is shared there". The user's inability to control what is shared is a pretty good legal defence in several scenarios. Even in the most biased of hearings, it is a strong mitigating circumstance.
That said, even more is needed. Where all this is heading as clear as daylight is towards clients not being able to control NOR TO RECOGNIZE what content is being shared, along with cryptographic peer anonymizing.
--
P2P networks treat site takedowns as evolutionary pressure and mutate around them.
The average person when they hear 'evolution' think of the evolution of living species. Why? Because the only time such a Big Word is used in the newspapers, it's usually the nutty religious people complaining that it isn't true. THen they get their sound bite and claim their invisuble sky-daddy is who what made the universe.
The 'common' definition is what any logical person would expect:
A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form.
Blar.
Fired up Asureus to try the new search feature, says I am out of date need new version , ok I do.
I should never have said yes, it will take hours (if I am lucky, days if not). I could have just FTPed a new verion in 20 sec or so.
I don't think the MPAA should be worried about BT.
At the speed it works the DVD sales will be about over when the download completes.
If you upload at 5k/s, you download at 5k/s,but if you can do 30k/s you usualy get 30k/s.
My lousy DSL cant sustain much more than 8kb/s upstream before all my other net-apps die. There is no upstream left for sending requests.
So I have Azureus capped at 5kb/s upstream to make the net usuable. Guess what? At occation I still get download speeds which maxes my downstream at 80kb/s. And that's when there are still other peers in the swarm.
You may be correct on the rest, but at this point you are wrong. Sure you're not mixing BitTorrent with ED2K?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Emule:
- Slooooow at single downloads, need a long queue, lots of incomplete files wasting disk space
Direct Connect:
- If the last source on your server goes missing, you often have to jump around servers to find another source.
- Haven't tried RC, but slow clients can block fast downloads (e.g. kick out 2k/s modem user, get 200k/s Uni user)
BT:
- Nearly impossible to find rare files!!!
And I guess it can be in its place to compare with 3rd gen networks too (Freenet, Ants, I2P etc):
+ Anonymous
+ Serverless
+ Doesn't rely on a single seed
+ Potentional to run any network service "on top" of the network
- Anonymous
- Slooooooooooooooooooooooooow
- Beta quality (and that's being kind)
- Plagued with incomplete files
- Poor/no searching
- Doubts about actual anonymity
- Doubts about scalability
You might have noticed anonymous listed twice, that was intentional. Expect the first well-working implementation to go through all kinds of hell. You might have thought Freenet has gotten a lot of flak. They haven't. They are to anonymous networks what IRC trading was to Napster. Read: Noone was really paying attention.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Too much of this kind of behavior will imply circumvention, which in turn can be used against the programmers.
You idiots are killing a good thing and are too greedy and to stupid to know better. Crippled hardware done through regulation is the only solution (this does mean machines with limited compiling capabilities and fully implemented TCPA by law), which could in turn effectively end open source developement and the playing field provided with unmodified machines.
>>This is not an example of evolution but rather of Intelligent Design. An intelligence is required to implement the irreducibly complex decentralization.
Nonsense. This is quite obviously a form of evolution.
First off, we get IRC. It wasn't well known by the public and searching was quite difficult for the masses.
Next, we get Napster. It was a good server, with huge increases in fitness due to searching, but it was too centralized (even more so than IRC). The main servers got killed with lawsuits and it died.
Next we got Morpheus, which started because of the success of Napster (and to fill the niche left by Napster's extinction), which was more decentralized and used Kazaa's network. And included file searches for non-MP3 files. Kazaa killed it off because they were greedy, and owned the core part of the network.
Kazaa was far enough away from the courts that they lived longer. However a series of lawsuits against users and the general peer to peer operation made it less fit.
Bittorrent came out with the primary advantage of the uploading while download protocol set. Which also added a more decentralized aspect to the peer-to-peer paradigm. It constituted a huge leap in fitness.
Bittorrent however is still based on trackers and torrent files. It needs a centralized location to start. These centralized locations are easy prey for predators such as MPAA and RIAA.
This addition, frees that restriction. Improving the overall fitness of the product by increasing it's decentralization which reduces predation from anti-piracy services.
Now, if, for example, back in 1998 decentralized Bittorrent networks showed up out of the blue. This would be a sign of intelligent design. No trial or error and it appeared fully formed. But, still not irreducibly complex. Each step towards decentralization adds fitness to the product. A slight increase (of decentralization) still yields an increase in fitness, which is all that is required for evolution.
Overall, it is true that the program was designed and implemented by intelligent people. But, this is just the nature of programs. If it is a good idea it should have more fitness and do well, if it is a poor idea it gets sent off to Limewire limbo. This is the product of evolution.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
In case you haven't been on Slashdot much, there's been a good deal of articles recently about ID; the grandparent is funny because of the 'leitmotif' quality, and because what he appears to be trying to say, sotto voice, is intrinsically hirarious to the sceptic, of which Slashdot is well-populated.
As an aside, I think that underestimation of the power of evolution is part of the reason that software patents are so readily granted.
Wikileaks, no DNS
(eow me 'ed 'urts...)
Now all we need is "required" sharing amounts... just lie and say the files not done until you share it with so many people!!! Then you can build it in tiers as it spreads... allow each part to share say 3 levels deep then get off...
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central host for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basicially this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I've been thinking about this tracker-less idea, and it scares me.
When bittorrent first came out, the AA's didn't know what to attack because as far as Bram Cohen was concerned, he was in the free and clear. Bittorrent did not handle any searching, was not the central tracker for the clients, and didn't really do anything but make a decentralized File transfer client to spread bandwidth costs and increase speed. So the way that the AA's handled bittorrent was to take out the trackers that were doing the illegal swapping, and this is fine, because basically this keeps Bittorrent's hands clean in the law's eyes.
Now in this case of the new decentralization, since the clients do some searching to find a dead tracker's torrent, it's giving the AA's a weapon to attack bittorrent directly. They can say that even though there is no direct searching on the part of bittorent, it still is impossible to stop illegal files now because there is no tracker to kill and a file could theoretically survive in the wild forever. Since the tracker is now the client, the only logical step would be to take out the client, which would be the source of the client, Bram Cohen and bittorrent itself.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Making bittorrent trackerless is a horrible idea, that will only serve to reduce the usefulness of bittorrent below that of Kazaa/Gnutella.
The biggest thing Bittorrent has going for it, is that a central authority that you trust, is listing legit files, with descriptions, etc. With Gnutella/Kazaa, you don't have any assurance, hence the problem with fake files.
Bittorrent makes this problem worse (if it goes decentralized) because it downloads chunks completely randomly, so you can't even preview an 9GB DVD image until it is (almost) completely downloaded. With Gnutella/Kazaa, they still download in randomized chunks, but they start with the beginning of the file, and have a larger contiguous chunk size, so even though there are breaks in a partial file, you can watch chunks of it before you've downloaded the first 10MBs or so.
The centralized distribution of torrents is at least 50% of bittorrent's advantages, over Gnutella/Kazaa. You'd actually be better off just switching to Gnutella, and it wouldn't take any effort to do that. Even better would be putting all this effort into a public-key trust tree mechanism, that would allow people to know which files have been voted as legit by people they trust, and/or people trusted by people you trust, etc., ad nauseum.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Any other slashdotter's using the imeem network? They've got this distributed/decentralized social networking and file sharing app which is pretty neat.
Hmmmm... The installation process no longer works -- download directory now requires a login. Why?
"This is totally insecure, but very convenient."
In 1985 there was a man named Dowling who was prosecuted for the "Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property". He was selling bootleg copies of Elvis records. The U.S. Supreme Court in DOWLING v. UNITED STATES, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) struck this down because copyright infringement is not theft. You have to deprive your victim of the item in order to steal it from them. Making copies doesn't deprive anyone of what it being copied, therefore its not theft.
Does it go on forever?
If you violate the terms of the license then the license is revoked thus making you a copyright infringer..
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
I'm running the daemon right now and I have 54 known nodes. Searching works fine, however I can't download a single .torrent file. .torrent, but I still can't get any .torrents.
Firewall/router etc. are configured the right way as far as I can tell.
The [View] link tells me a bit more about the
Can anyone help?
Stop making that big face!
Or, depending on how you look at it, propaganda designed to portray modern social tools as "shady" are becoming more popular among those who don't understand the issues.
It's free software, so the MPAA can't remove it from circulation by intimidating the author. At best (from the MPAA's perspective), it would slow development. At worst, it would land them in lots of legal trouble for false accusations etc., and fracture bittorrent into even more seperate projects that develop in parallel and share new ideas.
Yes. I mean, I doubt any half-sane person would ever give in to a *AA demand for control of the Net itself, but that is what it boils down to. You can shut down Napster, but Kazaa lives on. You can shut down Kazaa, but ed2k lives on. You can shut down ed2k servers, and get ISPs to filter ed2k traffic, but people will use BT. You can filter BT traffic, but people will use encrypted networks. You can filter unlicensed encrypted traffic (making up a future scenario here), but people will use underground, unencrypted networks. You can hunt those down, but people will use disguised data streams to transfer files. You can shut down the Internet, but people will use nextgen WiFi to make their own (maybe; that's still a little farfetched; to make a real Internet with such low-power radios would take too many). You can outlaw that, but people will just swap CDs. You can outlaw that, but you can't have a *AA marshal following every human to make sure they don't do it.
So the bottom line is, of course, it can't be stopped. But if they want to make it harder, the only thing they can really do is take control of the entire Internet (the ISPs, anyway).
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
["IP theft" is] a descriptive term and is useful in this discussion
"Copyright infringement" is more precisely descriptive than "IP infringement", as it doesn't have the association with patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or rights of publicity.
> Meanwhile the seeders are feeding the rarest pieces to the
> people it sees as the ones who upload the most to others
Not true, the seeders have no idea what your computer is sending to other people, only the tracker does. The seeders know what parts they have already sent out, and try to keep it evenly distributed, but if a leecher says it only needs a specific chunk, the seeder will send that chunk. That's how that "optimize for preview" feature in Azureus works, it just tells the seeder that it needs chunks at the start of the file.
The belief that bittorrent forces the user to upload is a misnomer, the client authors simply refuse to let the user not upload. The mac version of the official client wont let you set your uprate any lower then 2K/s on each torrent, as is the same for Azureus.
Now, there are several Trackers that wont let you download if you aren't uploading enough.