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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."
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
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.
yay for eveolution. a great product getting better is alwways good news.
This is not an example of evolution but rather of Intelligent Design. An intelligence is required to implement the irreducibly complex decentralization.
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"!!!
Looks like it tries to connect to localhost:8002, seems you need to install the daemon too:)
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."
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
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
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).
This is going to make the MPAA and RIAA angry.
I bet in retaliation, they'll put out crappy music and movies.
Oh, wait...
To try it out search for superpi, let's flood this thing with CPU bench screenies :) :)
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?
1) handed over to them
2) shutdown completely
3) taxed at 95% for any useage (no matter how irrelevant to music/movies)
Then you can just use links like tsn:sith.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
as funny as that is, if you think about it, the program was intelligently designed. perhaps improve is a better word in this case than evolve
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.
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
IP = Intellectual Property
And yes, while there is a tradeoff between anonymity and speed a reasonable level of both should be possible. A simple to use interface can be created independantly of the other two factors.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
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.
You mean like if you put this into Google:
?
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
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
"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?
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.
"and let us start anew"
Yep -- with 802.11b linking neighbors to neighbors across the country, you can create a "people's internet", something not subject to any central authority. Hopefully, such a network would thrive with a cathedral-and-bazaar philosphy, and not choke in it's own vomit with a tragedy-of-the-commons philosphy.
Then again, considering the way that the current internet has gone, a people's internet is probably doomed from the start.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Porn is (usually) copyrighted.
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:
IP does not apply in any situation, as it is a field of widely varying laws, not a law. Too many people use "IP" as a sort of handwaving. Sort of like two people discussing what kind of algorithm was used to render hair in The Incredibles and somebody comes along and says "You guys are both wrong - they used a computer!".
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I dunno ... there's not much good that would come from suing the kid, from the **AA perspective. It would just validate everything being said about the entertainment industry's chilling effect on innovative activities and make it that much harder to get further cooperation from Congress. That cooperation is essential to achieving total, unquestioned domination of content distribution and use, which is, ultimately, what they're really after. Bram Cohen, while he admits that he's maintaining a low profile regarding the MPAA (makes sure his equipment isn't being used to download protected content, etc.) hasn't been sued yet. Probably because it would serve absolutely no purpose and wouldn't do anything but increase the public's awareness of the protocol. That's the problem with all the lawsuits ... people I know that would never even have heard of Gnutella or Bit Torrent got into it because of all the publicity. "Yeah, I been checkin' out this 'new tella' thingy I heard about on the news ... that's some freaky shit, man.'" If they'd kept their mouths shut I suspect that peer-to-peer would never have grown in popularity as quickly as it did. To a certain degree, it's their own fault, shouting "hey, there's free stuff over here but don't you take any of it because that would be, like, wrong and all." Granted, people are good at finding freebies all by themselves, but it doesn't help when the owner of the goods in question is lambasting the airwaves telling everyone where to find it.
... they are, at the core, statists. They want to maintain the status quo ante, indefinitely. That never happens though, and people who think like that are notoriously poor at predicting the pace and direction of technological development. They tend to get caught with their pants down: that has happened repeatedly with these groups, and is about to happen again. The law (and abuse of the law) is their only recourse when people release nifty new stuff like this.
An equilbrium will be reached eventually, and it will be the same whether the entertainment moguls had started throwing their weight around or not. Actually, driving file-sharing essentially underground by forcing the addition of encryption and the development of decentralization techniques has only made matters worse (for themselves.) This is, however, typical of the mindset of the people that run the MPAA and the RIAA
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Given that, how long could it be before google has a specialized .torrent search?
Like this?
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.
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?
ANyone have a torrent of the installer? It's dogslow/slashdoted already.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Excellent joke, but only Konqueror users will get it!
Oh well, what the hell...
Evolution just means gradual improvement; it doesn't imply how the evolution takes place. You're thinking of Darwinism.
Welcome to Slashdot, where polite, factually correct posts are modded +5 Funny.
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
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
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.
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
>>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
I doubt it will be mitigating if there is an equivalent p2p system where you can control what is shared there.
I don't particularly want stuff getting shared off my computer and bandwidth that I don't know about.
What I could use though is a something that I can stick on my linux gateway to intercept BT streams, handle the torrent itself, so that I don't have to port forward to a single machine on the inside, and the uploading can be done from the internet facing machine instead of from the machines on the inside. I'd be happy to leave the upload going on files I downloaded for quite some time, but not under any circumstances for files I didn't download.
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...
Cut it out. So far you've already gotten communication, Eve, evolution, and God memes entangled. If someone grabs the wrong photon, it's anyone's guess what may get teleported where.
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.
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?
The daemon runs on your local computer. Port 8002 is the web interface. So, if you cannot reach your own computer on port 8002, your daemon is not running. :-)
Dr.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
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.
The problem he was addressing was that referring to "intellectual property" is too vague for this discussion. It is like a chemist referring to "stuff".
I was refering to "IP Theft", which restricts it to only the IP that is claimed (regardless of whether or not the claims are legally and/or morally valid) to be owned by some entity.
Yes, it was rather vague, but it was still descriptive. Think of a chemist refering to "acidic stuff".
Stop the world; I need to get off.
The term was not used outside of groups promoting FUD about P2P. Now it is not used outside of the media that has accepted the FUD. It's a term designed specifically to cloud a group of fairly simple issues where the consumer also has rights. You speak of "IP Theft" as if it is a legal term. It is not.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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."
It's a descriptive term and is useful in this discussion regardless of whether the entity being denoted is real, imaginary, or a legal fiction.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
["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.