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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
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:)
"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
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
No, trackerless BitTorrent is legitimate too, because it allows people without the resources to run a tracker upload torrents.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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).
You do , honestly . Trackers and torrent files , whilst small are still a drain on bandwidth that need not exist . /distros just dont have the money to support a server , or they do have the money and could better use it in other areas. .Removing the necesity for those overheads Removes alot of burdon from the server.
Many sites and young projects
It may not seem like much cost to distribute a 50KB file but if you get popular it can add up , then you have alot of other overheads
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
"Just a student"?... The guy is doing a PhD; many programmers have not even been in college.
This is going to make the MPAA and RIAA angry.
I bet in retaliation, they'll put out crappy music and movies.
Oh, wait...
Just call him Doctor Warez.
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)
The bottom line is that adding a distributed tracker both offloads even more bandwidth from the servers -- which is the whole point of using BitTorrent in the first place -- as well as eliminates the system's main weakness (e.g. removing content, legitimate or otherwise, from distribution by taking down a single computer).
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
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.
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
"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.
Porn is (usually) copyrighted.
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:
Given that, how long could it be before google has a specialized .torrent search?
Like this?
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...
While I agree that currently the only substantial use for trackerless P2P is IP theft. Sure it helps people a little because when they are getting their linux ISOs they don't need to worry if the server goes down. Realistically though for any popular download it isn't too hard to find a server to host the tracker which is pretty reliable.
However, there apparently isn't any lack of trackers for ilegal content. On the other hand the potential uses of trackerless P2P for legal purposes are huge. We just don't see these applications yet because we don't yet have working trackerless P2P. Dismissing trackerless P2P as only being good for illicit activity before we see what develops is the same error as dismissing the VCR as only useful for illegal copying because the media companies couldn't predict the rise of video sales.
Truly trackerless P2P completely changes the game. At the moment P2P offers few benefits besides a certain degree of anonymity so it is mostly used for people who want to share mp3s but wouldn't put them up on their webserver. If P2P goes trackerless if can REPLACE your webserver. Rather than posting your media to a website or single server you can post it directly to the P2P network.
The potential applications are huge. Home users who don't have or want websites can easily use such a system to share files without worrying about keeping their computer always on. Popular, legal but socially akward material can be easily hosted. Right now if I want to share my pornographic home movies I either need to pay money to an ISP which allows porno (most wont and I face the danger of huge bandwidth fees) or keep my computer always on to run a tracker.
In the future if some form of file ownership/change could be implemented P2P could replace webhosting. Imagine if sites like wikipedia could be started up without needing a foundation to pay for bandwidth because everyone who uses it contributes some of their bandwidth. This would finally realize the true potential of the web as equalizing sources of media.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
>>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.
seeds/finished downloaders don't/can't engage in tit for tat and so will give you as much as they can.
so it seems likely that in your case you were simply getting data from a seed/finished downloader when your rate spiked like that.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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