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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"!!!
This is going to make the MPAA and RIAA angry.
I bet in retaliation, they'll put out crappy music and movies.
Oh, wait...
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.
Bittorent is designed for a massive swarm of people all downloading the same file at the same time. It won't die under these circumstances, it will thrive. The more people you have downloading the file, the more people are sharing the file. The reason bittorent is faster is because it forces you to share with others, and doesnt allow you to get away with not sharing the file like many p2p programs, where many people with "slow" connections or a cap on their monthly bandwidth turn off their uploads. Thats why so many people download off one guy with other p2p programs, because the file is never shared by so many people who dowload it, the few people who are sharing their copy's queue is swamped.
It's all because of bittorents tit for tat system, where if the seeders are swamped, you'll usualy get your upload speed returned to you from the other peers you are downloading with. If you upload at 5k/s, you download at 5k/s,but if you can do 30k/s you usualy get 30k/s. You swap the pieces you have for pieces your missing with the other downloaders. Your client remembers the people who traded with it succesfully and tries to make further trades with these people since your client can confirm that they are uploading, and thus you will get something in return. Meanwhile the seeders are feeding the rarest pieces to the people it sees as the ones who upload the most to others, and they swap with others and so on, until everyone has a complete copy.
There are quite a lot of differences in the three major P2P technologies. Here I try to cover the most important of each:
ed2k (eMule)
Direct Connect (DC++, Reverse Connect)
BitTorrent (Azureus, BitComet)
This has been the situation for a while. In ed2k nothing big has changed for a year. DC++ (incl. Reverse Connect) is evolving, but magnet (TTH) linking has been the only major change in years. When DC++ gets its support for ADC complete, the evolution of Direct Connect is predicted to get a major boost.
What trackerless BitTorrent does is to make every client a small tracker. So it doesn't just enable searching and serverless usage, it also makes sharing illegal files easier (more than it does for legal). Previously, to share content, you had to find a tracker that allows posting .torrents. To share copyrighted content, you also had to find a tracker that didn't care about legal aspects. So sharing legal and illegal content is now equally easy, while it previously was (at least in theory) a little bit easier to share legal content.
Overall, the changes of trackerless BitTorrent would still make it the best available p2p techonology. For certain special cases, Direct Connect could be better, and both DC and ed2k support easier linking than BT, but even that can change in the future: BT could implement a meta-p2p engine, so that you could share plaintext links that make your client download the right .torrent file and add it to your queue. This would make BT superior to eMule in every aspect.