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Is BitTorrent Search Harmful?
protee writes "p2pnet published a report arguing that the robustness of BitTorrent to free-riding might have been more related to the lack of meta-data search rather than to its tit-for-tat-like strategy. The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?"
Such networks thrive because individuals can find the content they want. Searches will help improve that much as has happened with the World Wide Web. Remember, it didn't become explosively popular until the early search engines like Yahoo!, Altavista and Magellan came about.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
But they don't need the "fat pipes" to supply everyone who wants to download a given file. That's the very nature of BitTorrent! Indeed, the decentralized nature of BitTorrent allows for individuals or non-profit projects (ie. Slackware) to distribute massive files at neglible cost.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
(Note: I'm Swedish, just like the ones running and hosting Piratebay)
So what happens when pirate bay gets busted by the RIAA-imperial navy?
It's not clear whether they are breaking any Swedish laws - that's why they're so smug and play around with all the takedown notices. The only law they _might_ break would be something like "large scale contributing to copyright infringement" but even that's a stretch. There's a reason why they haven't been charged with anything yet, even though the Swedish Anti Piracy Beaureu are all over the piracy sites they know they can bring down in court.
it's in my head
The thesis of the research appears to be that, (1) if they can get away with it, some programmers will write implementations of the bittorrent protocal that are designed to "cheat" in such a way that they can have a higher ratio of downloading to uploading than they can currently get away with, and (2) it is the multiple swarms created by a lack of a central search engine that stops this.
The research is very unsatisfying to me for several reasons. First, its not even necessary to "cheat". On every bittorrent I've ever downloaded, my download has completed *way* before my ratio has reached 1:1, and it is only because I choose not to end the session that I continue seeding (or, more often than not, because I'm asleep, so the choice to continue seeding is made for me).
Second, the example they give of a strategy that beats tit-for-tat is one in which several cooperating strategies are used at the same time, with some taking on a "master" roll and some taking on a "slave" roll. This may make their point on some academic level, but as a realistic example is fails utterly. Who in their right mind would start ten different bittorrent sessions, with some acting as slaves and some acting as masters? The overall download speed would be awful from having multiple sessiosn running over the same wire. Its just stupid. At least come up with a better example of a strategy that can best tit-for-tat.
Third, I don't see evidence that people would use a bittorrent program that was designed to cheat. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't... the article assumes people would. My bet is that not enough people would use such a program that it would make a difference. Its not like this is evolution, where the successful cheaters "pass on their genes" to create more cheaters.
Overall, I think the research is a lot of academic mumbo-jumbo that may sound good on paper, but has very little, if any, connection to reality.
My own simpler thesis would be this: bittorrent works so well because a lot of the downloaders fall asleep and end up seeding longer than they otherwise might.