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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.
That Braham Cohen is so dumb, he probably never considered anything like this when he put together his own official bit torrent search engine. What does he know, sitting there coding in his mommy's basement when all the real geniuses are on Slashdot and p2pnet!
I mean, c'mon... *eyeroll*
...when they can't be traced. Up the encryption and IPsec and you'll find that people will start to share.
The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?
The answer: not at all. There isn't a BitTorrent network, just an application that has caused many thousands of disjoint, single purpose networks to come into existance.
And that disjointness will help protect them, I feel.
If the number free loaders gets too great, nobody will be able to get fast downloads off of BT due to lack of seeds (or whatever they're called). Once that happens, popularity amongst freeloaders declines, service returns to normal. A file sharing system without anybody seeding any files is a waste of time.
The main strength of BitTorrent is that it works on individual files. It is not a network, rather a protocol like ftp or http. Ftp sites that offer copyrighted content can be taken down, but the ftp protocol is alive and well.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
The thesis is basically that by causing your client to change identity frequently, you can take advantage of the leniency that BT allows newcomers to the network, and thus "leech" without punishment. This isn't done because you'll get kicked out of the communities that publish BT metadata if you do it.
I don't see it. If you're going to leech, that's the way to do it, but cooperating overall results in even better upload rates; you're not fighting for the few slots afforded newcomers, you will be given as many packets as you can eat as fast as you can eat them so long as you reciprocate. And I'm sure those communities will survive - I suspect that Bram will have thought of how to integrate search with community.
Xenu loves you!
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.
Seeing as how the **IA and its international counterparts have been successful in shutting down the tracker sites and this will help them locate these sites, don't you think the impact will be a move to only legal files being indexed for the search. This could actually lead to a vindication of p2p as a useful piece of software and a decline in the number of sites specializing in illegal copyrighted downloads.
It could be compared to bootlegs being move from inside the music/video/etc. store to the street merchants that have to pick up and move everytime the cop walks near them.
I've never seen a P2P network without leechers. Even those which include an economics system like edonkey still have their share. I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about bittorrent. Now it's pretty much an ordinary P2P net leechers will appear. The economics will help limit their impact though.
I am trolling
(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
More leachers != merrier
More peers = merrier
I think the main problem with some bt clients is that they flood your upload bandwidth... thus killing your DL speed.
A client that intelligently detects/limits/manages ULs is probably the best thing that can happen to bittorrent
As long as uploading is a transparent process that doesn't interfere with n00bs general internet usage, they won't bother to become leechers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Bittorrent Search could be slower than normal bittorrent usage, if these techniques are used (though I personally find that my download speeds are abysmally slow until I have enough segments to upload too, this "new user window" the report talks about could be a figment of the author's imagination) .torrents for from a website that's trying to provide files for people.
But this will not effect Bittorrent Itself. Bittorrent remains useful for legitimate downloads- of the type that people will be downloading the
Bittorrent may not become more useful because of searching, but it wont become less useful.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yes, but the real question is what causes that lack of "altruism" in the first place. My assumption (which could be wrong) is fear of retribution by some media conglomerate. Those with transfer caps would also be candidates for leechhood too, I suppose. However, when nearly untraceable P2P technology becomes the rule, when the Fear of God(tm) and/or somebody's lawyers is no longer a significant issue, I would expect altruism levels to shoot up. Remember the original Napster: everybody pretty much shared their entire collections. It wasn't until the RIAA started slinging lawsuits around that people even thought about anonymity (I think most people assumed they were anonymous.) Well, now they are thinking about it, but so are a whole lot of developers. From the RIAA perspective, I think this is going to backfire bigtime. I mean, they had to know this was going to happen.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.