Slashdot Mirror
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*
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.
(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
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