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New Auto-Seeding Torrent Server Released
ludwigvan968 writes "The University of
Texas New Media Initiative in association with Google's Summer of Code program have been working on a project to make sharing files over the internet easier than ever before. Summer of Code
intern Evan Wilson just released Project Snakebite, the first fully automatic BitTorrent server. Just as with a normal webserver, you drop files in a folder to share them. Snakebite takes care of generating
torrent files and running a tracker and a seeder for each file. Additionally, it builds a user-customizable link page with all of your files. It will even register your Snakebite server with an easy to remember URL for people that can't remember their IP. Snakebite is free and open software and is currently released for Debian. It's fully portable to both Windows and OS X and the developers just need some help packaging it."
Sharing files is almost a capitcal crime in the U.S.A.
With an unattended, fully automatic, open torrent server, how are you going to stop it from being filled with trash (ie. pr0n, infected files, illegal material) etc?
For those wondering where the source code is (the website isnt really your typical open source project breed), this app is written in Python. Something quite interesting the article failed to mention.
Actually i've noticed alot of OEM Compaq's here in the UK have Python runtimes preinstalled on arrival...I suspect some of their help and support software is written in it but I never bothered to invenstigate
I guess this might be good for people who want to distribute legal products through a torrent. I've used bit torrent, but only for leeching. It just doesn't seem like enough people are setting up their own torrent servers to make this software that worth while.
nothing
How long until people start seeding "Inbox.dbx" or "Outlook.pst" and other fun files we all remember from p2p days?
liqbase
Next case: Google versus the United Kingdom; Google is accused of funding the manufacture of items useful to terrorism (as the Federation Against Copyright Theft tells us, piracy funds terrorism)
Next case: RIAA versus Canonical; Canonical is accused of supplying Azureus, a piracy tool, to people
Next case: RIAA versus GNOME Foundation; the GNOME Foundation is accused of supplying a GUI library to piracy tools
WHEN DOES IT END?
I might be eligable for a tinfoil hat at this point, but I wonder how big Google's interest in piracy is. Yes, I know, BT is has legal uses, but they're sure not taking any steps to make the illegal sharing of information harder.
Piracy is a tough enemy for companies who make money off there software, and seeing how Google does not fall into this category, raising the ease of piracy-related actions might be a way to fight their opponents on a level they themselves can't be fought at...
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
And the selection is going to be about nothing until somebody makes an entirely user friendly Windows client. I'll stick to my current methods.
Despite the posts trying to paint this into the next Napster/Limewire/P2P, I think it would be great for distributing large files that might get slashdotted/dug/whatever. I think it's a good way to have a sudden rush of trafic pay for it's own bandwidth. Sure, not everyone is at risk of a slashdotting, but it makes a good precaution. Since it's just some Python, I bet there wouldn't be too much trouble getting it up in a hury as the server starts to get hit (if you're lucky enough to notice). A bonus of planning ahead is that there's always at least one seed (the server) transferring at about the same rate a normal download would have for a single user in the first place. Scalable content rather than scalable servers. Interesting...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Ok, because I'm a moron, the quoted text should read: "But is it anonymous?" and not "Sharing files..." My mistake.
The more Bittorrent adds features, the more it becomes like gnutella. Fortunately, I have been able to just use Gnutella for the last couple of years ;-)
Bittorrent is great for very large, very popular files, but when you start dealing with small or unpopular files, I've never found an example where BT got me what I needed faster. Searching Gnutella takes longer than searching for a torrent on the Web, of course, but in the end, download times on very large files that aren't well seeded is radically different, mostly because of the larger chunk size and contingous second-block fetch in Gnutella.
I will definitely use this myself. I have some large video files that I want to occasionally want to backup from one computer to another. Home movies and stuff like that. Between the problems in filesystems (what filesystem has full read/write support on Linux, Win2K, and OS X?) and size, this is the best way for me to transfer files.
Though a nice tutorial on setting up a vpn among computers with dynamic IP addresses (I don't have a static IP) would be appreciated.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
In the US, copyright is a limited monopoly over reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and the preparation of derivative works (17 USC 106). Reproduction is controlled for the same reason you claim it isn't: when it was inefficient and expensive, personal copying was virtually unthinkable.
I've been thinking about setting up my own tracker to allow my family to download home videos from me...
;-) That way I could go around to all of my families computers and set them up with the software and then just leave it alone. Every once in a while they can look in the "Home Videos" folder for new videos....
I know that sites like YouTube are popular right now... but I really don't like the quality restrictions... and would rather family members could just download a nice sized full copy themselves so they could burn it to DVD if they like or whatever.
Bittorrent would be ideal for doing this... and this software sounds like just the ticket. All I would have to do is point my family at the page it generates... and when I finish editing a home movie drop it in the "upload" folder and wham... it goes out to everyone.
All it needs now is an "auto client" that you just give it the URL of the automatically created website and it will automatically download anything new that arrives (that's a lot of "auto" going on
I think it's funny that people around here always cry "Bittorrent doesn't have to be for illegal purposes" and then any time a bittorrent story comes up all they can do is argue the finer points of what would/wouldn't be illegal/enforceable if you use the new tech... sigh.
Friedmud
I assume you'd have a complete file somewhere else on your computer. The thing is that you only have an incoherent part of the file on offer for download.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
While it's great that the authors created an apt-get repository for easy Debian installs, be warned that the packages don't work with Debian Sarge/Stable. (The packages conflict with Debian Sarge/Stable's Python packages.)
Oops! Another case of not testing your software before you release it.
At the risk of being pedantic, please note that LimeWire is NOT a network, as was Napster for instance. LimeWire is just the name of a Gnutella client, as BearShare or gtk-gnutella also are.
So the right wording would have been: "Despite the posts trying to paint this into the next Napster/Gnutella/P2P, I think....".
Raphael
A system whose efficiency increases with the traffic load that is put on it - clever idea.
So if I write and record a song, and I want to distribute it over BitTorrent to promote my album, how should I verify that the song I wrote doesn't violate the copyright in something I heard 10 years ago on the radio?
Assuming you meant "allofmp3.com" (no "my"), the most common allegations of the site's illegality depend on so-called parallel import laws (17 USC 602 and foreign counterparts) and on an interpretation of saving the file on the user's hard drive as "reproduction".
This is really cool and will be helpful for podcasters.
Mike http://thenextgenerationofradio.com
It's the whole idea bittorrent is centered around.
Of course, that, and relative anonymitiy have caused its use for piracy, but really, it's just a means of distributing large and/or popular files efficiently.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Firstly, the really large content often consists of videos, compressed files or other stand-alone files you would save and then open in another application anyway.
.torrent metafile, use it to download the content and then display it within the browser. This "extra step" of getting content via the metafile would happen beneath the surface, so it would look as if the page were loaded directly over HTTP.
However, from what I've understood of how BT works, webbrowsing might already work with an BT browser plugin. The plugin would take the URL of a
This would only be necessary for large in-line resources (Flash, images, etc). Or a website could rely on it entirely, using HTTP only to serve the torrent metafiles.
The process could be improved even further if there is already a standardized URI scheme in place for BitTorrent content - but I don't know if there is.
Yeah, you'll have to forgive me for gawking like I've never seen the internet before. I'm just unfamiliar with P2P and never bothered finding out how BitTorrent actually worked.
The days of free-flowing porn, put up by bunches of amateurs with no web design experience, and not a pay site in sight!
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
How about that :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
We sort of talked about that here.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Er, this project is slightly different to Az's ability to auto-check a dir every few minutes... this sets up a whole tracker. Which is something that Az can do, but not many people will run that on a web server.
Not sure about the US, but over here the police aren't "obliged" to go after anyone. It's entirely down to internal policy whether or not they go after anyone (some forces seem to prosecute everyone, others only go after speeders at certain times or on certain roads, or only if they exceed the limit by X MPH).
Even more so for the likes of RIAA/MPAA - since they aren't even legal bodies enforcing laws, they're wholly private entities bringing civil law suits against users. They can happily pick and choose who they want to sue. The "protection" offered is that of safety in numbers - they RIAA/MPAA can't sue everyone, so if you throw enough users into the mix the proportion who do get sued is statistically tiny. It's a bit like little fish staying in huge groups so that the sharks make less of an impact.
I thought he.net had the first fully automatic BitTorrent server
.
Only one catch, you have to trust the proxy not to make a copy of everything you do/transfer...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
...would be that with a locally hosted web page which says which files you are tracking, it will suddenly be very easy for the people that want to prosecute file sharers to link individual sharers to a specific torrent.
According to the summary, the Windows version isn't finished yet. They need help in packaging the files into a handy .exe installer.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The original bittorrent client is written in python and lots more are as well.
There is no way in hell this is off-topic. Especially since the article implies the original Bittorrent client is included with (and presumably used by) Snakebite, the torrent server we were discussing in the first place.
Taking any steps to make illegal sharing harder, would be a very dumb thing to do. (Unless they're working hard on an AI project so that you can have a lawyer inside your computer.)
You can't make illegal things harder without also making legal things harder. (Can you imaging how popular Apache would be, if the user can to jump through hoops to somehow prove to Apache that his website was legal?) Users aren't asking for their software to be made harder to use.
I see your point, but yeah, it's pretty paranoid. You could just as easily speculate that Apple used the same strategy against Microsoft. MacOS let a user copy a file (which might be pirated Microsoft software!) just by dragging an icon instead of the user having to type a "copy" command. But Microsoft couldn't do the same thing to Apple, because their "copy" command could not copy a Macintosh computer.
Technology makes things easier. Some things that people do are bad things. Ergo, technology makes doing bad things easier. If you ignore all the positive uses of technology, you can always make people who work in technology, look like Bad Guys. Name any technology (not just Google) and I can come up with a paranoid twisted scenario for how the inventor obviously invented it in order to screw somebody over. (e.g. A disease vaccine was invented because someone in the KKK had that disease. Data sorting algorithms are developed so that in the event of a Nazi takeover, Jews can be more easily located. Interstellar drive invented so that tribbles can be transported to shredding machines.)
The problem is that there is no evidence that actually suggests Google has done what you are speculating. The fact that it can be perversely viewed as compatible with nefarious use doesn't matter, if there isn't any evidence to back it up. If, for example, Google starts modifying their software such that it is specifically tuned for sharing copies of MS Office (and the modification does not otherwise improve the performance of the sharing software) then you might have something. But it's hard to imagine such a scenario, unless it's something silly, such as the filename for a new project defaulting to "OFFICE.EXE". ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I would eventually like to see something similar to All Seeing Eye incorporated into a BT client. Files with the same exact name and/or cross-indexed with a hash check would be grouped as one entity across many trackers. I think this would be cool.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
I wrote something like that a year ago: here. Took about week in the evenings. Why all the fuzz?
Very interesting idea. I was wondering if it might be possible to write something like this as an apache module and if it is possible, has it already been done?
.torrent in the same (or another) directory that will then get seeded?
Something like a directive in the Apache configuration file, where you define everything uploaded into a certain directory to automaticly create a
I'm seriously very interested in any thoughts on this, since I might look into trying to code something like that...
Thanks!
Oh ok, thanks. I guess the combination of .exe for Windows." without a link
a- summary not explicitly stating it wasn't finished (only that it is "fully portable" & "developers need help packaging it" (like everyone is supposed to know what that means)) &
b- this page stating that "Snakebite [...] works on [...] Windows" and "Here is where you download the
left me somewhat naively hopeful and confused. (The ACTLab TV bastards getting my hopes up...)
Thanks again.
Support the FairTax
Piracy is irrelevant for the majority of companies that make money from software. (Most software written is single use, business logic type custom apps).
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!! Although you definitely correct on a dollar basis, most of these custom apps are written by a relatively small number of consulting companies (esp. compared to the number of shareware/freeware authors). Thus, I think that although piracy is irrelevant for the majority of software packages, those packages are created by a minority of software companies.
Thus making your statement incorrect.
Was my lexical pick apart of your statement any more helpful to the actual point than yours of the GP?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Sure, it's only anonymous until the police come, and if they're ordered to provide information under Swedish law they'll rat you out to the extent that they're required to. But if you're not Swedish, you're not likely to be causing enough of an international incident to get the Swedish police after you. (Doesn't mean that the RIAA won't try, and it's possible that they'll occasionally succeed. ) And the NSA may be able to eavesdrop on their internet connections, they can't force Relakks to give them any other information without going through formal channels.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks