Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
Exactly right. As opposed to maintaining a tracker on a server, and then separately seeding the files, this solves the problem for you, assuming you have sufficient bandwidth and disk space. This essentially combines the best of direct downloading and distributed downloading; ensuring content is always available, while minimizing the bandwidth used to distribute the content.
The person who owns the original media is the one whose generating the copy. The downloader is receiving it. An analagous situation: a guy is selling ripped-off copies of DVDs from a market store. Someone buys a copy. It's the seller (the distributor, the one who reproduced it) that gets busted, not the buyer.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Who are you? Me?
Piracy is a tough enemy for companies who make money off there software,
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt! Incorrect. Piracy is irrelevant for the majority of companies that make money from software. (Most software written is single use, business logic type custom apps).
and seeing how Google does not fall into this category,
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzt! Incorrect again. Google makes a hell of a lot of money off their software - just not by selling it.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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