Researchers Create Selfish BitTorrent Client

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the computer science department at the University of Washington have released BitTyrant, a new BitTorrent client that is designed to improve download performance via strategic selection of peers and upload rates. Their results call into question the effectiveness of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat reciprocation strategy which was designed to discourage selfish users. Clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux."

Comments

Re:Well, uhm. Ban the client?

[lisaparratt]

If you bothered to RTFA, you'd realise selfish!=bad.

Re:Well, uhm. Ban the client?

[jdray]

I didn't even have to RTFA to figure that out (yay me, right?). AFAIK, most people who could (would) dediate a serious amount of bandwidth to downloading content quickly would be likely to dedicate a serious slice to uploading, therefore enriching the available bandwith for everyone.

Not so selfish.

[ckdake]

RTFA. They didn't create a client that is "selfish" by trying to avoid uploading. They created a client that is selfish by first allocating more upload capacity to other clients that will send them more when they upload more, and only allocate the remaining upload capacity to clients where benefits from increased uploading are not certain. If you read their paper, they regularly bring up the effects of this on the entire network and they don't know if it's good, bad, or has any effect on the network (and not for a lack of trying)

Re:Trivial result

[simm1701]

Did you actually read the paper?

They are looking at improving download time for that user and the overall swarm by the use of their algorithm.

The idea being that you share all the upload space you have - but you do it in such a way as to maximise what you can download in the same amount of time.

This in turn means that when you have finished downloading the file the number of copies within the swarm will have increased - also those that shared with you more will have been able to download quicker themselves.

A client like this will penalise selfish or greedy uploaders far more than the normal client as it rewards those that give back.

Give a leach a block and he will have downloaded that block, teach a leach to seed and he shall have blocks for the rest of his life.

Re:The trackers will not abide.

[simm1701]

Actually this client would likely be favoured by the private tracker sites.

The private tracker already gives you plenty of incentive to make sure your ratio is >1 - even asside from basic morals.

The design of this client means those with higher speed uploads available will complete sooner, and thus you will end up with more high speed seeders.

Seeders who since they are members of private trackers are probably going to stick around until ratio >1

True I admit on piblic trackers something like this may not be as helpful or beneficial, but you can't have everything.

Nothing to worry about here...

[evilviper]

The anti-leech technology of the bittorrent protocol remains effective. Those ranting about this just haven't bothered to read... This client (despite the unfortunate name) is just smarter about how to use upload bandwidth, in an async world.

In fact, I would say this is an IMPROVEMENT in some ways over bittorrent's default behavior, as it will dedicate more of your outgoing bandwidth to higher-speed peers. They, presumably, can then serve up more data to others than a low-speed peer reasonably could.

Instead of being the end of bittorrent, this could really improve the health of the P2P network, increasing speeds and decreasing download times for everyone (not only those using this program).

Re:Nothing to worry about here...

[evilviper]

It seems like this is just a scheme to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

That's far too simple a way to look at it. The analogy just doesn't hold up.

It's giving less of an advantage to those with slow upload speeds (leeches), and high download speeds, but those with low speeds stand to benefit nearly as much as those with high-speed connections. It will take less time to have more full copies of a torrent shared, on higher speed hosts, with lots of bandwidth to spare.

The only senario in which the low-speed clients lose out, is at the very beginning, when only one peer has a full copy, and the high-speeds are actively sharing among each other and competing for access. After that inital rush, the low speed connections should have full-speed access, and more peers with full copies to chose from. The only way that wouldn't work is if ALL the high speed connections disconnect instantly afterwards.

It really should make bittorrent better all-around. The potential for abuse is only marginally higher. And the low-speed (leeches) only lose a little bit in certain senarios, but stand to gain even more in the end, bring them past the break-even point as well.

Re:leechers

[PingSpike]

And when there's 12 seeders and no one besides you downloading...then what? Its rare, but that does happen.

Re:Just great

[Rogerborg]

And now what? You didn't do something really, really foolish, like believing the Slashdot headline before RTFAing, did you? Silly hobbit.