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

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.

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).