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Researchers Create Selfish BitTorrent Client

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the surprised-it-took-this-long dept.

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."

2 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Even better...downloading without ever uploading by meese · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some folks at ETH Zurich took it one step further, and wrote a client - BitThief - that doesn't upload and yet still can download as fast as a regular client. This is especially valuable in countries that define copyright violation to be the uploading of content.

  2. Emule / Edonkey has this by Deathlizard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Emule has a system like this, and it basically slows everything down in the name of fair sharing. It takes absolutely forever to start downloads, since you're stuck in a vicious "chicken and egg" circle of "I can't upload anything to download" and "I can't download anything to upload".

    As it stands, Bittorrent is how the Edonkey protocol used to be before ratio systems were added to the clients; Fast. After Edonkey started adding anti-leech systems to the clients, the speed went into the toilet, and the queues started skyrocketing.

    I suspect that if this catches on, you can kiss 300kb's downloads goodbye.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!