Slashdot Mirror
The Uncertain Future of BitTorrent
javipas writes "The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker are working on a new version of the BitTorrent protocol that could become the successor to the current one, maintained by BitTorrent Inc. The company founded by Bram Cohen — original author of this protocol — now has decided to close the source for several new features in the BitTorrent protocol, and this "gives them too much power and influence". The new file format would be called .p2p, and would maintain backwards compatibility with current .torrent files."
is they?
Let them close it. As long as the open source community doesn't use it to distribute isos, I'm happy.
You can give OSS to the people, but you can't take it back!!
Perhaps that's one of the biggest reasons people should think long and hard about attempting leverage open source to gain popularity and a user base. There's that possibility of the user base forking your work and taking it over if they don't like the direction you're going... and that's exactly what I predict will happen with BitTorrent. And while they're at it, they'll probably go ahead and build into it some anonymity protection.
Cue the grammarians in 3... 2... 1...
And because of those closed features, the new tracking system will probably not be as popular because no one likes to use the original bittorrent client. That is until they reverse engineer it. Anyone who torrents anything (legal or otherwise) will notice there are like no original bt clients showing up. Why is that? Could it be it sucks? Unless these new features are like gold, no one will care and will continue to use the old one.
Just keep using the existing protocol. You might miss out on the latest K-Fed release if all the kiddies are using the new format, but then again that could be a plus.
All this open source stuff is just marking for COMMUNISM
Are these new "features" that need the source to be closed RIAA or NSA oriented ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
The PirateBay team is currently developing on a new torrent protocol that they hope will be the next-generation successor to the current BitTorrent file. They say that they're concerned about continuing to use the current standard since BitTorrent has closed the source and hope to be able to create an open-source successor that maintains backward-compatibility with the current .torrent standard. The new standard, currently named .p2p is still in the development phase, but the initial release is planned for sometime early next year. Among the planned new features are responses to the increasing number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations who currently abuse the BitTorrent protocol.
Seriously, would it have been that hard to have waited for a submission that was informative and grammatically correct?
and has p2p right in the extension? I'm betting many people are just going to stick with the original... This seems like his Vista...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
There are some very interesting technologies that can be applied to a new .p2p format while remaining backward-compatible with .torrent files. Such as auto-regeneration of almost-complete torrents via in-file redundancy (small size increase, massive benefit), the possibility of onion routing and obfuscation, new uploading algorithms, that sort of thing.
.torrent specifications -- the old, open one and the new, partially-closed one -- why not go whole hog and fork the thing all to hell? An application should be able to easily handle both.
And honestly, if Bittorrent closes some of the protocol, the features either going to be ignored or reverse engineered. In which case there's already 2 different
[ think ]
That someone can figure out a way to stop Comcast from injecting fake packets so my pr0n & warez downloads finish faster.
-
FataL
DRM? Adware? I don't see why it needs to be closed unless it's stuff people don't want.
I am aware of the gramatical errors in my above post. I was jsut so excited to almost get first post. Oh well though. But seriously, I hope this does not affect how we use .torrent's. I just switched from Azureus to utorrent because AZ was getting a little too "Kazaa-like" for me to enjoy. Why can't people just leave the shit that works alone.
Trying to add this feature or change how this one works. It fucking works fine. I just want a simple easy to use "open source" torrent client. Anything better than utorrent out there guys? Any help would be appreciated
Another reason for a new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.
Given this, is it really wise to make a public protocol design page?
After MPAA got Bram Cohen and the UTorrent guy on their pockets, it was a matter of time until they tried to pull such stunts. My bet is that they will try to close a "hole" in the protocol, the impossibility to create a truly private swarm, one where only authorized peers could connect, regardless of the desire of the peers themselves to share the information about the other peers (DHT style). That's the wet dream of people selling content, they could sell access to their content using the bittorrent protocol and nobody would be able to join the swarm without paying.
But there is nothing there people should be afraid., as everybody knows, real innovation on the P2P scene occurs when the interested parts (the filesharers, not necessarily illegal ones) are the real force behind the development, as PEX (protocol encryption) came to prove, now that the cat is out of the sack, there is not a lot of things that Mr. Cohen can do.
BitTorrent might be going to the NIGGERS.
It's the same thing that happened to large cities since back in the old days you could actually walk through them without fear that some nigger thug-wannabe was going to threaten you. The cities have gone to the niggers and now BitTorrent will too. A sad sad world. What the fuck can you say for a group when their highest goal in life is to be a goddamn thug?
nigger nigger nigger
Means harder for RIAA to track you... ;)
If a person wants to illegally share music, they could (hypothetically) get a pair of 300GB USB drives. Put all their music on them. Go to the library, check-out more music. Put that on their drives. Go to their friends houses and trade. A couple of trades with friends who are actively trading will:
1. quickly net them more music than they can listen to in an entire lifetime.
2. make sure they have off-site backup of their music in case their house is burned down by RIAA goons.
And, if you don't put it on-line, none of it is traceable by RIAA. And Comcast can't stop it.
Who did this submission ?
It's totally brain-dead, they removed "The Pirate Bay" from the source they duplicated, but forgot to the remove/alter the references to it....
"The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker"
Which one ? => TPB
So? It's going the same path of Overnet and so many others. Closed source = failure. Let them die alone.
And they speak as if they were the only ones who could develop new features. Don't forget about the distributed network for BitTorrent and all the good things clients and servers have implemented to improve existing protocols, BitTorrent and others.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
I download everything in eights of a byte. Some argue you can't get much smaller.
...on a more serious note, does streaming allow you to stop a download and resume two days later? I had always been under the impression that if you don't get the whole thing, you're screwed.
By keeping the source closed, he is in fact assuming all responsibility for the actions of his code. If his code allows something bad to happen, we can say with certainty that it's all his fault.
With Comcast leading the charge of ISPs determined to completely destroy the usability of the protocol, will a new version make any difference? Is it not already too late?
First of all, I RTFA. Nowhere on the page does it say that anything is closed.
The file format is just a list of files:
Now, onto the beginning war:
A. Bittorrent is the typical protocol now
B. They are now trying to enhance it
C. Pirate bay is now coming up with a different protocol D. Pirate bay says the other parties protocol gives the other party "too much power".
How many times have we seen this before? They are going to start sniping at each other because each believes their protocol is better, and thinks the other will have too much power by having the standard protocol. So we get into a war that attempts to divide the community, with fanboys on either side joining in. For previous "Art" see betamax vs vhs, blueray vs hddvd, compiz vs beryl, and even gnome vs kde.
While I am all for competition to make way for the better product, I think it would be best if the two sides would work together instead of trying to fight it out, to the probable benefit of no one.
Long live the Ryan Fenton protocol!
Oh I dunno, if you want to watch it whenever, independent of your connection's status. Or, well, if you're downloading an application. :)
When you want random-access to a file, streaming doesn't work. That's why BitTorrent is so good. Also, it means you can publish your own content and not have to send it to everyone, just some folks. Once it's out there, if it's popular, other folks can download it from others, saving you thousands in bandwidth costs. FLV is just a video codec - it's being served over HTTP, which is ages-old and not particularly suited for mass-dissemination of data in a bandwidth-effective way, anyway. FLV might be good for low-quality videos, but it sure ain't good for gigs of ISOs, DVD-quality movies, albums, libraries of pictures, etc. It's all about using the right tool for the job, and FLV is great at streaming low-quality videos to users at great expense to the server.
Streaming is only useful for the "hey check this out" content type.
Most ISPs are starting to put monthly bandwidth limits on their users. You don't want to keep streaming the same thing over and over again every time you want to read/listen/view it.
You also can't access streaming content without internet access, such as on most portable devices (iPods, etc). Even if a few portable devices can access internet, it can still be trouble getting a connection (people are getting smarter and locking down their wi-fi routers), and it drains the batteries.
Downloading+storing is still better than streaming for most content.
You know that you can download more things than just video with BitTorrent, right?
Also, have fun streaming video encoded at a 1080p resolution over a typical residential DSL connection.
nob head, go back to digg!
Hmmm.
I dont want to be paranoid, but...
RIAA/MPAA/**AA are trying to legislate against P2P
They have several key bitTorrent devs in their pockets
They are promoting a new *better* protocol
How long before this is a negotiating tools to the powers that that control the legislation - on the lines of "yes, P2P has legitimate uses, but the new protocol will safeguard those interests whilst protecting copyright" or something on those lines. In other words this could be an initial step towards the long term goal of a legal P2P system that is easy to police/control content. These people plan a long way ahead, I would not be surprised if something like this is brewing...
Mind you I like the concept of packet obfuscation to thwart ISP throttling mentioned in TFA.
Come on guys, is .p2p the best you could come up with? It should have a name indicative of its BitTorrent roots without infringing on Bram's precious trademark. Call the file .swarm or the protocol BitSwarm or BitStorm. That ought to irk Bram a bit. Bram had a great idea and a great start. We should be thankful for that, but he is not the kind of charismatic guy that can lead a community of users and developers. So take his great idea, form a community, and let him join if he has another good idea to contribute.
If his code allows something bad to happen, we can say with certainty that it's all his fault.
Manufacturers do not assume liability if their product is used to perform illegal activities. How long would Heckler and Koch, Gerber, and Ronson remain in business if they were held liable for every knife fight, gun duel, and arson?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wonder if an upgrade of the bittorrent protocol was needed (except in order to disrupt other clients' compatibility) : it seemed to me that the actual protocol doesn't works so bad? does it?
AFAIK, there's no security issue, neither performance... Indeed something about privacy could be good, but I wonder if it's possible... So why this need of changing the protocol?
what ever happened to Freenet? I know it had totally different objectives than BitTorrent, but it was interesting nontheless.
I am so sick of getting stuck at 99% with 0 seeders and 99 leechers on all my illegal downloads.
:D
So.. make 10% parity and then bitorrent can be even more resource intensive.. doesn't matter because we all have dual and quad cores now. So, just stick bitorrent on another core. Then, give bitorrent its own hard drive and you barely notice it running on your computer.
^^ That's my feature request.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Hey Pirate Bay folks, here's my list of feature requests for the new version of your open source torrent protocol:
ONION ROUTING:
1) Implement Onion routing (aka: Tor / anonymize the sources) as a built in feature.
2) Onion Routing should, where possible, try to use exit points and middle points that have roughly the same amount of bandwidth as you, otherwise torrenting will not become a reality through Onion Routing. So some kind of peer bandwidth algorythm needs to be incorporated.
3) Onion routing should be on by default, and each user should also become an exit point and donate 30% of their bandwidth to this. This will greatly increase the number of exit routers & provide this as a defacto alternative, as opposed to just some obscure security feature for the 31337 (hackers & government homeland types).
4) Individual site upload ratios, should take into consideration that fact that you are an exit point and some portion of that 30% should be counted toward your uploaded bytes ratio (even if traffic is going to other sites)... in other words, help promote torrent security = get bonus points from private trackers.
SIMPLIFY ISP SHAPING BYPASS
Background: Forcing protocol encryption isn't enough these days; some ISPs are shaping or even blocking torrent traffic by methods such as sending TCP RST packets to close a session, or their infrastructure auto-analyzes your encrypted traffic patters and if they are high bandwidth, very encrypted and on for long amounts of time to the same destination you get flagged & shapped (regardless of the fact that you could indeed be doing something legal)
1) There's a page on Wikipedia that lists all the "BAD ISPs" (http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs). This is a list of ISPs internationally that in one way or another shape your bitorrent traffic (Comcast anyone?). We need to be one step ahead of these ISPs and render their multi-million dollars worth of shaping infrastructure useless - sooner rather than later - sooner so that they can't make up for the ROI on all that gear they purchased. If the ROI fails, the next time engineering dept approach CEO for X dozens of millions more, they will get declined and we (torrent community) will win.
2) This site breaks down "throttling" into 5 different categories or ways in which the ISP can throttle you... each listing the bypass method.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping#Escalation_of_the_crypto_settings
Note that level 5 (the most aggressive shaping method known so far) is only bypassable by a single client today (Azeurus), utorrent to my understanding can not bypass this.
Anyway my point with these above 2 items is that these facts need to be considered:
1. The number of ISPs throttling internationally is already large and growing larger
2. Your new torrent client needs to simplify bypassing these various levels of encryption so that it can be adopted by the masses. If it is not adopted by the masses (rendering ISP throttling useless), the ISPs will have won.
I don't have time to type more, so please research what other clients out there (beyond just torrent) are doing and borrow ideas from them.
Here's a brief list of intelligent encryption/anonymous software out there to investigate:
RODI: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1252232
MUTE: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
ANTS: http://antsp2p.sourceforge.net/
GNUnet: http://gnunet.org/
I2P: http://www.i2p.net/
FreeNet: http://freenetproject.org/
TOR: http://tor.eff.org/
THanks and good luck!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Remember when the author of SSH attempted to change the license a non-open one?
Possibly not. OpenSSH forked, and no-one uses the ssh.com version.
That is the nature of open source.
I have no idea exactly what Bram intends to do, but there are so many pro-business uses for Bittorrent that I'm amazed nobody's really done it in a major way. It would be nice to see a really good real-time audio/video streaming implementation. Alternately, it would also be nice to see some plugins for apache and/or FTP servers that allowed people to download in mass quantities and share the bandwidth with everyone in a more normal way. In other words, there's no reason I should have to have my desktop on to share/seed a torrent file.
Another poster has opined that Freenet is dead, with just a few users and almost no content. That mirrors my experience. Yet you seem knowledgeable and still include a link to it. Do you know something I don't? I'm serious about this; I'd really love Freenet to work. AFAIK, though, it just doesn't in any meaningful way.
If your experience is different, please take a moment to elaborate.
If *anyone* has any current, positive experience with Freenet, please jump in. I figure *somebody* is probably still using the thing. I'm just wondering who, why, and if they're actually getting anything done.
Which similarly never killed anyone, although some of the more famous stations DID broadcast from ships in international waters...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
If you look around at bittorrent trackers you'll see maybe 50000 people that have downloaded a TV episode, now go look at Blizzard on patch day, you'll see over 100 times that many by the time everyone has their patch.
They have 9 million subscribers, all those subscribers by default use bittorrent for their patches.
Blizzard isn't the only company that is doing this either.
"dot-pee-too-pee" sucks. They clearly can't use that. I hearby open the floor for suggetions. To start I'll throw out:
BitSwarm
next . . .
This could be great or horrible. If he bows to pressure and doesn't license it to any one using it for "illegal purposes" it could really hurt file sharing. If he lets those use it who want to it could be a wonderful thing especially if it includes something that doesn't link back to the ones doing the sharing as much. Last think I need is the MAFIAA kicking in my door.
WTF?
Some people at ToorCon presented an anonymity extension to the Bit Torrent protocol, BitBlender
I have a feeling that most people will just use the older 'open' protocol and not bother with "yet another closed protocol". This is 2007, things are different today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What is DIGG? I have neve used it. I will never say first post again if this is something that offended you. I was jsut excited to put my 2 cents in. Many apologies...
They should call it... .arr
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Do you know something I don't?
;-)
Aw, poor Alice! She's so clueless and disappointed because she hasn't found Wonderland... yet
Yes, Alice, I do know something you don't. Freenet is for posting stuff, but there are OTHER similar (anonymous) networks around... some haven't made it to the public, and some are still in beta (but already working imho). They implement onion routing, and are very secure. Some are used for file transfer, others for general purpose (to host websites, forums, etc). Yes, they work.
Just search for the rabbit hole (hint: Steganographed text inside), Alice. Just keep it secret until the time comes.
Won't attack X break Freenet's anonymity?
Short answer: Probably yes.
Long answer:
Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet.
On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).
The problem is that the only way that you can offer true anonymity is if the client can directly control the routing of data, and thus encrypt it with a series of keys of the nodes it will pass through (a la Mixmaster). Freenet's dynamic routing cannot offer that, so to attain true anonymity you have to send the message through an external network of anonymous remailers first (a future SMTP->Freenet bridge would make this possible). There are also plans for doing mixmaster-style injection of requests over the "standard" protocol, however this probably won't be implemented before version 1.0, which is still some way off.
Quack, quack.
I imagine Koch would end up in a pickle if they stayed on with every buyer, beyond the point of sale, and failed to report crimes too.
Quack, quack.
but am I the only one that read the article and asked why there is such a huge focus on avoiding litigation?
Disclaimer: I use bit torrent to download files regularly, which may or may not be copyrighted. Take what I say here with a grain of salt. Also, this is not meant to be a trolling post.
From the article:
Before I get to my real point, I want to call bullshit on this. People don't upload out of a fear of litigation (at least that is not their entire motive), they don't upload because they're a bunch of leaches who don't want to share their own bandwidth. Anyway, on my real purpose here.Seriously, come on. I think it's great that there is an interest in improving the BT protocol, but I think the motive for it needs to be examined. Any improvements that might be implemented should be in the spirit of making it easier share content within the legal framework. The focus should not be to avoid litigation, or to bypass network traffic shaping, or anything else along those lines, it should be solely to improve the ability of users to share legitimate content. Politics should have no role in the development of the protocol whatsoever.
The fact that litigation and network traffic shaping has been taken into consideration indicates that there is something wrong with the current copyright system, and that is really what should be addressed here. By taking the BT protocol and adding these kind of features the p2p community is putting itself in direct conflict with the 'AAs. This is only going to add more fuel to the fire, and it will give the 'AAs more ammunition. They will be able to point to the specs for the new protocol and say it was designed with the intent of illegally distributing copyrighted material, and they will be right.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
22C3: Lecture on Freenet's new algorithm
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2894489251637986433&q=google+video+freenet&total=112&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2
Interesting approach for the next version: you only ever connect to your friends. All traffic is through the 5 or 10 people who you have said that you trust, so no RIAA snooping IP addresses.
They talk about it in the context of China and other Governments, but they never addressed the big issue: if the NSA has AT&T in it's pocket then they also know your friends.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
You can't take the sky from me...
Brilliant! Now, in addition to the (miniscule) legal risk I take on by downloading Linux ISOs and British TV, I can dedicate 30% of my bandwidth to exposing myself to liability for someone else's downloading of new movies and top 40 albums! This is the best idea since private trackers. "Hey, let's set up a site that tracks what illegal stuff all our users upload." "Great idea, OiNK dude!"
(posted AC because it seems appropriate)
heh... yeah, 'cause everyone knows that a term can only have one use.
If you use it to mean someone taking over someone else's ware, then you use software piracy the right way.If you use it to make file sharing sound badder than it is, then you're just repeating the *AA's FUD, and that makes you a tool, not a cool badass pirate.
The sex.com saga, that was piracy. Napster, not so much.
You can't take the sky from me...
A better example would be Lik-Sang, as a "provider of copyright infringement technology". And even that is diluted, as bittorent is a protocol with many clients now. The protocol itself does not infringe on the copyrights of the media, though it is conceivable someone could dig up a patent out there. (Boo! Hiss!)
P2P is becoming one of those words like "green" "liberal" "marijuana" etc. It's "loaded" with extra meaning. Some people immediately associate P2P with illegal activity. Can't they at least take away that bit of the inevitable PR campaign against the new "P2P" protocol?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Screw it! I say we write our own BitTorrent protocol. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the protocol!
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
For, you see, some of the things you make mention of sound vaguely like the dystopian future mentioned in the Cyberpunk and Shadowrun RPGs as well as many novels of the cyberpunk genre - Gibson in particular. The one thing that went on in those worlds, and I truly fear might be coming for ours, is that the masses did not all sit idly by and let the MegaCorporations rule them - they fought back against the oppressors. In multiple ways, not just with arms. If the RIAA and MPAA and other "organizations" that are merely corporate shills keep pushing the 'cyberpunks' of this world to the edges of existence, I feel it is only a matter of time before they do exactly what Shakespeare mentions above and use that fourth box (Ammo) in favor of using the Soap, Ballot, or Jury boxes.
Many of you may think I'm losing my faculties suggesting such a radical change in the sea of apathy that is out there in the United States (and a lot of other democratic style nations - UK, Australia, Canada, and many more) and I truly hope I'm just being paranoid, but something is going to snap and soon. The battle between the gatekeepers and the freedom lovers is coming soon. I pray it can be worked out without resorting to that Ammo box, but I fear greatly that it will come to it. Sooner than any of us believe.
Who knows, maybe enough people in the United States will vote this election cycle and we'll get some common sense into positions of power? But I ain't holding my breath... :-p
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
You can't take the sky from me...
Well how'd'you get to be king, then?
You can't take the sky from me...
I guess it's better'n pullin' some sword out of a lake.
and seems to feel he is loosing money by having the previous version open. The fact that it wouldn't have been used by anyone has been forgotten under the illusion of 'could haves'
Not the first person to follow this path, but if he is successful, he would be the first.
Personally, I hate bit torrent and think it is used well outside it's usability sphere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He feels that he can license this new, magic and all powerful* protocol to companies like Blizzard.
*Not valid in any state, your mileage will vary.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
New word for the week describes you, asstroll.
Where on earth do you get that idea? I, for one, have been hesitant to upload due to being randomly targeted with one of those MAFIAA lawsuits. That's the only thing stopping me. Sometimes if a torrent swarm is doing well and doesn't need more seeders, I turn off my seeding before I've hit my target share ratio (usually 2.0). I turn it on later if I notice that the swarm needs more seeders.
Sometimes a swarm needs seeders for a long time, so I cycle through a disconnect-reconnect so I'll be placed on a different IP address.
Why would I be miserly with my bandwidth? It doesn't cost me anything. Upload bandwidth is generally unused. I can still use my computer even when it's torrenting in the background, and I leave my computer on all the time anyway. The downloaded files don't take up more room on my computer --I mean, I have to have the file *somewhere*, so I just leave it in the torrent directory. (This is for unencrypted files, the correct way to share --I don't know why some yahoos decide to RAR-archive their files before posting to torrent. It just make people want to delete the shareable archived files so they have room to decompress the original files. And besides, isn't the point of BitTorrent that we're not afraid of big files any more?)
I have no doubt that fear of litigation plays a significant role on this, and probably technical problems such as Bad ISP's and unfamiliarity with firewall settings play a part, too. But I think you'd be wrong to label everyone as just being ungrateful leeches.
They started a system that was incredibly slow but some very motivated people used it because it was supposedly more secure. The problem is those very motivated people were mostly pedophiles. Of course there were a tiny fraction of people interested in using it for posting out of oppressive situations but I don't think that was really very popular because there are other ways that reach a larger audience. So there never were really that many people using Freenet in the first place which made it even slower.
Then the nitwit developers had this "great" idea to convert it to a darknet. This is where you only connect into the network via trusted nodes and nodes only allow people they trust to connect. A totally broken architecture for a public system. So that basically killed Freenet. The old system is no longer supported and the new system sucks donkey balls.
And on top of all this, the Freenet client was written in suck-ass Java. It would eat memory like nothing else and after running for a few days people complain of it dragging the whole system down. Java is just too resource intensive (both CPU and memory) for this type of work. Why do you think uTorrent (C++) is way more popular than the official BitTorrent client (Python)?
I'm still waiting for a protocol that distribites par chunks. Doing so would mean all you would need to gather to get a file is some real portion and enough par chunks to equal the total size of the file. The interchangeable nature of the par chunks would greatly increase the chances of one completing a file, even if the original source goes away.
This is just vapour-ware. The announcement may as well have been "I don't like the new President, so we're going to build a ship and fly to the moon"
Sure you are. But I'll believe it when I see it.
Designing and implementing a new protocol clearly requires lots of effort and details to actually be realised. If and when that's done, then you've got something to announce and something to assess as whether it's better or not than existing protocola.
But anyone and his brother can claim they are inventing one [and list some magic features it'll have to solve supposed current problems and issues]
In truth this seems far more like a way of making a political / PR statement in response to Bram Cohen taking BT closed-source.
The thing is, it doesn't matter. If the new system isn't as good for downloading stuff, noone is going to use it. BitTorrent isn't suddenly going to cease to exist or stop working - that's the beauty of open source; the genie is out of the bottle and we can now enjoy BitTorrent for the rest of eternity.
More power to Bram and the rest of BitTorrent Inc - they can make some new thing, sell it to the movie/record industry for jillions of dollars, and the rest of us can continue our lives as they were before content in the knowledge that it's not going to affect us at all.
Seems I wasn't wrong after all. Cambridge points out that people is the plural of person, so you must use the plural form of the cerb: "People live much longer than they used to". There's another example here with the sentence "People like to be made to feel important.", and AskOxford also confirms that. So I have better english skills than I thought :)
Wasn't this posted already? Or have I been fooled?
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide