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The Uncertain Future of BitTorrent

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the standards-are-hard dept.

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."

4 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. What the Story Submission Should Have Said by VengefulCynic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  2. Re:Shooting themself in the foot by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 4, Informative

    except cohen bought utorrent and adopted it as the official client. a lot of windows users use utorrent, so that argument doesnt really stand.

    --
    (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
  3. Re:Oh well, by deathy_epl+ccs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hell, I think modern piracy would've taken longer to come to their attention if the dumbshits at Napster hadn't tried to make a business model out of it.

  4. Re:Oh well, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The official client is now based on utorrent, which is written in C++, not Python.