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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."
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.
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.
All this open source stuff is just marking for COMMUNISM
Anyway, all p2p is based on innovation. Just look at history: Kazaa, napster, eDonkey and thousands of others. Protocols tend to disappear and being replaced by better and more sophisticated ones. Or they just get extensions like eMules Kademlia.
I think we should be happy that somebody's thinking about something new instead just relaying on something that's good but not optimal. Especially now with current climate of litigations and general problems (traffic shaping, etc) with BitTorrent it's time for something more resilient and anonymous.
Just my 2p.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
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 ]
DRM? Adware? I don't see why it needs to be closed unless it's stuff people don't want.
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
Exactly. The official implementation is not the most used one. Therefore it does not matter if it changes. The open source Azureus and the others whatever-torrent will not be affected. I mean, they were already non-official extensions to the protocol, such as DHT, web seeds, ... The protocol has been out of BitTorrent Inc. hands for much time now. Few will follow them if they change it.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
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.
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.
So much for the "editors" - you do know that cutting and pasting story submissions into a database does not make one an editor, right?
Well done. And remember, newer nanotech is coming which will give us solid-state storage with terabyte capacities. Eventually it'll be petabytes. As you say, all we have to do is sneakernet the drives to each other, snowballing the number of tunes and videos on each individual drive.
Imagine the day when you could carry the Library of Congress (which probably will be copyrighted as a work itself) around in your pocket.
Also imagine two more things, sadly. "IP" corporations will make the manufacturers of such superstorage encrypt their devices and register the keys with the corporations/government, and no doubt will make the devices snitch you out by making them periodically check in with a registrar with a list of naughty things you may have; and possession of such devices, most certainly possession of unregistered/unlicensed content will bear the penalty of years in prison, or even the death penalty. George Hearst's men shot his miners who pocketed gold nuggets during the first Guilded Age. We are entering another. This time the evil men can track our movements and actions minutely. This age will be a police state beyond even my sad imagination. Actually it will be a death sentence to resist the new lords of IP: if you resist arrest, they will stun you, possibly killing you. If you try to flee the country, they may shoot you dead. If you are imprisoned and try to escape, they will shoot you and kill you. Death is the penalty for ultimately refusing to bend the knee and take it in the ass. And your friends will sadly shake their heads at your obdurate refusal to accede to the law, and Youtubers will guffaw as the taser darts stop your heart, cheering on the thugs who are shutting your fool mouth up.
Here's a little line for all of you. When people ask you why you should care if the guvmint/Comcast/shadow creatures of the corporate world/ monitors your location, communications, downloads, reading material, mail, and traveling accessories if you've done nothing wrong, ask them the simple question:
Why do you have shades on your windows if you've nothing to hide?
If the protection of our precious kids/selves/intellectual property is more important than the right to not be monitored, then build all houses out of glass and let everyone see what we do. It's the same damned thing. If you've nothing to hide, put cameras in every corner of your house and let the government record.
You all won't do it, because you know damned well you all do something illegal somewhere. Corporations break the law every minute of their existence. A lot of you smoke leaves. A lot of you sleep with people you know you shouldn't. You read things that would affect people's opinion of you. You listen to music and watch video without license of the copyright holder.
Anyway, keep the bugs off your glasses and the smokies off your asses. I'd say "Peace", but we're not ever going to get that with greedy bastards convincing us to roll our pants down on command.
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 know Bram Cohen didn't like the idea of encrypting torrent data, but this new version could quite easily dial home to the MPAA/RIAA secretly. Given his close ties with the movie industry I doubt it'll ever overtake plain old bittorrent unless its open sourced/reverse engineered.
Okay, let's assume the almost-done is not caused by malicious junk torrents, and instead just that nobody has the last part. Presumably then, it's because everybody who did have it left.
So, if there was 1% overhead that went into parity... those people would just leave 1% sooner (since they can regenerate the files they need anyway). So everybody would be stuck at 98% and still unable to use the parity. That won't be helpful.
Parity is useful in newsgroups because your servers won't randomly run away from you when they're done, it's just lossy in a random fashion. For bittorrent, you're reliant on whoever's seeding to stick around.
You can't take the sky from me...
It's been called piracy for as long as I've owned a computer, and that's goin' on 30 years... Folks should be proud of their heritage, instead of trying to edit historical use of a term like you do.
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!
Wait a minute, that link has a search string at the end! Someone call Amazon!
Could not open
parent is a freaking retard for all the reasons GP stated.
NO ONE in their right mind would knowingly run a bittorrent client that also acted as a TOR node. Haven't you heard all the stories about TOR exit node operators constantly getting harassed and arrested for child pronography and other illegal stuff? Why would it be a good thing to allow other people's illegal actions to appear to originate from your computer? This is a totally unavoidable consequence of onion routing.
You're missing the point. Keeping ISPs from eavesdropping on bittorrent is nice, but that only saves you from throttling and forged RST packets, not lawsuits.
Assuming the pirated song is in a public torrent, MediaSentry can and join the swarm and start requesting chunks of data. If their client can connect to my client and download chunks of whatever file they're "protecting" today, I'm equally hosed whether those chunks are coming from a file stored on my hard drive or forwarded from someone five layers down in the onion. End-to-end encryption doesn't help when the attacker controls an endpoint.
(The former AC, now home from work)
0 1 - just my two bits
In that case, just call it the FSM.
And instead of .torrent, files will have an .appendage extension.
Arrrr!
Ignore this signature. By order.