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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."
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.
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.
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.
You're forgetting about Azureus which is both open source and cross platform. I'd imagine that combined, Azureus and muTorrent take up most of the share of which client people use, but there are still plenty of others out there.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
"and that's a bad thing why, exactly? "
Because if I am going to pay a content provider for a download, I want the transaction to be as follows:
1) I pay $$$
2) Provider sends me file, using their upstream bandwidth and my downstream.
As opposed to:
1) I pay provider.
2) Provider tells me where the files, or pieces thereof, are.
3) I use my downstream AND upstream bandwidth, and my file storage, and my processor cycles, to distribute the file for the person I just paid.
I know some game companies do this to distribute, and that's fine, because gamers know what they are paying for. But for mass distribution of passively consumed content? Fuck 'em - they can make their own capital investment in servers and bandwidth instead of "borrowing" mine.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
what ever happened to Freenet? I know it had totally different objectives than BitTorrent, but it was interesting nontheless.
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.
If by 'more sophisticated' you mean harder for the RIAA to shut down, I agree with you. But how many people think Napster would still be going strong if legal issues had not shut it down. I'm sure everyone remembers how easy it was to find any song in seconds in its heyday.
And all pot dealers care about is their profits, and not hemp legalization, cannabis culture, or personal freedom.
Huh. That runs counter to my entire body of experience. Most dealers are selling just enough so that they can smoke for free and possibly make a little extra money on the side. Large scale distributors (the ones who sell by the pound or more) on the other hand probably care more about the money. It's more pure business at that level.
And yes, I do greatly respect dealers for "sticking it to the man." Or, at least for ignoring unjust laws like we all should.
If the protocol is open-sourced, I don't care if he writes a closed-source implementation. However, the current protocol that they claim to be writing isn't published on the wiki. They're keeping it a secret... so, screw BitTorrent.
I vote that we write one of our own. I've written a BitTorrent client before, and have written a protocol extension. I'm just beginning to ponder a completely new protocol. Any interest?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Good luck close-sourcing Python code, anyway... reverse-engineering .pyc is beyond trivial. If there's anything really useful in there, it will be reverse-engineered and mysteriously make its way back into the BitTorrent OSS fork, anyway.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Drug dealer or pot dealer? Because I can't think of a single pot dealer in my area that doesn't hold a day job. And most of them have fairly serious day jobs, not supermarket-type positions.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Really? Thanks... a bit of encouragement goes a long way with me :-) The spec is currently pretty fluid, but it basically incorporates the btslave friendship mechanism, and instead of Merkel trees (which have been added to BitTorrent), it uses the directory structure itself for the tree of hashes. Then, I'm proposing a Publisher/Mirror/Peer hierarchy that should please ISPs and improve performance, since it allows ISPs to easily act as mirrors to their own users for popular file systems. By incorporating support for publishing dynamic updates to the file system, as well as efficient support for small files, it should be quite good for video streaming, as well. Symbolic links to other NetFS sights will also be supported, creating the potential for a web of NetFS sites. Looks like it's gonna be fun...
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I'm actually luke-warm to encryption built-in from the start, though I could be convinced otherwise with a good argument. Like Brahmn, I believe it is important to keep the protocol transparent to ISPs, and not piss them off. Encryption is a red-flag that says "Hey, there's something funny here!"
On the other hand, defeating censorship is a goal I'm 100% behind.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.