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."

Comments

Oh well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Let them close it. As long as the open source community doesn't use it to distribute isos, I'm happy.

Re:Oh well,

[jackharrer]

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.

Re:Oh well,

[SuluSulu]

Some of us don't use bittorrent for downloading just OSS IOS's, you insensitive clod!

Re:Oh well,

[Nukenbar]

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.

Re:Oh well,

[deathy_epl ccs]

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.

Re:Oh well,

[smilindog2000]

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?

Re:Oh well,

[Scrameustache]

Hell, I think modern piracy would've taken longer to come to their attention if the dumbshits at Napster Please stop calling "filesharing" piracy. Real piracy gets people killed.

Re:Oh well,

[deathy_epl ccs]

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.

Re:Oh well,

[computational super]

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.

Re:Oh well,

[jgoemat]

I can't wait to go see "Unauthorized Copiers of the Carribean".

Re:Oh well,

[deathy_epl ccs]

I hear they're going to have Johnny Dupe in that one...

Re:Oh well,

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Oh well,

[Anonymous Coward]

If Lao Tsu knew what he was talking about he wouldn't have said that. He says so himself.

Re:Oh well,

[smilindog2000]

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...

Re:Oh well,

[smilindog2000]

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.

Will they EVER learn?

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Will they EVER learn?

[phobos13013]

To be fair, the actions of Bram, et al., are necessary to protect himself from liability. He has quite intelligently always stated that he did not condone or support any of the "illegal" uses of the technology. By doing this, they can claim innocence from complicity of its uses. Meanwhile, if the a community of individuals changes the protocol and uses it for whatever purposes they like, each user is responsible for their own implementation and the protocol is out there maintained by everyone who uses it, so no easy target for prosecutors to chase after. Not to say that Bram intended this, but I doubt he's concerned with the results.

Re:Will they EVER learn?

[iendedi]

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 good riddance. I can think of few reasons why having bittorrent proprietary would be advantageous for users. But I can think of many reasons why special interests would pay to make it so. I also agree with anonymity protection, something like a lightweight tor cloud between p2p endpoints makes good sense.

Re:Will they EVER learn?

[CarpetShark]

To be fair, the actions of Bram, et al., are necessary to protect himself from liability. He has quite intelligently always stated that he did not condone or support any of the "illegal" uses of the technology. By doing this, they can claim innocence from complicity of its uses.

Hmm. If he believes it's a good thing, and I'd rather see him stand by that belief. If he intended it to be a piracy tool because he believes in piracy, then he should stand by that, instead.

Either way, Bram doesn't seem to realise that he doesn't matter any more. The technology is out there, and neither he nor anyone else can take it back. He's unlikely to release anything more important for the rest of his life, and he may as well just accept whatever small (and it was small) contribution that he made. I say small, because however good BT is, it's only a little better than the P2P systems before. Just another piece of the slow, step-by-step, but fairly obvious puzzle we all glorify as computer science.

Re:the people is working

[Anonymous Coward]

from the standards-are-hard dept.

Apparently Taco finds that basic grammar are too hard, too.

Shooting themself in the foot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Shooting themself in the foot

[Ginger Unicorn]

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

Re:Shooting themself in the foot

[jZnat]

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.

so?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:so?

[damaki]

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.

Tin-foil hat...

[alexhs]

Are these new "features" that need the source to be closed RIAA or NSA oriented ?

What the Story Submission Should Have Said

[VengefulCynic]

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?

Re:What the Story Submission Should Have Said

[cromar]

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.

Re:What the Story Submission Should Have Said

[Shakrai]

I have personally yet to meet a drug dealer where selling drugs was not their primary, if not only, source of income

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.

There are some very interesting technologies...

[DanielJosphXhan]

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.

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 .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.

Re:the people is working

[Anonymous Coward]

they is. and our children is learning.

Re:When will people realise

[lilomar]

We know, and believe me, you will be the first against the wall when The Revolution comes.

What the the closed source features?

[timeOday]

DRM? Adware? I don't see why it needs to be closed unless it's stuff people don't want.

Predictable

[vivaoporto]

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.

Re:Predictable

[The Rizz]

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. [...] they could sell access to their content using the bittorrent protocol and nobody would be able to join the swarm without paying. ...and that's a bad thing why, exactly? Content companies receive a secure p2p distribution channel, and the rest of us receive a 100% bulletproof example of how p2p is not "just for illegal files". Sounds like win-win to me.

Re:Predictable

[LordSnooty]

Except it never takes off because there aren't enough people in the swarm to keep download speeds high, because they're all on the other side grabbing rips for free.

Re:Predictable

[R2.0]

"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.

Re:Predictable

[tkavanaugh]

also why should i pay for the bandwidth that is going to benefit the *aa while i'm downloading something i paid for?

USB 2.0 is better than Bit Torrents.

[Organic Brain Damage]

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.

Re:USB 2.0 is better than Bit Torrents.

[lilomar]

Ahh, good, old fashioned sneakernet.

Re:USB 2.0 is better than Bit Torrents.

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:USB 2.0 is better than Bit Torrents.

[TheQuantumShift]

But "Don't copy that 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache USB 2.0 External Hard Drive" doesn't have the same ring as "Don't copy that floppy"...

Re:USB 2.0 is better than Bit Torrents.

[way2trivial]

this sounds familiar
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/22/hackers-project-sends-media-filled-hard-drives-to-troops/

So what?

[Wiseman1024]

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.

Au contraire

[FranTaylor]

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.

Re:Au contraire

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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. Right! Because when the Russian mob uses Excel to keep track of their extortion payments, it is all Bill Gates's fault!

Re:Au contraire

[jollyreaper]

Right! Because when the Russian mob uses Excel to keep track of their extortion payments, it is all Bill Gates's fault! But when the Excel math bug makes it look like someone was cheating the mob and they get whacked for it, can we blame Microsoft then?

Re:the people is working

[Funkcikle]

Obviously a lack of seaders is preventing the spread of good righting.

http://thepiratebay.org/search/oxford%20english%20dictionary/0/3/0

Ryan Fenton

[Kamineko]

Long live the Ryan Fenton protocol!

Re:Meanwhile, .FLV yawns, streams another video

[dave420]

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.

Re:Grammatical Errors.

[msuarezalvarez]

1. "first post"ing is for Digg and Fark :)

Hmm. You must be new here...

hmm.

[apodyopsis]

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.

Au contraire contraire

[camperdave]

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?

Re:Au contraire contraire

[click2005]

Manufacturers do not assume liability if their product is used to perform illegal activities.

That has never stopped the media companies from going after software that enables copyright infringement.

Re:Au contraire contraire

[Penguinisto]

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.

I don't even have to point at an analogy, just at parallels - Napster. Kazaa. Both were very successfully litigated against for complicity in copyright infringement, no?

/P

Re:Au contraire contraire

[eison]

Not nearly as simple as you say it. They were busted because they actively advertised and supported and encouraged the infringing use. For Napster for example, undermining copyright was literally written into their business plan.

On the subject of P2P

[LM741N]

what ever happened to Freenet? I know it had totally different objectives than BitTorrent, but it was interesting nontheless.

Re:On the subject of P2P

[Alsee]

Yes, freenet was . .
. . .
. . . . . . i . .
nt . . . e .
. . r . . es . .

-

Letter to Pirate Bay re: new torrent protocol

[Adeptus_Luminati]

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!

Re:Letter to Pirate Bay re: new torrent protocol

[Antique Geekmeister]

The earlier poster here suggested switching Bittorrent like protocols to UDP: I'm merely pointing out where it's going to have issues.

Well, yes. ISP's pulling that level of filtering are, as you imply, doing so where choices for cheap and freely usable bandwidth are limited. This can be because of the expense of bandwidth or a desire for casual monitoring (such as a campus network, where the student with the 3 Terabytes of MP3's and DVD's sharing them to the world is both a bandwidth and a legal problem). It's relatively common in small, insular markets, where a power user or systems dabbler such as many Slashdot posters would be regarded as a problem, not a good client base.

Some folks do find the proxy filtering an issue in corporate networks: I've certainly found it to be pesky for rsyncing or Bittorrenting freeware CD images, and had talks with upstream network managers who wondered why I was pulling so much data through the firewall (which I throttled, and did off-hours, but they noticed).

Re:PARITY.. please.. add parity

[Myen]

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.

Freenet

[BenEnglishAtHome]

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.

And well before warez, there was pirate radio.

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Which similarly never killed anyone, although some of the more famous stations DID broadcast from ships in international waters...

Re:And well before warez, there was pirate radio.

[mikael]

... whose DJ's then became famous DJ's for legitimate stations.

The earliest pirate radio station in the UK was actually by the Daily Mail:


Ceto - The Ceto was a steam yacht reportedly renamed "Broadcasting Yacht" and fitted out for radio broadcasting purposes in 1928. Starting from off the coast of Dundee, Scotland, 'Daily Mail Radio/Radio Daily Mail' (Reports vary) broadcast easy listening music to various points around the British coast as it cruised around the nation's coastline. The sole sponsors of this voyage were Britain's Daily Mail, Evening News, and Sunday Dispatch newspapers, and the intent was apparently not to set up an offshore station but rather to publicise the papers. The brain behind this publicity stunt was Valentine Smith, the Daily Mail's publicity officer.

Better name for the file extension

[Arcturax]

They should call it... .arr

Freenet is NOT what you're looking for...

[Spy der Mann]

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.

I'll probably get modded down for this...

[SirLurksAlot]

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:

While some nodes currently max out their upload capacity (those who have popular content), the vast majority of nodes hardly upload anything (because either their users don't have anything that is popular, OR because they have something that is popular, but they don't dare to offer it, for fear of litigation).

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.

Storing the chunks - while possibly avoiding future transfers - makes the owner of a reflector node a target of litigation, because he supported the distribution of s.th. copyrighted e.g., AND it can be proven by analyzing his harddrive. If a reflected chunk is held in memory when process is swapped out then it may still be possible to prove that the distribution was supported.

Counter measures to defeat traffic analysis would be interesting.

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.

Wong+time != right;

[Scrameustache]

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. You still say Pluto is a planet, don't you?

Re:the people is working

[tehmorph]

Wait a minute, that link has a search string at the end! Someone call Amazon!

Re:Wrong+time != right;

[deathy_epl ccs]

I guess it's better'n pullin' some sword out of a lake.

Re:Confusing name

[mrsteveman1]

PiratFS :D

Re:Onion Routing

[Cid Highwind]

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)

Re:Confusing name

[cp.tar]

In that case, just call it the FSM.

And instead of .torrent, files will have an .appendage extension.

Arrrr!