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P2P BitTorrent Tool Could Replace Pirate Bay
With the US and other G8 countries trying to outlaw The Pirate Bay and its ilk, an anonymous reader suggests that a solution may have emerged out of Cornell University. A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.
Sort of. The main point of the Gnutella network (of which Limewire is a client) is searching. The network is inefficient, but it allows for arbitrary searching. This would be along the same vein as using a Gnutella-like network to share .torrent files, then using a BitTorrent client to actually transfer the data. (I haven't read the article, but I suspect their searching network is more efficient than Gnutella.)
No, it's implemented in an Azureus plugin.
I see nothing in the design of their searching network that would preclude implementations independent of Azureus.
I've read the GP's post and I've been pulling out the Old Constitution trying to figure out where he's coming from.
We, the US, are governed by the rule of law. And sometimes, the rule of law is very unfair for a few of us. BUT, it will correct itself eventually and to be honest, I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.
...we still need trackers, right?
X.
We had applications like this previously to bittorrent that did not list files, and one of the big golden opportunities of not maintaining a file catalog was that you didn't really have the possibility of you having illegal content on it, it was just like downloading. You don't see companies like Microsoft or Mozilla getting pressure about the fact that people download copyrighted files there. Decentralized? As in no servers, no directories and no trackers for files? How do the individual nodes find each other? If you have something where nodes pass their knowledge of other nodes along (the longer you are connected, the more nodes you might potentially learn about) that could be interesting. But how can you have something totally decentralized? Can discovery truly work on a whole-internet-sized scale?
activestudios web design
Download Cubit 0.31. Put in string "pink floyd meddle".
Lots of hits. But no "pink floyd meddle".
Maybe next year...
Nope. There are other things you can do of course. Reputation based schemes like Credence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(reputation_management_scheme ) applied to peers could help you boot off peers out of swarms with no or poor reputation. This would force certain organizations to build reputation up first, but keeping that will be a tough cookie. Won't be fool-proof, but will make it harder. Not many people will give RIAA/MPAA the thumbs up.
Then there is small world theory. Downloading stuff through trackers from people you don't know is somewhat silly. You should be able to get the same content (though a bit slower) through semi-trusted contacts. The only way to defeat that is infiltration by certain organizations, but, rather tedious and difficult.
You can also create a scheme where you us peers as proxies. Instead of downloading something directly, you ask a peer to relay a bunch of encrypted anonymous bytes for you. Will slow down speeds well over 50%, but difficult to defeat.
There about a billion more ways. The fact that they are not implemented yet, is simply because most p2p-apps/networks don't want to start an arms race.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
MEMO TO WORLD GOVERNMENTS: You can't stop the signal. Stop wasting taxpayer money.
You realize that ridding the world of drugs is just as impossible as ridding the world of file sharers right?
The solution in both cases is the same, legalize it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
At which point some clever individual finds a new variety that circumvents such attacks.
Thinking a moment about it, I could envision (for instance) a peer-to-peer system that uses rateless codes along with a protocol on top of UDP, and an anonymous DHT. It wouldn't be BitTorrent anymore, but it could work like this: The one who wants files sends his IP through the anonymous DHT. Those with files transmit a nonce to that IP, and the requesting person replies (so as to prove he's giving the right IP). Then the senders transmit packets as given by a rateless erasure code encoding of the original file, and mark the packets with a fake source IP address. This works because erasure codes don't need any regular ACK-type feedback. Now add something like EigenTrust (or a robust variant of it) on top of the DHT to get rid of fake file uploads, and proof the erasure code against the case where some "senders" just pretend to have the file and send noise instead (there's a paper of how to do this, but I can't remember its title at the moment), and you're all set.
In the worst case, ISPs would implement egress filtering. That, itself, isn't a bad thing (as it prevents reflection denial-of-service attacks), and so in either case we win. And that was just a first stab; clever people could probably find some way of masquerading it as HTTPS, use secret sharing to say "but I wasn't really sharing the file, just a part of it", or whatever.
I absolutely HATE Google spelling correction. It often tries to correct obscure words I haven't misspelled and gives me far too many irrelevant hits. It also forces me to go back and add quotes around everything. It sucks.
I also don't like that they drop punctuation out of their search terms. Sometimes I WANT to search for ";;" or something.
The PirateBay admins themselves have been looking into ways to replace the Bay. This looks like a good alternative. However, due to the popularity of closed-source BitTorrent clients (uTorrent et. al), we'll need a stand-alone version of this Cubit.
If the copyright holder (or its agent) participates in distributing a work, can that distribution still be called unauthorized?
Digital files can be copied without depriving the original owner of theirs, be it software or music. Your money was taken from you leaving you with less (I hope your insurance covered it).
Now just imagine once 3d printers become cheap enough for the common household... Manufacturers of small cheap trinkets had better be worried because their time is next.
The acta agreement calls for criminal prosecution of any facilitation of widespread copyright infringement.
This means ANY p2p client, including open source, will come under the gun.
azureus, newsreaders capable of binary download, limewire clients, and of course this tool.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Didn't try that for a long time, but in past searching for (and downloading) torrents off the Gnutella worked miracles.
It was in the times when there were no such sites like PirateBay or TorrentSpy or SuprNova. Private trackers were majority and were pain to use and were often down.
Now it seems to be essentially same principle: search for torrent on one P2P network but download the content off another P2P network.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
For the millionth time in this post the Constitution does not grant rights to people. (It does recognize some rights of the people, but does not grant them those rights.) It limits what rights the government has. Anything not specifically mentioned is up to the state level or lower to sort out. Which is kind of what all those RIAA trials going on in different states is about.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Of course not. The issue here is that the total damage done because it's illegal is much greater than the damage done if it weren't. The solution is to control it, like you would alcohol and tobacco. Look at it this way, was the US better off during prohibition?
Cynical Idealist
there is an effect you are neglecting: as copyright periods increase, this effects incentives in two directions: 1) the obvious, expected profits increase, increasing incentive to work. 2) Writers can expect to profit longer off of their previous work, allowing them to "live off there previous work" Because of the decreasing marginal utility from money, effect 2 overpowers effect 1 pretty quickly. There have been some nice papers on this( google "optimal copyright period"), and the current estimate is that a period of around 14 years maximizes incentives to produce. Anything above that actually decreases the amount of works produced. (This is only for copyright, the formula for patents depends on the sector)
Contrary to popular belief, property rights are a very modern invention, and large chunks of the world still do things relatively communally.
Developed nations implemented wide scale property rights only in the late 19th century, so as to avoid "tragedy of the commons" situations by giving owners of property an inventive to maintain it.
In other words, property rights were designed to overcome a market failure(Tradgedy of the Commons), much in the same way as copyright laws.
Both IP and property rights have severe costs(Think of absentee landlords owning multiple homes while others are homeless), but when property designed, they can serve the public good.
Conventional property rights are pretty well designed, IP laws not so much...