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.

Comments

Dude.

[Kingrames]

They haven't even passed their unconstitutional law. And here you are already defeating it. You're supposed to give them a few minutes of satisfaction.

Re:Dude.

[TRAyres]

Where in the constitution is the right to file share? Constitutional law isn't my field, but saying file sharing is a subset of freedom of speech seems like a stretch. I do agree though: this is closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

Re:Dude.

[sabrex15]

Cubit

Re:Dude.

[Shakrai]

Where does the constitution say we can't file share? Rights not specifically mentioned are automatically reserved to the people.

Actually they are reserved to the States or to the people.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Re:Dude.

[iminplaya]

The sharing of information IS freedom of speech, not a subset, despite fraudulent claims of ownership. The fraud may be protected by law, but it's still fraud. The law is supposed to protect everybody, not just specific commercial interests, as this one does.

Re:Dude.

[Mr2001]

Freedom of your OWN speech is protected. Not to share other people's speeches without their consent. There is a big difference there. I'd say there's virtually no difference at all. When words are coming out of my mouth, that's my speech. It doesn't matter whether those words also came out of someone else's mouth a few years earlier.

Of course these people own what they say (or in the case of music, what they produce). They produced it. That's nice and glib, but it doesn't hold up. A barber "produces" your haircut, so does that mean he owns it? A house painter "produces" the color of your house - does he own that? If I cut a piece of paper to a precise length, maybe even a length which paper has never been cut to before, do I own that length?

It just doesn't make a lot of sense to speak of "owning" something which is an attribute of something else. A haircut is an arrangement of hairs on your head. A poem is an arrangement of words on a page. A painting is an arrangement of color on a canvas. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a length or a weight; the idea is ridiculous on its face.

Just because you say it out loud once (or sing it at a concert) does not mean it instantly belongs in the public domain. Likewise, just because you say something out loud once (or sing it at a concert) doesn't mean you instantly "own" that utterance and, from there on out, should be granted veto power over whether anyone else can say it or sing it.

How about you say or sing whatever you want, and they say or sing whatever they want, and neither of you tries to get in the other's way? That's freedom of speech.

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

And with Guitar Hero replacing actual music, soon there won't be anything left to steal! Now *that's* innovation.

Re:Good!

[AmaDaden]

30 years from now.... "Dude! Some of my friends and I found like these things in my attic. You can use them to make sounds and stuff. It's like video games but real! We were able to like play a song but it was like not a song from a game or the internet! It was like new!"

This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks...

[nweaver]

As I contemplated when AT&T started saying they want to fight piracy on the wire, the most effective way is for the ISP to cooperate with the MPAA, where the MPAA gives a graph of "These people are exchaning a large copyrighted file, block it".

If ISPs move in that direction, this defense won't help, and thats probably the bigger threat for blocking P2P piracy, as there are always countries of convienece to set up piratebay like operations.

Re:This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks...

[Klaus_1250]

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.

Re:In *WHAT* network?

[Dunbal]

And when can we expect *that* to get shut down?

      Just a couple months after everyone has stopped using it and is using something else.

Re:Kademlia

[blueg3]

To my knowledge, Kademlia uses exact keyword searching, not approximate searching. While distributed hash tables are a fairly effective decentralized searching mechanism, it's tough to move them from exact-match searching to more general searching.

Other DHT systems are also used to list peers for trackerless torrents and to find peers for particular files on networks like eMule (by searching by hash).

Dupe (kind of)

[Ankur Dave]

The article from yesterday about Verizon and Comcast's pledge to support Bittorrent also includes information about Cubit.

A poor replacement.

[hlt32]

Use of this will significantly increase the number of fake files uploaded.

At least TPB allows file comments which allows fakes to be spotted pretty fast.

Also, do not forget about the amount of traffic private torrent sites get - which this is not a real alternative to.

Re:Limewire/Frostwire?

[blueg3]

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.)

Re:Gnutella

[blueg3]

* The network is much more efficient.
* All this network is sharing is torrent metadata (.torrent files), while a BitTorrent client is doing the real transfer.
* Their keyword searching system, while allowing for finding the k-nearest keywords, is not fully general like searches on a Gnutella-like system could be.

Self Healing

[Urger]

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -Joe Gilmore

Re:Self Healing

[WMD_88]

John Gilmore. :p

Re:It needs Azureus?

[blueg3]

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.

Yes. What's unconstituional

[Hankapobe]

I have to agree with the parent here.

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.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Chris Acheson]

Congress can create whatever laws they want. Sure, the supreme court can strike down those laws, but they can also let them stick, at their discretion. It's not like the supremes are any more accountable than congress is.

I agree that free sharing of information (in all its various forms) is beneficial in a utilitarian sense. However, I think it's more important to point out that we do have the individual right to freely share information. The constitution and the law can infringe upon that, but they can't revoke it.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The problem is that, for the moment, the will of the people is being overshadowed by the will of the corporations/rich/government/folks-in-power.

Companies spend literally millions of dollars lobying the lawmakers. They give them various gifts, incentives, and outright bribes. Pretty much anyone elected to office, beyond the very local level, is in somebody else's pocket. Which means that the laws that get passed are not the ones that the nation as a whole wants, but rather what the people with lots of money to spend want.

The only thing that we the people can do about it is oppose those laws at every possible opportunity, and oppose them loudly. Protest peacefully but loudly. Civil disobedience. Circumvent whatever technical hurdles are placed in our way.

Perhaps this law is not actually "unconstitutional" in the literal sense of the word... I sincerely doubt if there's any text in there about a right to P2P... But I garontee that the founding fathers did NOT want us ruled by a government that doesn't listen to its citizens.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."

by:

Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source:

November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[pablomme]

No, we're governed by the constitution. Congress only has power to enact laws as stated within it. That's complete nonsense. The US constitution was written with the explicit intention of being amended, as it has been in 27 occasions. Actually, the constitution itself only sets up a basic framework, and it's the first ten amendments that give you any kind of rights.

And guess who has the power to amend the constitution.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[r00td43m0n]

I completely agree with Thomas Jefferson, but the few of us (relative comparison) are the only ones who care, the masses are too busy watching American Idol, Survivor, sensational news to pay attention to any of this anymore. So recently I have really taken to an excerpt from Fahrenheit 451:

Granger: "....When the war's over perhaps we can be of some use in the world."
Montag: "Do you really think they'll listen then?"
Granger: "If not, we'll just have to wait.....But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them."

So even though we check slashdot everyday and post these stories and our replies. The masses will not listen until they want to. They would rather be tuned out to reality and no one can force them to tune in.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Schadrach]

The Bill of Rights doesn't give a list of rights you posess, it gives a list of rights that the government cannot take away under any circumstances. It's also stated in the constitution that any power not explicitly given to the federal government belongs to the states or the people.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Mister Whirly]

"Something higher than government of men gives you rights.

Who/What would that be?"

Chuck Norris.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[Opportunist]

Your conscience. At least mine is the ultimate decider for legal and illegal, not some law. Following unjust laws made unjust governments possible in the first place.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

[scipiodog]

The Bill of Rights doesn't give a list of rights you posess, it gives a list of rights that the government cannot take away under any circumstances. It's also stated in the constitution that any power not explicitly given to the federal government belongs to the states or the people.

Mod Parent up!

So many people in the US don't seem to understand this point. If they did, I personally think we'd be in much better shape overall.

The point of the US Constitution is NOT to delineate peoples' rights - it is there to explicitly state the ONLY circumstances in which the government can infringe upon them.

The Tenth Amendment specifically clarifies that powers that the Constitution does not delegate to the United States and does not prohibit the States from exercising, are "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Essentially, all rights not mentioned in the Constitution one way or the other, no matter how obscure, are still in force.

But...

[Xenna]

...we still need trackers, right?

X.

Re:But...

[blueg3]

No. The decentralized-tracker problem is a ton easier than this problem, and there are already multiple decentralized-tracker solutions. Decentralized trackers are just done with simple distributed hash tables. What they've done is make a fancier DHT system for finding "near matches".

Re:Gnutella

[blueg3]

I think there is already a mostly-unused torrent-tella-like system. It's really a very good solution, since Gnutella provides very powerful searching and BitTorrent provides high-bandwidth data transfer. This is actually more like using eMule's Kad to share .torrents.

As I mentioned somewhere else, though, people won't move from the index site + centralized trackers + a BitTorrent client until enough indexes and trackers get shut down that they need a new solution.

Re:In *WHAT* network?

[blueg3]

It seems to work the other way. It'll get shut down about a year after a better solution is developed and about a month before everyone starts using that better solution.

Encryption doesn't help...

[nweaver]

Encryption doesn't help. You can participate as clients of a swarm to get the identity of the members of the swarm, which is the information the ISPs need to block the swarm.

Nonsense

[Chris Acheson]

We, the US, are governed by the rule of law. Sure, if by "rule of law" you mean "arbitrary decree of unaccountable rulers".

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. This is pure fantasy, and is the kind of thinking that leads to bloodshed. If abuses are not resisted through active, vigorous civil disobedience, then your "eventual correction" IS a bloody revolution.

Re:Nonsense

[morgan_greywolf]

This is pure fantasy, and is the kind of thinking that leads to bloodshed. If abuses are not resisted through active, vigorous civil disobedience, then your "eventual correction" IS a bloody revolution.

Sssh! Don't tell him. I prefer the bloody revolution version.

Re:Nonsense

[jcgf]

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.

Re:Nonsense

[neomunk]

The problem isn't that filesharing is like stealing a credit card, it's that some people are 'propagandized' enough to THINK that filesharing is like stealing a credit card.

Seriously, the first posted reply to this comment by jcgf points out why, but in his or her brevity jcgf doesn't bother to point out what everyone who's actually THOUGHT about this already knows: P2P is NOT inherently to be used to spread copyrighted information. Download a popular linux distribution with bittorrent and you'll max out your pipe (at least with residential broadband, 6MB down here), proving conclusively that P2P isn't remotely 'evil' no more than a gun is evil (in fact it would be LESS so, if both weren't EVIL==0).

The next point that you are (purposefully) ignorant of is a point mentioned in the summary of the article we're discussing; namely that wikileaks, a site that would be ludicrous to accuse of 'piracy' or 'theft', is going to come under the same draconian shield as distributors of Brittney Spears' new album (those evil unrepentant bastards). Now, I know that -some- people (those who very much enjoy their rose-colored lenses) are offended that wikileaks has the audacity to disrupt the 'socially acceptable' order of things, and will latch on to the flimsiest of pretexts to shut it down, but even they know they're trolling, but they're willing to troll for 'a good cause'.

Or, to sum this up: Quit trolling about piracy. You KNOW by now (as I've seen you be told numerous times) that your arguments are completely based on distortion and FUD, you're just making yourself look fanatical.

Re:Nonsense

[debatem1]

I love this logic- support the existing law or you are against an orderly society! We have the ability to change laws for a reason- bad laws get passed. And it's not unpatriotic or immoral to suggest that a law needs change. Bottom line: if you agree with a law, say why you agree with it instead of pretending that changing an unpopular law is morally equivalent to destroying the rule of law.

Re:Nonsense

[Chris Acheson]

I'll certainly defend your right to keep your real property, but information isn't property, never was, and never will be.

Re:Nonsense

[mbius]

the creator is obviously and naturally entitled to owning their ideas

A student of the "paraphrase what he said and negate it" school of rhetoric, I see.

Anyone who has tried to make this work -- fairly -- realizes it can't. Trying has brought us to legal reductio ad absurdum, with USPTO overwhelmed by nonsense concept-squatting and the court system burdened with eight-figure (hence, "important") infringement suits.

In a perfect world, maybe the ancient Greek who figured out the major scale is entitled to royalties on every piece of tonal music ever "invented" (and for Jack Valenti's duration of "forever minus a day"). The rest of us realize that's idiocy: does the practically negligible difference in intonation from changing temperament count as materially different? What about timbre? Who ought to own the 12-bar blues?

Your suggestion our legal process need concern itself with the pockets on my jeans is ridiculous. I challenge you to argue "Amazon's" 1-click claim is any less so.

None of "original," "idea", "implementation" is well-defined. Even the comparably hyper-cooperative world of math publication sees hot debates over independent discovery. We therefore conclude "ownership" in this context is neither obvious nor natural. Enjoy your Monday. You will, no doubt, condemn any corporationy corporation, that is caught violating GPL

In much the same way I believe murder is wrong despite my willingness to shoot a guy who breaks into my home. Doing the best you can with the cards you're dealt doesn't make you a hypocrite.

Re:Nonsense

[DavidShor]

Remember, writers and content producers are a very small percentage of the population, and should not have very high priority in social utility function.

The only purpose of IP law is to increase production of information and research.

And as it stands now, it's an empirical near-certainty that copyright periods are far too long to serve the public interest.

Re:Limewire/Frostwire?

[Klaus_1250]

Gnutella (LimeWire et. al) has more than one way of searching. Through Ultrapeers, Ultrapeers and OOB-replies (e.g. not routed back through Ultrapeers) and Mojito (DHT).

Using Gnutella to search/index .torrents is already a long time feature of G2 (Gnutella 2, though it is NOT the successor of Gnutella), with Shareaza being the main client for the G2 network (along with very basic support for Gnutella, BitTorrent and eDonkey2000).

DHT-networks can be more efficient, but they are also vulnerable to attacks and pollution and are somewhat lossy.

Decentralized? No servers? No trackers?

[xmuskrat]

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?

poison?

[Deanalator]

I think that the hardest part of adding search to any p2p system is that it is too easy for malicious users (*IAA thugs) to poison search results, and I don't see anything on their page that deals with that.

To design a reliable search system, you need to have a good rating system, and a solid trust model. At the same time, you need to avoid making the trust model so tight that new users cannot get any search results (freenet).

Also, I think it should be noted that a lot of bittorrent usage is moving towards the subscription model, so people should be able to search for channels as well, not just single files.

I am interested in seeing where this project leads, but I don't think people will be completely abandoning the well organized, well moderated torrent sites any time soon, but it will be nice to be able to search quickly for files without needing to open a browser.

pink floyd meddle

[Rick Richardson]

Download Cubit 0.31. Put in string "pink floyd meddle".

Lots of hits. But no "pink floyd meddle".

Maybe next year...

Re:You might want to read the bill of rights close

[0111 1110]

Somehow I doubt the founding fathers had "Dude, they should totally be able to pirate music, movies, and video games" when they were writing the bill of rights. You seem to be missing the point of the 9th amendment. The whole point was that just because "the right to make and trade copies of digital information" was not included in that ancient document written with quills does not mean that we do not have that right. The point of the constitution was to limit the "rights" of the government, not those of the people. Remember these were the guys who were willing to go to war and die over a minor tax. I'm not sure how sympathetic they would be to protecting the aging business models of mega-corporations with more and more draconian laws and even larger and larger police states to enforce them. I think they would consider rampant piracy to be by far the lesser of the two evils. And as far as file sharing goes, clearly the people of the world have spoken in its favor.

Re:the US is pathetic

[Arcturax]

There was. 1776 to 1783.

Get a real job

[Chris Acheson]

Tough luck. Time for a career change.

Re:You might want to read the bill of rights close

[Stanislav_J]

Under current copyright law, nothing ever becomes public domain and they have turned it into a perpetual right to milk a creation forevermore without ever giving anything back to the public that gave them that monopoly to begin with.

Even after the teets have run dry, and there's no more profit to "milk" from a work, they will still hang onto the copyright to prevent anyone else from possibly themselves gaining any benefit from it. Sometimes there is no effort even made to profit from a work -- there are quite a few older TV shows and movies and such that are locked up in vaults, sitting there making zero profit for their rights holders, usually because the remaining appeal of the work is considered too narrow to be profitable. (Too small of a customer base for a corporation's lofty financial desires.) If they are no longer making money off it, whether through market forces or by calculated choice, the work should pass into the public domain instead of being held hostage.

Then you are pretty fucking clueless aren't ya

[way2trivial]

Gosh- you haven't heard of it- it must not exist?

they do-- in lots of form factors and pricepoints.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=3d+scanner&spell=1

Oft Repeated Nonsense

[mcrbids]

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).

Eh... duh? The issue isn't that "copying" a work deprives the original author of his or her copy. See the definition of "copy". You'll find that it's a very old word.

The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question. Since economics require a balance of supply and demand, and since copying can be done infinitely (killing any such balance) then economic restrictions are in place so that economic activity can continue.

This is a *good thing*. If you want to do anything, push to have the copyright terms brought back the reasonable timeframe they initially were...

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.

Hopefully, copyrights will apply then.