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Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent
A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."
Shut your face, as someone who is actually still stuck on dialup I find your comments offensive and insensitive; you know full well on your dialup days the downloads you attempt would have taken weeks. And even try to liken it to our suffering when you see speeds in the lower half of a hundred K that might take a couple of hours. For Shame Good sir, For Shame.
(Yeah, I'm planning on suing the government and AT&T for retributions for the hardships and suffering our modem bound people have had to endure.)
Seriously though, the answer to the rare file dilemma is that the website that is hosting the torrents needs to have a server running Bittorent and all the files with intelligent prioritizing of the worst seeded files. So when there are other people to take the load the website can outsource it, when its rare the website will have to share the burden like it would have had to via http anyways.