Slashdot Mirror
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."
...and hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin). And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
BT is popular because you can go to a reputable listing site, find a well seeded and good quality torrent with comments by others to back it up and download it quickly. Compared to the chances you take searching traditional P2P systems, full of dodgy encodes, fake file names and incompletes it's obvious why people turn to BT first.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
According to the website, Tribler will exchange torrent downloading history by default.
Is it just me, or is the BitTorrent world slowly converging on features and an architecture that the eDonkey network has had for years?.
I mean, BitTorrent started out as a way to download big files, like Linux ISO's. Then people started making big torrent search web sites, similar to eDonkey servers. Then people made BitTorrent clients that had a queue of downloads (e.g utorrent), quite similar to eDonkey clients. Now these people have made Torrent searching distributed, just like eDonkey and Kademlia.
I've never been much impressed by BitTorrent (gee, can you tell?). Just what is it that makes it more popular than eDonkey/eMule? Is it just the reputation and hype that has built up around "Torrents"?
The joke comes from South Park. In the South Park Episode, "Gnomes", the following sign explains the gnomes' plan to steal underpants: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Gnomes_plan.png .
I know this is a naive question, but how does a client find any peers to query without a centralized server to get a list from?
The government can't save you.
Actually far more rounds are expended in target practice than in killing people, meaning that target practice is a much more common use for a gun than murder.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If you want data from the internet, somebody is going to need your IP address.
Yes, but the computer that has your IP address doesn't need to know the data, and visa-versa. That's the whole point behind onion routing; you route through one or more neutral intermediaries, and use end-to-end encryption. Neither endpoint needs to know the other's IP address, and the intermediaries don't have any idea what data is being exchanged. With two or more intermediate nodes you don't even have to disclose who you're talking to.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of Cubit
Tribler takes an interesting approach to the distributed search problem -- collect Torrents in the background and perform on-demand searches locally. To improve recall, skew the Torrent collection to collect mostly from those that have similar interests.
It does raise a few questions. Search quality for less popular Torrents will likely be affected. Searching for Torrents outside your typical interests may also be problematic. And given a Torrent may in theory be replicated to every Tribler client, there is some bandwidth concerns.
I guess only time will tell if limiting search to only the files that have been previously downloaded by one of your peers is sufficient for most users.
Cubit takes a different approach -- perform efficient, distributed search over all the available Torrents in a manner that is resilient to typos and spelling mistakes (from both the search string and the content). Rely on a separate mechanism (such as user comments or a reputation system like Credence) to determine good Torrents from SPAM in the search results.
The approaches seem complimentary, and I'm looking forward to testing out the new Tribler once the website recovers from the Slashdot-ing.