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?
According to the website, Tribler will exchange torrent downloading history by default.
with ed2k I enter in the 2000th position in 2000 different queues. with torrent my download starts almost immediatly at the top speed my connection supports. I don't like the work of emule developers at the protocol, and they aren't very receptive of suggestions. I think the users voted with their downloads.
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 .
It's the fact that
a) The torrent sites are easy to search, have good files and few fakes.
b) The tit-for-tat algorithm does a pretty good job of ensuring people upload stuff to you. Every other P2P software I used before bittorrent was slow and unreliable.
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.