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BitTorrent Client Offers P2P Without Central Tracking
Shiwei writes "While BitTorrent is the most popular P2P protocol, it still relies on several centralized points for users to find the files they are looking. There have been several attempts at making BitTorrent more decentralized, and the latest Tribler 5.3 client is the first to offer the BitTorrent experience without requiring central trackers or search engines. Tribler offers some very interesting technologies; the latest version enables users to search and download files from inside the client. Plenty of other clients offer search features, including the ever-popular Torrent, but Tribler's results come from other peers rather than from a dedicated search engine. Users can search and download content without a server ever getting involved; everything is done among peers, without the need of a BitTorrent tracker or search indexer."
Slashdot UTF fail. muTorrent, or utorrent, not Torrent.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
So Essentially... bit torrent trackers are turning into Kazaa/Limewire type of software... We are going backwards.
What about man-in-the-middle peers?
Wasnt that the point of DHT?
The summary (and TFA) is misleading. This client isn't the first to support trackerless downloading. Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.
What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago), but it does appear they put some thought into making their feature set more user-friendly, with categorization ("Channels") and such.
With a large public tracker like PirateBay there are mods and members who weed out and delete the malware, spam, and bad torrents that are on the tracker. Wouldn't a distributed system like this actually make it easier for "bad" content to get uploaded? Its like Limewire all over again.
The idea here seems to be that "you cant stop the signal". But I am not sure how they get around the fact that you don't have to kill the signal, just garble it.
this, dns-p2p, and etc are turning the internet into a truly decentralized, uncontrollable, REAL cloud as it should have been from the start.
...
i, for one, am not suprised that the ones to save net freedom, are ending up being people who have been accused of piracy. after all, if it is not detrimental to the control of private interests, why villify something in mass media, right
Read radical news here
Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.
You also need to have a torrent that doesn't disable DHT and peer exchange. This has to be the most irritating "feature" of BitTorrent; the torrent file controls whether they're allowed. I understand why it exists and it'd be OK...if tracker administrators didn't abuse the hell out of it. I've lost track of how many times I've found a fairly new torrent that had a dead tracker.
Please help metamoderate.
at some point all digital media will be available for unlimited download by subscription, and eventually via tax. [at least for the people]
A bit like the library, or maybe youtube (as in you pay for the goods that advertise of youtube ergo you pay advertising 'tax' on the goods)
If you can download it for free from youtube, how many times are you going to watch the same damb thing, is it really worth making everyone download it every single time?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Giant waste of time, bittorrents benefit is from the community bitching about bad torrents, you cant do that without a web of trust or a trusted third party.
Yes, because the only reason anyone would ever create anything is to get a paycheck.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
What about apps like emule ? They have been around for almost 10 years now and have no centralized database or tracking
youtube, DVB etc.. plugins for instance ripping or downloading or recording and sharing.
point, rip and share.
maybe some darknet intergration,
voip, IM integration.
record that call with you boss and blast it out over the internet.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
There's still the fact that IP data is available. Any user on the network will be broadcasting their activities making them vulnerable. Protecting users' anonymity is just as important as decentralizing any part of the network. In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of P2P that needs to be fixed. Not that I have any novel ideas on how that can be done....
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
It's becoming ever so popular to complain about ICANN or otherwise feel that a decentralized internet is the solution to our problems. I'm not a prophet, but even I can see the future on this one. The ones who will benefit the most from a completely decentralized DNS and/or P2P system are the ones who control the biggest botnets within the network. The rest of us will be so inundated with garbage that the internet will essentially become completely useless.
That's not to say that ICANN and especially the RIAA et al. aren't problems, but I don't see this becoming a viable solution. So I'm a skeptic, for now.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I don't think it's a waste of time in the sense that it's a step in a potentially useful direction.
If you want to add trust capabilities to the mix there are non-centralised ways to do it such as allowing digital signatures.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
So, how does this make it any different from Limewire, or Napster? I understand that there's the added benefit the swarm, but... really, how is this any different? It'll get driven to the ground with junk and viruses. I'll stick to my private tracker, TYVM.
Yes, I pity the poor, hardworking, impoverished studio heads and record company execs, who have always been the primary beneficiaries of royalties. The Beatles, as a group, got a farthing per record, BTW.
And once you'll get cryptography enforced and a few more TCP/IP tricks I wonder how riaa will stop p2p.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Maybe I'm behind the time with this type of technology, but is there a way that this could be used to access web pages like wikileaks to prevent servers from being shut down or blocked by dns?
A distributed search feature is great, but the Trible software is bereft of features. I recommend sticking with uTorret, and hoping uTorrent developers implement a similar feature.
Legitimately speaking, why exactly would one require a search engine inside a bittorrent client? I mean, if you want a torrent of something that's actually on the up-and-up, couldn't you just google for the website that seeds it, and click on the torrent link at that site?
It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine!
Dilbert RSS feed
shareaza has been doing this with torrents for years! complete with file ratings and comments
From what I can see, it's pretty much OneSwarm, but without the anonymity.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It is another example of the development of torrent which will never die though a lot are fighting against it.
Dunbal already mentioned this, but I didn't see anyone commenting on this. Isn't this just LimeWire or Kazzaa in another skin? Seems kinda like a good way to spread crap malware. Is my logic flawed?
Thomas Jefferson said, "Information is the currency of democracy". The WikiLeaks drama is showing us how readily our own politicians will abandon core values of democracy in order to avoid embarrassment. It also clearly demonstrates that we live in a world where our personal communications can readily be disrupted at the whim of private corporations under pressure from these same politicians. The entertainment industry has tried to criminalize peer-to-peer technologies for years, but what is happening with WikiLeaks makes it more essential *now*, than ever before, that we adopt open source peer-to-peer technologies on a large scale. Perhaps the most important of these is The tor project which permits private and anonymous communications. Democracy cannot exist if people cannot speak freely without fear of reprisal. The more TOR relays that exist around the globe, the more immune we all are to the government/corporate censorship we are witnessing. Do your part in ensuring your digital rights by running a relay and becoming part of the network.
NO, No and Yes, its not the only reason of course but getting a paycheck is surely as important as any other reason, you fucking ninny tard.
Now enjoy the fruits of your fucking idiot, slefish and childish need to acquire others property without compensation and watch as your stupid little world crashes all around as it is now doing
...welcome back to 2005 and enjoy Gnutella
Before torrents, there was Kazaa, Gnutella,Limewire and eDonkey. (They still exist). All of these support searching peers from within the client without any intermediary website. I always wondered that bit torrent seems like a step backward - since it relies on websites and trackers that can be shut down, or seized and have the users traced from the logs.
So why is BT so popular as compared to the earlier services? Is it a more efficient P2P protocol? After all you still require a client to download and you still need to open ports on your firewall to allow traffic, same as with the others.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The vast majority of my uploading has come about with the torrents I started, where it *has* to be me providing the uploading bandwidth, even at my crappy ~50KB/sec. (I get better upload bandwidth with garden-variety HTTP uploads) Talk about getting in on the torrent early.
For my rare torrents, I'm still a useful seeder, but I've not really needed after that for the big ones. Similar applies for the stuff I download.
Nevertheless, I keep the torrents around (unless it's something I want to relocate to fit my sorting system). However, I sometimes am only seeding the new and/or rare stuff (which I mark in uTorrent with the 'Initial-Seeding' flag for easy classification, not mention that Initial-Seeding actually does get my new stuff out a little faster)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Would distributing the .torrent's in usual person-to-person manners fall under "on a friend-to-friend basis" as you phrase it? Sure, a server might technically be involved (from the email site or whatever), but I don't think that's what Tribler meant, as you would agree with your example of Google as the server. And not necessarily (put only the .torrent in a sneakernet, etc)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Even if the initial seeder isn't trying to be malicious - torrenters make mistakes too, and TPB comments once let me know about some technical issues with a particular file, which I did get fixed.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Tell that to Cory Doctorow. I've slightly edited the quote for brevity, and the emphasis is mine. If you want to read the whole text, it's in the forward to Little Brother. The link is to the entire text of the book.
Free Martian Whores!
The only weird old tip this guy has is the one in his pants.
You also need to have a torrent that doesn't disable DHT and peer exchange. This has to be the most irritating "feature" of BitTorrent; the torrent file controls whether they're allowed.
It is true that there is a flag in .torrent files which can kindly asks the client to disable peer exchange. Some BitTorrent clients will disable peer exchange is this flag is set, many do not care at all and exchange peer information anyway. It is in any case the client software you are using, not the torrent file, which actually disables DHT...
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Since neither of us have the paper handy,
In a nutshell, Kademlia isn't affected much by churn because its buckets of known nodes prefer long-lived ones.
If I (as a Kademlia node) know that you exist (I have you in a bucket), you will never be displaced by a newer node unless you become unreachable to me.
The paper found that the longer a node has been around, the better chance it will STILL be around in the future. Not exactly rocket-science, but it's a handy bit of knowledge.
a system whereby you trust an entity based on a greater trust of some other closer entity who claims to trust them .
Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you?
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
Obscurity is the biggest problem of the vast majority of artists, but free downloads don't change that. Now you're just free among everybody else who's free. Publishing a book on paper or a CD in a music store makes you less obscure: you're among the handful of artists picked to do that. Somebody bothered to invest in a physical artifact. That's how you get famous enough that a non-trivial number of people share your work.
That model is failing fast, and yes, we need to find a new model. But artists who are already famous from the old model have less than zero experience with the new model; they have a deceptive and misleading opinion based on a position that very few artists ever get.
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
You can borrow basically any book you can think of, for free, from a public library. People still buy those same books, do they not?
Right. I'm crazy because I don't think the entire world will fall apart if TV studios stop being so profitable. I mean, who will design and build our roads and cars and airplanes and houses and computers then?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Borrowing a library book isn't really "free", in the libre sense. It's due back at a certain date. You can only get it during the hours that the library open. If you lose it, you are REQUIRED to pay for another copy, so it's not even really gratis. And there are only a finite set of copies, so if the book is popular, you may not be able to get it at all.
Finally, I dunno what library you go to, but my library is far from having every book I want.
People buy books because they want to be more free with them. They're willing to pay for the convenience of having it any time they want. Even to loan it out, but it's still only a single copy: when you loan it out, you don't have it.
If unrestricted digital copies were allowed, none of that would apply. It may be that this is what the world is coming to regardless, so we may have to deal with it. But it's ridiculous for a famous author to claim that you can give it away free and somehow make it up in volume.
People may well pay for the convenience of print, something that still requires a real printing and binding machine. But if the text is given away, nobody will have reason to pay for anything above the printing cost.
Non-famous authors have problems getting noticed even if their books are free. Especially if their books are free, since they don't stand out from the millions of others. Print on demand doesn't change that. A commitment to pre-printed paper copies in a bookstore is something that helps an author stand out, and it's self-serving for Doctorow to forget about that.
It's not the only route, but the key is the investment of money: things that require no investment will always have to compete with the vast world of other free things, mostly junk.