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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."
You mean the legitimate publisher who wants to leech my limited monthly cap for their own purposes?
I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.
Bootstrap is the interesting issue.
You can't have a situation with no server involved, ever, unless you're distributing the software on a friend-to-friend basis. There *has* to be a root node or selection of root nodes that the software knows about when it's installed, unless they have sufficiently advanced technology that it's indistinguishable from magic. Or they use some sort of brute force search....
Sure, once a node is online and given enough other nodes stay online enough of the time, it would be possible to have a persistent network.
I suppose you could do something like search google for random torrents, join in, test the folks you connect to for being part of the decentralised network, grab network info from there etc. It still uses google as a central reference point but it would be more robust than having some sort of hard-coded 'peer tracker' server, or using any sort of brute-force port scan of the internet.