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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!
Don't worry, nobody will care this time either.
People keep trying to do this. At first we had P2P clients with integrated searching. None of them ever got all that popular. Then BitTorrent is launched, and it didn't have any searching, and relied on the much more familiar and comfortable web for that. It became a huge hit. What do these people do? They think, "Wow! BitTorrent is pretty great! But wouldn't it be even better if it had search?"
Predictably, though, they fail completely, every time.
No, the protocol is splitting, with one fork preferential towards pirates and the other honoring the original aim, the legitimate publisher.
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.
You really should get an account... like PizzaAnalogyGuy or something.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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
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
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.
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 you are saying that Napster never got very popular?
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol, and thus worked better for large files like videos and games. It had nothing to do with people being turned off by integrated search.
I think that integrated search is a good idea - now if I want to download something, I have to search on pirate bay, if I don't find it there, I go to isohunt and so on. I'd like the ability to search on all public trackers at once. As a mater of fact I'd also like to be able to search all private trackers (that I am a member of, or optionally can become a member) at once. Centralized search would be bad, but a decentralized search that looks like centralized (you only search in one place) would be great.
And I think that BT became popular not because it relied on the web for searching (you can search for ed2k links too), but because it usually is faster than eMule and similar. Usually people do not keep a lot of torrents seeding at one time so each torrent gets better upload speed than if it was divided among thousands of files in the "shared" folder. The original BitTorrent client even had one window for each .torrent, with uT it's easier to seed 100 torrents, but still more difficult than it would be with eMule, especially if I want to move the files around.
Also, there are private trackers for BitTorrent, that enforce good ratio and thus make downloads faster (since there are more seeders), I never heard of private eDonkey servers and Gnutella does not even have servers.
However, BitTorrent also has its disadvantages. Sharing is more difficult than "drop the file in your 'shared' folder or share the folder that the file s in", users that have/want the same files cannot download from each other because the files are in different .torrents.
No Bittorrent client will be complete until it has an email client built in. A flight simulator would be nice too.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
Agreed. If this "step backwards" allows us to relive the glory days of Napster, I'm all over it. More importantly, though, decentralized services are nearly impossible for governments to shut down. Which, in our current political environment, sounds like a great idea.
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.
Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down (like they did to other p2p programs in the past that were not open source like kazza)
What about a text editor? I hear that EMACs has one now...
I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.
My sarcasm detector is out of batteries. Does WoW really require subscribers to donate their upstream bandwidth for patches? Honest question.
Yes, they use a torrent based distribution system for their patches. So, yes, while you are gaming, you are typically using some of your upstream bandwidth to help deliver patches to others.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Because you can't rely on google or the website being there when you need them. The Wikileaks conspiracy is a case in point. Their DNS provider, their money transfer companies and their hosting company tried to make them disappear. So far, Google is working as intended, but for how long? Also, organizations with fewer resources might wither and die under such attacks.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Better yet, couldn't you just include the torrent hash encoded in base64, upload to a free website, let Google cache it and have them act as the indexer? It's not like they can do anything illegal.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
"Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down..."
I more concerned about Big Business getting their fingers in the pie.
From Wikipedia:
"After a dozen downloads the Tribler software can roughly estimate the download taste of the user and recommends content.[4] This feature is based on collaborative filtering, also featured on websites such as Last.fm and Amazon.com."
The problem is that collaborative filtering drives everyone in the same general direction--it is essentially distilling down one's tastes to the bare minimum. If too many people focus on these "suggestions", less popular torrents will die of neglect. The conspiracy theorist in me says that this exactly the idea--kill torrents, not all, just some. From the perspective of most media outlets, the only good torrent is a dead torrent.
There is also the possibility of gaming the system of collaborative filtering to intentionally steer interest in specific torrents.
I'll stick with TPB. Seed/Peer counts speak volumes.
Torrentz is a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of torrent search engines
www.torrentz.com
Dilbert RSS feed
It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine!
Dilbert RSS feed
Ironically, the day they invent a Bittorrent client that can suck you off will be the day they kill Bittorrent. At least for porn.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
A lot of that wasn't really the protocol as such, it's that you actually got faster downloads for faster uploads so people turned off all their caps. Napster etc. didn't really reward uploads much, you got the files at pretty much the same speed no matter what. Proper incentives are everything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Woah Woah Woah. Yes they offer a torrent based system by default but turning that off is as simple as clicking Options->Uncheck peer2peer downloading.
So it's by no means forced and anyone with a bandwidth cap can easily turn it off.
I just use google to find where the content is, instead of visiting every torrent site until i find it....
Yes.
In fact, some games (Lord of the Rings Online, I'm looking at you) install a content distribution service (Pando) where you basically agree to be part of their content distribution network, all the time, and not just while you are gaming. Unless you switch it off in the service panel, of course.
decentralization = hard
You see this as a bad thing, and personally, I agree. However, it's probably time to face reality. In this long September, the internet has taken a new shape: a hive mentality. Gone are the days where we just grab whatever information we come across because it is unique and exciting.
The net has simply become too large for that. These days, people seek features to cut down the signal to noise ratio. This in itself isn't a bad thing, but it's based on taste, and the taste is that of the majority who only care about the latest cute hampster video or what happened on American Idol. It's only natural that some of that "noise" will be useful information. I was on a torrent site the other day looking for programming texts. I was lucky if I could find more than a handful of seeders.
The key is to encourage people in our own niche group to participate in sharing information. Let the masses have Facebook and Twitter, but we must take part in distributed file sharing while there is time.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
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.
If the website with the legitimate torrent doesn't have links to infringing content, what reason would there be for someone to try to make it disappear?
There's plenty of websites that provide non-infringing content via torrents, yet I cannot think of a single one where the necessity of a dedicated torrent search engine would be remotely necessary in order to find it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
No, it became popular because Napster was sued out of existence.
I disagree. Having separate trackers with their own community was a big part of BitTorrent's success. It brings people together, they actually talk about what they're sharing, and they can organize to put together big projects that just didn't happen before bittorrent. It's not exactly the lack of integrated search that did it, but the lack of search pushed people to the web which is a much better platform for collaboration and communication. If this client doesn't even let people make and read comments on a torrent it really is a step backwards.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...welcome back to 2005 and enjoy Gnutella
You forget, most users don't change ANY settings. Only the most "hardcore" WoW players would look that up, and out of the millions in its player base only a small percentage are "hardcore" (small enough that Blizzard has changed the game to be playable for 10 man groups instead of 60 man groups).
Since you didn't seem to get the point, let me summarize:
Decentralized, search: All P2P clients except BitTorrent. All failed.
Centralized, no search: BitTorrent. Wildly successful.
It was the only P2P client at the time. It was also never as popular as BitTorrent.
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."
Yes, if you only read the headline. This client also has decentralized search.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Is it 1997?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
That's interesting. I never got into private trackers, so I had the opposite experience. I always liked how Napster let you browse people's shares. I would search for an artist I had heard about and then while downloading I would look through their collection and find all sort of other music that I had never heard of, and would download some of that as well. I discovered more bands that way then anything else at the time.
When Napster was shut down, I tried a few other packages, but the built-in search and public trackers didn't really have the same discoverability that Napster had. Shortly after sites like Myspace and later LastFM filled the role of try-before-you-buy, which is all I really used filesharing software for.
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.
This.
People seem to think that being decentralized will stop the lawyers from shutting down P2P or suing individuals.
You can never really decentralize - you always need to connect to other peers. The best way to find peers is via a central server that maintains a list of peers. It's possible to set it up so that you can "trust" this list of peers. In reality, however, P2P networks live or die by content availability and speed. How do you up those? Add more peers. If you had to wait 6 weeks to get an invite to a private tracker, that doesn't mean the RIAA/MPAA/etc. did the exact same thing.
If you take out the tracker, how do you find peers? People talk about distributed hash tables and peer exchange. No one really says the obvious - you go looking for peers. And from there you can find other peers. So how do you start looking? Where do you send your initial packets? You've either got a centralized server to handle the bootstrapping, or you just spam subnets, becoming the center of your own network map. This is akin to walking down the street yelling "Anyone got crack for sale???". If this is what you're doing, you've got no guarantee that you won't get fucked. In fact, you make it easier to piss off someone who wasn't even looking for you.
Being decentralized does nothing to make an individual anonymous, safe, etc. But surely it will help the network as a whole, right? Wrong. Instead of going after trackers and sites, they'll go after the initial distributors. For movies and games, there are only a handful of guys supplying 90% of the content. I guess music is easier for the average schlub to rip and share, but who the fuck wants the shitty music they put out today? Honestly. If you take out the ability to easily go after big sites, they'll just ramp up their efforts to go after the sources. They'll always focus on the easiest targets. They USED to focus on the sources (and did so successfully) until Napster came out.
So in the end, decentralization may protect the network, but it doesn't protect the users. As a downloader, you can feel relatively safe. As a source, you'll have a bigger target on your back. As a downloader, if sources are targeted, you'll have less to download.
As for trusting other users for searching?
Do we not remember Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, etc. etc. ? I hope your friends and family all run selinux.
My sarcasm detector is out of batteries. Does WoW really require subscribers to donate their upstream bandwidth for patches? Honest question.
Require? No. You can turn it off.
If you want to get the patch before the next patch rolls out, then yes.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that this exactly the idea--kill torrents, not all, just some. From the perspective of most media outlets, the only good torrent is a dead torrent.
Except that the most popular torrents are the ones that media companies most want to shut down: new releases, blockbusters, current TV shows (which would be tricky to win a lawsuit), etc.
None of the media companies really care if people are downloading things like DVDs released 10 years ago, or 25-year-old CDs. For many people, though, those are some of the most important torrents, as you sometimes can't legally purchase the content any more.
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!
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
uTorrent has a Tetris game built in, you'll just have to be satisfied with that.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
What makes you think that the only reason of BitTorrent's success is its lack of search? I remember that the switch from eDonkey/eMule to BitTorrent was solely because of BitTorrent protocol was much faster.
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
Do you have an upload cap?
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
The downloads and uploads are added together for the monthly cap of 35 GB.
http://www.telebec.com/english/magasinage_ligne/asp/internet/sympatico_hv.asp
I don't think that it is bad, myself, merely that it is a fact.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You mean the legitimate publisher who wants to leech my limited monthly cap for their own purposes?
So asking if you would mind helping out with spreading the cost of bandwidth around, where you are free to say yes or no, is now 'leeching'?
Remind me to never ask you for a favor.
You sound like the type who would respond to "Could I please use your cellphone for just two minutes to make an emergency phone call" with the response "Well I dunno, I only get 700 minutes a month, and even though I have plenty of minutes left, I still feel you somehow owe me money for those two minutes you want to use"
Or worse, you claim I can use your phone, and later try to hold those two minutes I 'owe' you over my head for the rest of time...
It's not like anyone is forcing you to leave the torrent running, especially in small legitimate publishers cases where they only have one or two files to distribute anyway and there is no such thing as ratio!
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.
How about Wikileaks? It's hosting content that has NOT been declared illegal anywhere in the world. Yet it is under constant attack.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
A bittorrent search facility would not, in any way, alleviate any of the issues that wikileaks may be having. While they may certainly benefit from using bittorrent for content distribution, how does having a specialized bittorrent search facility assist in that regard? What legitimate content can you find with a specialized bittorrent search engine that you can't find at the web site that would have seeded the content in the first place (which is generally easily findable with a generic web search engine), other than artificially contrived examples that are little more than a proof of concept of something that nobody has any real reason to utilize because there are other equally practical options available, but the seeders of those files are more hung up on the proof of concept than they are on actually distributing the content?
And hey.... the very nature of wikileaks seems to be almost specifically orchistrated to make certain types of people nervous. Whether or not such people deserve to be made to feel this way is irrellevant. How does, for example, Slackware having a torrent of its latest Linux distro cause anybody else to get on edge? And of course... you don't exactly need a torrent search engine to find it either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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!
Having a torrent search engine would do away with Google and the Web altogether, when it comes to distributing content.
Your attitude towards Wikileaks notwithstanding, it's quite obvious that certain types of currently-legal content are being or can be suppressed.
Let's take your example: Slackware is not illegal today. If Microsoft decides it's time to kill linux, they can start a patent lawsuit, seeking an injunction against distribution first.
If an injunction is granted, Slackware would become illegal to distribute before the trial even starts and would continue to remain so for the duration (or even afterwards).
Rinse. Repeat. Microsoft has hundreds of patents it could claim to have been infringed upon. The claims do NOT have to be solid. Just solid enough to go to court.
Are you willing to do without Slackware, if Microsoft so wishes?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
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.
You've sidestepped my point again... that there is absolutely no legitimate content that even remotely necessitates having a search engine specific for torrent files, other than cases that have been artificially contrived to prove a point and where the seeder cares more for proving that point than they do for actually distributing the content, because there are probably at least a dozen other ways that would have been possible to find it without using a bittorrent specific search engine that could have been just as practical, and far less likely to be associated with illegitimate activity, even though the actual material may not be illegitimate itself.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Excuse me for being blunt, but I am beginning to suspect obtuseness on your part.
Your principal claim is
"that there is [...] no legitimate content that [...]necessitates having a search engine specific for torrent files other than cases that have been artificially contrived"
Not so. Depending on your definition of legitimate, of course.
Case in point:
The movie "The Departed" is banned in China.
Please tell me, what would be easier, if you want to see it and are living in China?
Having a search facility within your torrent client, or trying to circumvent the various technical means that the Chinese have for censoring the web, using no more than a browser?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Uhmm..."The Departed" is a copyrighted movie, not freely redistributable content.
It's ironic that the example you've given as a supposed legitimate example isn't something that people can legally distribute via bittorrent in the first place anyplace that Copyright law is upheld, China or otherwise.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ironic, you say? I find it more ironic that, although nobody can legally buy "The Departed" in China, you still whine about copyright infringement.
Want an example involving public domain stuff? How about any Falun Dafa video then? Stuff about Tibet or the Dalai Lama? Anything about Tiananmen square?
You sound like a hacker. Time to get with the program, really. I'm aware of freenet, but I'd rather not have to host CP just so I can safely explain what absolute tossers my country's leaders are.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
It may not necessarily be easy to get access to such information with China's borders, but you've failed to illustrate how having a bittorrent specific search engine would make it any easier to find it. The only thing you've given an example where having a bittorrent specific search engine would be advantageous is with copyrighted content that isn't supposed to be legal for anybody to be freely distributing... comparing that to censorship is a bit unreasonable because copyrighted material *IS* readily available, you just have to pay for it.
Of course, as for the notion of comparing copyright to censorship, I'd like to point out that content under the former is legitimately available, even if for a cost, while content subject to the latter is not... at any cost (although having money may be helpful in acquiring it, acquiring the censored material is still against the law).
It is not my position to justify censorship, by the way... but you introduced the subject into this when I was talking about copyrighted material. It's merely my intent to show that copyright and censorship are not the same.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only thing you've given an example where having a bittorrent specific search engine would be advantageous is with copyrighted content that isn't supposed to be legal for anybody to be freely distributing... comparing that to censorship is a bit unreasonable because copyrighted material *IS* readily available, you just have to pay for it.
I specifically point out "The Departed" is NOT legally available in China, at any cost, and you come up with this claptrap.
I then point out examples of public domain works which are being censored and which could benefit from a distribution network that can neatly bypass the Great Firewall of China and the dependence on Google's censored search results altogether. You choose to ignore me.
You, sir, have been wasting my time.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
You're missing my point... again.
Although the public domain examples you cited could benefit from a distribution system such as bittorrent, none of those examples factually *DO* benefit from a bittorrent specific search engine, even within China's borders. I asked you for a factual example, not a theoretical one... and the only factual example you could list was one that isn't freely legally redistributable in the first place.
I'd ask you to try again, but as you feel responding to me is a waste of your time, I guess we're done.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
none of those examples factually *DO* benefit from a bittorrent specific search engine
That's just because such an engine does not exist yet.
Are you arguing that the types of content in the examples I gave you are not being distributed via torrents and so would not benefit from an in-client search engine? 'Cause if you are, you are dead wrong.
Here is a Google query that you cannot perform from within China. There are many others, of course.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
First of all, you did not use a torrent specific search engine to find that. Secondly, I cannot help but wonder if you really could not possibly find that information within China without a torrent-specific engine. I'd be willing to bet that you could... you just might have to get a bit more creative than just using google (after all, we are talking about government censored information here). Finally, there are many torrent search engines... it's just that they all search specific torrent sites, and most are not truly peer to peer (there are some peer to peer search engines, but I do not know of any that are bittorrent specific). Further, the amount of porn and spam and other tripe on the services that do use peer to peer search engines is so high that most legitimate content ends up getting lost in the noise, and given that historical precedent, I don't think it's very likely that a future bittorrent specific peer-to-peer search engine is liable to help matters.
Regardless... my main point remains... that to date, no truly legitimate purpose has yet been found for which a torrent specific search engine would actually be beneficial other than artificially contrived examples created by people who are more interested in proving a point than distributing the content, or else simply hypothetical situations.
If this should ever change, as you seem to believe it can and will, I'll be happy to admit I was wrong. Somehow, however, I don't think you or I are ever going to see such a time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No true Scotsmen, eh?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.