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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!
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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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
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.
You have been disconnected from the interwebs until further notice for suspected possession of copyright infringement technology.
Infringing technology detected on your PC (by method of our complementary rootkit) includes (but is not limited to):
- FileZilla
- Putty
- TrueCrypt
- PGP
- And last but not least: mTorrent (the evilest)
We hope you enjoy your offline existence banned from the interwebs.
Frankly, we think you got off easy and deserve much worse you terrorist pirate scum.
Regards,
MAFIAA lawyers
P.S. Hahahahah, suckers, you thought this was a game... Thanks for helping us get all this $$$$$ at the price of your freedom!!!
From what I can see, it's pretty much OneSwarm, but without the anonymity.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
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!
This way if you serve a file you'd have no idea who actually downloads it - you'd only get requests from random clients which are not actually downloading the file.
You can further complicate this by not making the request directly, but instead add a counter to the request. Each client decrements the request counter by one and forwards the request to another randomly chosen client. Only when the counter is zero will it actually request the byte from the server.
Of course that would add a lot of overhead - probably better not to make it on byte boundaries, but rather use larger blocks. Also the file server isn't really protected. I suspect there are probably lots of better techniques available already.
...welcome back to 2005 and enjoy Gnutella
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!
I think it's because of the number of downloads at a time.
You typically have only a handful of torrents running vs many files on the other networks.
One at a time downloading: you see nice fast speeds. Lots of files downloading: you see slow speeds all around even if you're going at the same total speed for all files as torrenting would.
That and the somewhat verifiedness you get from a torrent you get from a trusted source as opposed to searching in the other clients. The thing I don't get is why people assume that just because the search is there, it's the only thing that can be used. I would argue ed2k/magnet links and the like are easier than torrents in that they are just links rather than files. You click on the link, it downloads. Find a trustworthy indexing site (comparable to a bittorrent indexing site) and you've got a fairly reliable system that doesn't go away when the tracker does.
It's also not limited to the people who downloaded the exact same torrent as you but to everyone who is looking for a file with the same hash. Why did they use blocks instead of file hashes in bittorrent?
Torrents don't seem to last as long either. They start out fragmented and, rather than sharing everything they have, only a few are active at a time. It's worse for the general availability of files. Per torrent ratios I think mess things up: uploading to get a 1:1 on a file with 1000 seeds is not nearly as important as uploading anything on a file with 0.