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."

Comments

What

[AnonGCB]

Slashdot UTF fail. muTorrent, or utorrent, not Torrent.

Re:What

[asvravi]

He is talking about a million uTorrent.

Re:What

[Anachragnome]

"A hug."

Hilarious, heart-warming and creepy, all-in-one.

To clarify

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:To clarify

[DamienRBlack]

Wouldn't this experience be a lot like the old eDonkey 2000 experience. The problem with no centralized servers is that no one pays attention to ratio and the like. In fact I don't think most eDonkey users ever thought in terms of ratios. Also, there is no place to go to request stuff and ask for new seeds. The reason I switched to torrents, (and it took me a long time), is because of the centralized tracking. Sure, the popular stuff is usually available, but try to get something obscure that you can only find online and you are probably screwed. At least that is how eDonkey always was. Now eDonkey had some servers, but my point is that I feel like the experience would be the same as sharing on the eD2k network. No comments, no tracking, no ratio enforcement, no one pulling fakes and spam. eD2k was a hazardous wasteland but of mines. How would any of this be addressed with peer-to-peer torrents?

Re:To clarify

[Nursie]

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.

Ok, but.

[MrQuacker]

But how does moderation work then?

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.

Re:Ok, but.

[Chuck Chunder]

You don't need a single "trusted entitity", a web of trust is based on your own prior experience and what others around you will vouch for.

If you have downloaded a torrent signed by someone before and been happy with it your software might be happy downloading more from them without warning. If you haven't seen anything from that person before your software might poll your peers to see if they will vouch for it and ultimately give you a choice one way or another.

Various key servers could be set up to serve trust information but would not present a critical point of failure or (for dodgy torrents) be at much legal risk because they wouldn't be serving anything remotely related to other peoples copyrighted information.

Wow. p2p is turning net into a huge cloud

[unity100]

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 ...

Excellent Work You've Invented Gnutella

[phantomcircuit]

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.

Re:Excellent Work You've Invented Gnutella

[aiken_d]

Are you kidding? Once I get my hacked client together to return Rick Astley videos for every search any peer does, there will be even more complaining.

Re:Another Victory

[biryokumaru]

Yes, because the only reason anyone would ever create anything is to get a paycheck.

Re:Back in Time.

[Yvan256]

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.

The future.

[onefriedrice]

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.

Re:Back in Time.

[pavon]

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.

Re:Back in Time.

[hoggoth]

No Bittorrent client will be complete until it has an email client built in. A flight simulator would be nice too.

Not new

[Per Wigren]

From what I can see, it's pretty much OneSwarm, but without the anonymity.

Re:Another Victory

[mcgrew]

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.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "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? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of