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.

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.

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: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.

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: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.