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Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 01:01 PM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."
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P2P BitTorrent Tool Could Replace Pirate Bay 413 comments
With the US and other G8 countries trying to outlaw The Pirate Bay and its ilk, an anonymous reader suggests that a solution may have emerged out of Cornell University. A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.
Submission: Researchers Make BitTorrent Truly Decentralized by Anonymous Coward
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It's a good start... (Score:5, Interesting)
...and hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin). And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc.
=Smidge=
Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Insightful)
And exactly how many joe averages run Opera?
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Funny)
Me, for one.
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
You're replying to a slashdot comment saying that you run Opera. What makes you think you qualify as Joe Average?
He said "Me, for one" instead of "I, for one"? /. elitist would munge their grammar in such a fashion
No
Parent
Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
No /. elitist would munge their grammar in such a fashion
I propose that the poster is so elite that he is completely out of touch with Joe Average. Alas, due to this, his attempt at pretending to be average failed.
The correct response should have been
Parent
Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
He said "Me, for one" instead of "I, for one"?
I, for one welcome our new Joe Average Opera-using overlords.
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
funny you mention that.. people whos computers i have had to clean viruses and crap off of because it was obvious they where browseing porn with IE.. install opera and inform them to use it instead... they have a odd face but hey i havn't had to touch any of their comps again (thankfuly)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
Opera and myself have been browsing the web for porn since 2000 :) I never leave my pants on the floor without it :)
Uhh, too much inf... No wait
-1, Informative ;)
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
My mom recently told me that I should switch to Opera, and she just turned 60 a few days ago. But, she also plays WoW and is more active in web development than I am... so I guess my family isn't exactly "average".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, yes, unless the voices in my head contradict her.
Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly the opposite of what companies looking to replace http/ftp want.
See, here's the thing:
Bittorrent only does file transfer. All other p2p clients do file transfer and search.
Bittorrent is massively popular. All other p2p clients are struggling to get anyone to use them.
And what lesson do people learn from this? Apparently that Bittorrent needs search. These are hardly the first people to have tried this, and found that nobody wants it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That having search functionality will make people not want to use a protocol?
Centralisation is why BT is so popular (Score:5, Insightful)
BT is popular because you can go to a reputable listing site, find a well seeded and good quality torrent with comments by others to back it up and download it quickly. Compared to the chances you take searching traditional P2P systems, full of dodgy encodes, fake file names and incompletes it's obvious why people turn to BT first.
Re:Centralisation is why BT is so popular (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and you can still do this even with Tribler. They're not mutually exclusive.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But, what I really want is a way to sort by seeders AND 4 or 5 star ratings AND filter by category AND quickly view tags (dupe, spam, nuked, wrong category, etc) on a torrent. No site lets me do this, but Demonoid comes pretty close with filters.
Decentralization is a pretty good idea, but it's certainly a long way from being ready for pr
Re: (Score:2)
The eMule network has ed2k URI's [wikipedia.org] which use a hash function to identify a specific file. I don't see them used much, but I'm not a big P2P'er.
Let me see if I have this straight... (Score:3, Interesting)
Full decentralized, search capabilities, with many people able to share pieces of the same file... I think we already have something like that [wikipedia.org].
News flash: Centralisation is a strength of BitTorrent.
Re: (Score:2)
News Flash: New feature does not remove older.
I just don't see how this would hurt torrents in any way. (unless you talk about cliques of people worried about their private trackers, who might be exposed to public by some seach feature, in which case solution is not use client that does that.)
Also, Torrent was hardly centralized lately, popular cients support several tracers per torrent, user-to-user peer exchange and tracer discovery. Hell, those "centralized servers" usually just offered torrents with tra
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I do. Having non-tracker searching might resurrect some of my current dead torrents. I hate being stuck at 80% forever, and there might be a seed somewhere out there just waiting to be discovered.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
News flash: Centralisation is a strength of BitTorrent.
Ever since the demise of Napster and Grokster, followed by the public death of eDonkey, several large ED2K servers and various gnutella clients centralization has not been a strength and everyone has been running as fast as possible in the other direction.
The problem with centralization is that it gives the **AA a big fat target to aim their lawsuits at. And they've quite successfully sued P2P companies into oblivion and hassled websites out of existence.
Everyone should be aware... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the website, Tribler will exchange torrent downloading history by default.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, and it also states it can be easily turned off by "disabling the recommender in the Preference menu".
I think you're missing the point.
It's a stupid and arguably dangerous default setting to have enabled. The only way the company could make the **AA's lawsuit campaign any easier is to e-mail them the name of every torrent you download.
Researchers plans (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Decentralize bittorrent
2. Share pirated stuff
3. ???
4. profit
5. Cure cancer?
Re:Researchers plans (Score:5, Informative)
The joke comes from South Park. In the South Park Episode, "Gnomes", the following sign explains the gnomes' plan to steal underpants: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Gnomes_plan.png [wikimedia.org] .
Parent
eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is the BitTorrent world slowly converging on features and an architecture that the eDonkey network [wikipedia.org] has had for years?.
I mean, BitTorrent started out as a way to download big files, like Linux ISO's. Then people started making big torrent search web sites, similar to eDonkey servers. Then people made BitTorrent clients that had a queue of downloads (e.g utorrent), quite similar to eDonkey clients. Now these people have made Torrent searching distributed, just like eDonkey and Kademlia.
I've never been much impressed by BitTorrent (gee, can you tell?). Just what is it that makes it more popular than eDonkey/eMule? Is it just the reputation and hype that has built up around "Torrents"?
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, I'll give you that. It often takes a while to start a download, especially if it's not widely available. eDonkey seems to be setup for college students - run it 24/7 and everything is queued. I wonder how BitTorrent does it differently. Surely not every BT download starts immediately - there can't always be enough idle peers (with the content you want) to make that possible. Is your experience mainly with new or old content, or both?
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to have some misconceptions on how BitTorrent works. Basically, when you start a torrent download, your client asks the tracker (a central server that's keeping track of things) which computers have the download in question. Your client then asks those computers for pieces of the whole download. The pieces come in random order, and it might take a while for you to get the whole file, but the strength of BitTorrent is that, by asking many computers for small pieces of the file, you're getting a share of the collective upload bandwidth of every computer that's got part of the file, rather than getting the complete upload bandwidth of a single computer. This lets the download start immediately, and means that even peers that don't have the complete download yet can help speed things up for you.
Parent
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's different from eMule/eDonkey protocol how?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the difference is simply in the number of files and the time period.
torrent: open for only a few hours and for a single download. Usually for recent tv shows.
amule: on 24/7 and am sharing out all of my anime fansubs(2000-ish individual files). Some of them over a decade old.
My overall upload bandwidth is throttled to about the same level for each, but the upload bandwidth for ed2k is distributed amongst my entire collection of files. Therefore people have to wait a lot longer to get a particular
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
I've only used eMule, so I don't know how much these problems affect other eDonkey clients, but in my experience these are the big issues:
1. You can only start sharing once you've downloaded an entire piece of the file. The same is true of BT, but eMule pieces are big and have a fixed size (around 9 MB). Torrent piece sizes are variable, and they're often less than 1 MB. This means you can start sharing sooner, especially since...
2. ...eMule severely limits the upload speed per connection. If you set your upload rate to 30 KB/sec, you'll end up with 10 connections, each uploading at 3 KB/sec. At that rate, it takes nearly an hour to transfer an entire piece of the file, and until that's finished, the peer can't share any of the data you've been sending him.
3. eMule's credit system is mostly only useful when you're downloading a group of files that are shared by the same users who are also interested in some similar files you have (i.e. you share S1E1 and gain credits that you redeem when downloading S1E2). BT provides immediate gratification: your uploads are almost always reciprocated right then and there.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How can BitTorrent, as it's been suggested, start downloading almost immediately when eDonkey supposedly takes longer?
Noone said that it would go fast. You'll download at about the speed of your upload (and sometimes slower when it is a badly seeded torrent) which still is far better than emule. Of course, on well seeded torrents you get higher speeds as seeders contribute bandwidth without taking any.
However, the real difference between bittorrent and emule is trust in the system. Bittorrent users have a far higher trust that peers on the other side will share as sharing is rewarded by higher upload speeds. That trust lea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're exaggerating ridiculously, a file with 2000 sources you should start getting within a couple minutes with emule. A file with only a few sources may have large queues that take a while.
Having queues at all is the problem. Don't make people wait to participate in the swarm. Give them data immediately, so they can upload it to others.
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the fact that
a) The torrent sites are easy to search, have good files and few fakes.
b) The tit-for-tat algorithm does a pretty good job of ensuring people upload stuff to you. Every other P2P software I used before bittorrent was slow and unreliable.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it just me, or is the BitTorrent world slowly converging on features and an architecture that the eDonkey network has had for years?.
No, it's not.
What is happening is that there are people who think that what BitTorrent really needs is to become eDonkey. And then they make a big deal about how they are going to turn BitTorrent into eDonkey.
And then they find out that pretty much nobody wants eDonkey, and that's why they are not using it, but using BitTorrent instead. And their wonderful project slowly dies and is forgotten.
And then we wait half a year, and the next person steps up to the plate to turn BitTorrent into eDonkey.
Stupid Question (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this is a naive question, but how does a client find any peers to query without a centralized server to get a list from?
Tribler and Cubit (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of Cubit
Tribler takes an interesting approach to the distributed search problem -- collect Torrents in the background and perform on-demand searches locally. To improve recall, skew the Torrent collection to collect mostly from those that have similar interests.
It does raise a few questions. Search quality for less popular Torrents will likely be affected. Searching for Torrents outside your typical interests may also be problematic. And given a Torrent may in theory be replicated to every Tribler client, there is some bandwidth concerns.
I guess only time will tell if limiting search to only the files that have been previously downloaded by one of your peers is sufficient for most users.
Cubit takes a different approach -- perform efficient, distributed search over all the available Torrents in a manner that is resilient to typos and spelling mistakes (from both the search string and the content). Rely on a separate mechanism (such as user comments or a reputation system like Credence [cornell.edu]) to determine good Torrents from SPAM in the search results.
The approaches seem complimentary, and I'm looking forward to testing out the new Tribler once the website recovers from the Slashdot-ing.
Re: (Score:2)
There are already decentralized mechanisms for finding peers given a torrent -- the problem that this is trying to address is a decentralized mechanism for finding torrents.
Re:Ivy League (Score:4, Informative)
Good to see the best minds of this generation have chosen to benefit humankind with... ...a better way to steal stuff!
Bit Torrent is not always used to steal stuff. Its how some game updates are downloaded, and most versions of Linux offer a Bit Torrent download.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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You seem to be implying that killing something is never a correct course of action. I can think of several not-uncommon instances where it is a correct action.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
He said something, not someone. Hunting animals for food is generally accepted, killing animals in life-threatening situations too.
Re:Ivy League (Score:5, Informative)
Actually far more rounds are expended in target practice than in killing people, meaning that target practice is a much more common use for a gun than murder.
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Re:Solving the wrong problems (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want data from the internet, somebody is going to need your IP address.
Yes, but the computer that has your IP address doesn't need to know the data, and visa-versa. That's the whole point behind onion routing [wikipedia.org]; you route through one or more neutral intermediaries, and use end-to-end encryption. Neither endpoint needs to know the other's IP address, and the intermediaries don't have any idea what data is being exchanged. With two or more intermediate nodes you don't even have to disclose who you're talking to.
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