Azureus Decentralizes Bittorrent 672
BobPaul writes "While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?"
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lack of search... (Score:5, Insightful)
No the lack of search is exactly what differentiates the BitTorrent network (though its not really a network is it? It piggy backs off webservers) from other P2P apps.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:1, Insightful)
What? (Score:0, Insightful)
I can only imagine...
"OMG, PEOPLE USE BITTORRENT TO PIRATE!1!1! LIES!!1! -1, FLAMEBAIT!!@!@U!(@"
Re:Torrent distribution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree with Parent, why do
Re:Torrent distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't _need_ to be ported. There are at least two possible reasons to do so anyhow, one "moral", one pragmatic:
* It's difficult to distribute the Java runtime environment for some Linux distributions due to licensing issues. That means that for some of the most popular distros, installing Azureus is decidedly non-trivial for someone that's not fairly familiar with non-standard installation.
* If you are using no other Java app on the system (I don't), the footprint of Azureus + JavaVM is very sizeable. Having something run under a VM that's in use anyhow makes the app use much less resources.
Bonus reasons is that more alternative clients will shake out bugs and issues with the system, and will encourage further experimentation and exploration of the system and the UI.
At the same time, porting it (or reimplementing in another client) takes away exactly zero from the Azureus developers or users. It's a win-win situation.
Why? Because "the spice must flow" (Score:0, Insightful)
Java 1.5 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you say 'wah wah bit torrent is faster', etc, it is only like that because it is centralised and so a tracker can make sure everyone is seeding, there are statistics which encourage people to seed, and most importantly, there are far less files, and so the bandwidth isnt spread out as thinly.
The more these guys work on decentralising BT, the closer you get to just being a less efficient and less established clone of emule. Whats the point?
As far as 'warezing' is concerned (99% of traffic), BT is a terrible protocol. The trouble is, these kids see the speed of BT and think thats the way to go. They realise the centralisation is a problem, and so try to fix that. Without realising they are just reinventing the wheel. They think they are going to get the best of both worlds, because they are just warezing kids and don't know any better.
Completely different market (Score:5, Insightful)
That means
a) helluva lot more complexity in terms of making it work
b) lots of complexity in making it actually anonymous
c) massive loss of bandwidth due to proxying data around
Judging by the website:
"NOTE: The only way to speed up the ANts connection system is to let the net grow. Only with a reasonable number of high speed peers (i.e. peers that handles up to 30 connections) properly configured (firewall, ip etc.) initial connection can be easy and fast. So don't care about connection speed by now... let your node run and it will find peers or they will find it! DON't ASK TOO MUCH TO A NET MADE UP OF 20/30 peers..."
I call shenanigans. The demand will scale with the supply, in fact you start running into MORE problems with finding content on a large network, not less. See Freenet. Oh, and I hope the actual number of nodes is higher. With that few, you can map out the entire network and analyze it apart almost no matter how brilliant the software is...
Kjella
Re:This is not anything new. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Torrent distribution (Score:3, Insightful)
For all intents and purposes, if it can't be pulled down and installed automatically as part of the application install process, that precludes the use by the large majority of users.
Re:Tor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Newbs can't download or install anything (Score:2, Insightful)
You obviously have neither parents nor an Uncle Bob who "knows computers" but who is always ringing you up for advise.
I do, several.
None however run Linux, (nor use bittorrent). With OS X, Java is already there. With Windows it is really simple to install. Will.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is, you are a liar and a child molestor and you eat babies. How do I know this? I don't, but, like you, I will assert it to be true without providing any supporting information.
Though I cannot refute your assertion with solid numbers (as the only info I can find is either procured by pro-gun nuts or anti-gun nuts), I can refute it with simple logic.
The local rod & gun club gets about 50 people per day, averaged out across a seven day week. The reality is that most of the business is on the weekend, but an average is sufficient for this exercise.
Using your statistic, that means that, in my town alone, there would need to be 5000 shootings DAILY.
Let's assume the traffic at my local club is average. Since there are approximately 10000 US cities (link [google.com]), even if only 50% had a rod & gun club, that would mean there would be 250,000 recreational gun uses each day. Assuming this is the 0.01 minority, this means that there would have to be 25 million gun shootings in the US each day. Each year, every one in the US would have been shot... twelve times.
Now, getting back to BitTorrent. I would tend to agree that BitTorrent is analagous to gun use in that its primary use is recreational in nature. The difference here, however, is that BitTorrent's recreational use is more likely to be illegal in nature than not.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have to venture a guess that 95% of gun use is against targets, 4.9% is against animals, and less than
I don't understand... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the need for decentralized trackers? I don't get it! Bittorrent is supposed to be a haven for law-abiding citizens to trade Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg text files.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:3, Insightful)
So there is still a fairly just debate over the fact that guns are by nature evil
Bittornet is designed to take the load off of server , and by its nature is good
However there is an argument that it can be used to help people download infringing materials.
So Guns are designed to kill , Torrent are designed to aid.
many people use guns for legitimate reasons such as Hunting for food or to cull an animal population.
Guns are also used by murderers to murder people
Many people use bittorent for legitimate reasons such as downloading files that are not copyright infringments in their country!
Torrents can be used for a slightly negative reasons, IE Infringment by those scurvy Infringers of the High seas.
So to sum it up
at best , guns kill for food at worst guns kill.
At best torrents help the internet , at worst they potentialy infringe some copyright.
I gotta say... (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent is great. p2p is great, in general. But continually highlighting how great it is for piracy (yeh, regardless of how lame the RIAA/MPAA are) just puts more negative attention on it and further affixes the concept of "p2p is bad" in people's minds, rather than what they should be thinking.
I don't know if slashdot editors actually are willing to edit posts rather than just put them up (I can see reasons for doing it and reasons for not doing it), but this post would have been just super without the last sentence.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry but the gun was not invented for recreational use. It was invented as a weapon of war to maim and destroy people. You think the gun was created so people can have gun clubs and target practice? Oh dear god I hope not. The vast majority of the times a gun is used in the world is not for fun. Unless you consider killing and scaring people fun then yes its recreational.
Anyway the BT and gun analogy is misleading. I don't think anyone is going to die from the misuse of BT. Oh maybe those poor artists will starve to death because you downloaded all their CDs. But other than that.. no one.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bittorrent was designed to download. The analogy to the gun is stupid ad best. You can't threaten a download with azureus. "I MIGHT USE SOMEBODY ELSE'S BANDWIDTH TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FILE! FEAR ME!"
Then again, I could be completely wrong, because, as I recall, sport utility vehicles were designed for offroad driving, not taking up 4 parking spaces at the fucking Krogers, you fucking asshole. How are those keytip-sized scratches looking?
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
Guns are designed to eject a small, dense projectile along a highly predictable trajectory at very high speeds. This makes them very useful for hitting objects at some distance with a force that the object can not sustain without damage. This makes them a very useful tool for killing, but the killing is still an act carried out by the user of the tool.
So I guess I am argueing that guns are designed to do something that is very useful when trying to kill, not to kill.
As to whether either rifles or torrents should be illegal, no they shouldn't, they both have plenty of legitimate uses. If you don't think rifles are useful, then you don't understand that in many places(Michigan for one), deer are essentially pests, tree rats, if you will. They destroy trees and have a huge negative impact on forest regeneration. One great way to keep the population in check is to shoot and eat them. There are ~300,000(out of about 1.75 million) deer shot each year in Michigan alone. Compare that to the nation wide murders of less than 20,000(yearly) and you have a pretty concrete example that at least some guns are being used for legitimate purposes(controlling the deer herd). Let's not get into the fact that the herd is where it is due to the elimination of natural predators.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shooting can be FUN. Not violent. It's an activity that takes a lot of skill to do right. Learning windage adjustments. Learning the temperment of your weapon. Recording datasets and adjusting your loadings to shrink a target group. Bedding the action or recrowning a barrel. There is a lot of work to shooting accurately, and a lot of people enjoy that activity just as an activity, with no ulterior motive (no more than any basketball player, football player, or golfer has).
That's where I think the gap exists. There's a large group of people out there that have the unwaivering belief that guns are out there only to kill people. Target practice? Oh yeah they're training to kill people. Hunting? Yeah they're just satisfying a violent streak. They'll break and kill people eventually. Self defense? They're just looking for an excuse to kill people.
Despite so much evidence to the contrary you still have people with the severest case of tunnel-vision I've every seen.
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:1, Insightful)
So, Bob and Jenny have sex most Thursday nights, for their married life, 40 years say (married at 30, die at 70), and they have two kids.
They therefore have sex ~1500 times in their life (+/- a few, and less in their old age) but only two occasions have resulted in conception.
I'd say thats recreational use.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, this also renders the grandparents claim meaningless:
Even if BitTorrent was mostly used for illegal purposes (which is impossible to know for certain), this would in no way invalidate the fact that it is used for legal ones (such as distributing Linux distributions) as well.
BTW. I can't help but notice that every time there's some kind of argument, it will turn into a debate about firearms sooner or later.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
Odd. I thought they were designed to propel a lump of metal at a high rate of speed along a trajectory determined by the operator.
guns are by nature evil.
Made by the devil himself, right?
Guns are objects. They are not inherently 'Good' or 'Evil'. Good and evil are used to describe human morals and ethics.
Calling guns 'evil' is like calling copyright infringement 'piracy.'
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
For God's sake, please!!! Basically, all the tracker does is distributing a list random list of clients to you and keeping statistics.
BitTorrent is fast because your client makes sure it is getting the most it can from the network using it's tit-for-tat logic: if a peers uploads in a nice speed to you, so you will do to him. If a peer is not uploading fast enough you will just stop uploading to him or upload to him slower. It's this selfish behavior that makes BT work - not the tracker!
eMule is also decentralizing itself (with kad), so, what's your point? By decentralizing all they want is avoiding the only point of failure that BT has: its dependency on a tracker. But, then again, it is not the tracker that makes BT faster then eMule...
ON the other had, a emule server is nothing close to a BT tracker. Basically, the first only is concerned about collection meta-data and handling searches, the later just handle source searches and keeps tracks of who has each piece of the file.
Yeah, right. It just doesn't matter that BT is the result of a PhD thesis and there are lots of papers in ACM and IEEE stating that "Yes, BT supports flash crowds and is able to keep with a almost insane number of users downloading". Those are all warezing folks, for sure!
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry but the gun was not invented for recreational use. It was invented as a weapon of war to maim and destroy people.
It really makes no sense to talk about "the gun". Although the first guns were weapons of war, they have fairly little in common with modern firearms. During the long (and continuing) evolution of guns, many different uses impacted their development, and some of them had nothing to do with war. For example, one very significant advance -- the long, rifled barrel -- was quickly adopted by armies after its military capabilities were demonstrated during the US Revolutionary War, but that advance was developed to produce a better tool for gathering food. There are many other such examples.
Guns today are designed and built for many different purposes, and their designs reflect it. Some are primarily designed for killing or wounding people. Military arms and many handguns fit this category, with many subcategories for particular environments and goals. Some are designed solely for supported target shooting, using very small bullets and enormously long, thick, heavy barrels. Some are designed for hunting, with widely differing designs based on the characteristics of the animal to be hunted and the environment in which it is hunted.
And, yes, the analogy between guns and BT is very misleading, except insofar as they're both tools that can be applied to many different purposes. But that is such a large category that it would be wise to pick a different, less inflammatory tool than the gun for the comparison. Like a hammer. Or a car. Or a TCPA Trusted Platform Module ;-)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also used (quite effectively, even according to the FBI) as a means of defense against violent human predators.
I have no problem if you don't want to carry or use a gun. Go ahead, be prey - your safety isn't my problem. It isn't even the problem of the cops, according to recent court rulings. But you don't have any business trying to turn me into prey just because you can't stand the notion that I may not be as spineless as you are.
Max
You'd be crying anyway. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were doing all of that on a 2GHz with only 1GB RAM, you'd be crying even if you weren't running Azureus.
--
Need Referals? The ref stops here [refstop.com]
Re:em.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you think people stopped using the C-based bittorrent clients? It's because they didn't "just work". They didn't let you easily manage more than one stream, or throttle the bandwidth, or give nice-looking feedback on what parts were done, or recover from errors (ie not just die all the sudden), or support plug-ins, or have a built-in http server to check status, or work cross-platform, etc.
It would take a long time to make an interface as nice as Azureus in wxPython because writing widgets that display what chunks of the file are downloaded, the bandwith charts, etc and making it all update in realtime and stay consistent with your non-python core code would not be a simple task. Managing lots of multithreaded channels in C (or C++) and making it efficient and reliable would also not happen; your app would crash unexpectedly because doing that in those languages takes a lot of work. In Java it might take a day to add plug-in support and, if you wanted them to, the plug-ins could do basically any other part of the program could. That's essentially impossible in C, and very risky in a scripting language (since there are basically no sanity checks whatsoever).
So yeah, when you want to sell some complicated IT "solution", wxPython + C is a "good" choice. But for something like Azureus Java is really the best choice.
Re:Torrent distribution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever your stance on copyright issues and such, the fact of the matter is that the technological revolution that has put a PC in most any home in the so-called developed world COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without piracy. What we call "p2p" today is just a relatively new way to do the same thing that has been going on since the floppy disk became standard.
I used to swap floppies via snailmail, long before any normal person had a modem at home. Which was perfectly cool, since neither RIAA, MPAA, BSA or whathaveyounot were legally allowed to inspect mail. I used to get thick envelopes full of floppies from Iceland, Finland, Germany, England, Italy, all over the place. And sent full floppies back. Chock full of warez from such fine groups as Pompey Pirates, Automation, Bad Brew Crew and others. I'm sure there are representatives for the "I used to bang rocks together to get ones and zeroes"-crowd out there who are getting ready to jump in right now and claim to have been trading fortran code written with a quilt pen for making punchcard nudie pics decades ago, or whatever.
Where would the PC be today without warez? Would 200GB hard-drives would be standard in workstations at this moment, if it weren't for good old warez? Would "Doom" have been a success if almost every kid on the planet with a computer had a pirate copy? Would people buy graphics cards twice the price of a standalone games console if they had to buy every title they wanted to play? Would the PC so completely dominate the computer games industry if it weren't for piracy? Would CD-burners ever have gotten into the home?
I can't say. Probably not. What I do know is that digital piracy has had a significant impact and has made all of us "consumers" spend our money differently. We have for instance neglected to buy as many copies of Britney Spears' ".. baby one more time" as we did Michael Jackson's "Thriller". Which you can interpret together with estimated downloads on p2p networks and say "kids aren't buying music any more, they're downloading it for free instead". Or you can try to grep reality and see that most kids spend their money on a lot more things now than they did. There are more shiny objects of desire to aquire than yesterday. The stars are standing shoulder to shoulder where before there were only a few, and when a star fails to sell any records, a new one is there before you can say "overhyped musically insignificant crap". Not only music artists and cinema tickets and rentals are avaliable any more. DVDs, cell phone content, handheld games, computer games, console games, online games, and so on.
I bet a good portion of the people who fail to show up at the screening of whatever "kung fu cop" movie is screening at the moment are at home watching something really good that they would have NEVER heard of were it not for piracy, like for instance this really good Thai martial arts/action movie which you would probably have never come across if I had not given you a tip: Ong-Bak.2003.DVDRip.XviD-VALiOMEDiA
(if you're l33t you'll know how to find it, if you're n00b you'll have to make some friends who can teach you how to be l33t. An excellent way to make l33t friends is to host an FTP server with loads of disk on a fast static link.)
The freedom of piracy means that people are able to experience the state of the art, even if they aren't aware of the product, can't afford it, can't find it, or maybe even are too stingy to buy. But so what, because through this sharing of data people are discerning the crap from the useful. People are recommending things to each other. Quality prevails in piracy, because it is natural selection. As people discover the new possibilities of various pieces of technology, they start to desire it. This sort marketing cannot be bought. For the companies that have good products at affordable prices and with good avaliability
Re:A step in the right direction... (Score:3, Insightful)
My kid has a far better chance of drowning or dying in a fall than getting shot. You won't, however, see me campaigning to outlaw swimming pools or ladders.
Unlike you I see an actual value in gun ownership: self defense.
I'd have to say the number of citizens who've SUCCESSFULLY fended off a burgler/rapist/murderer with a gun is MUCH lower than the number of people that use guns to go shoot up schools/stores/people, etc.
According to the FBI somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 violent crimes are prevented every year because the intended victim was carrying a gun. The gun is actually discharged in less than 1/10 of 1% of these cases, and most of the time the discharge doesn't result in an actual injury. So you're dead wrong in your assumption.
The FBI no longer publishes the study in question, but there are plenty of others that support these statistics. One of the most scientific and widely-reknown is "Firearms and Violence: A Critical View" by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; you used to be able to get a pdf version of their report online and I have a copy of it myself. Unless you're going to go completely whacko and contend that these folks have a huge pro-gun bias I suggest that you use this study (along with all the others cited in the paper) to educate yourself on the actual defensive use of guns in the U.S. and its efficacy in preventing violent crimes.
Max