Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent 262
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."
Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Everyone should be aware... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the website, Tribler will exchange torrent downloading history by default.
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.
Re:Everyone should be aware... (Score:3, Informative)
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] .
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:0, Informative)
The difference between emule and bittorrent is that bittorrent is *effective*. Emule has always been a completely slow piece of shit. Bittorrent became popular because it's typically FAST on bandwidth speeds!
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.
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.
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.
Re:Ivy League (Score:3, Informative)
He said something, not someone. Hunting animals for food is generally accepted, killing animals in life-threatening situations too.
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.
First?!?! eXeem was first (Score:2, Informative)
I still remember when suprnova closed down and they started development on eXeem which sounds to be exactly what they are trying to do here. That project didn't even last for a year.
I believe that those researchers will fail the same way as eXeem failed.
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.
Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Stupid Question (Score:1, Informative)
utorrent uses 3 methods to get peers without needing to use a central tracker.
1) DHT
2) Local Peer Discovery
3) Peer Exchange