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."
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:It's a good start... (Score:5, Insightful)
And exactly how many joe averages run Opera?
Researchers plans (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Decentralize bittorrent
2. Share pirated stuff
3. ???
4. profit
5. Cure cancer?
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:Researchers plans (Score:2, Insightful)
I always feel the need to correct this joke. Get rid of the ??? step as part of the joke is that it doesn't exist and ruins the entire thing. By adding the ??? step it's as if you are looking for the step when the idea is that you deny it is even needed.
If you're always "correcting" a joke did you ever stop to think maybe you just don't get it?
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ivy League (Score:1, Insightful)
I cannot.
Re:Ivy League (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't think that if someone is about to end your life it's correct to end theirs first, to preserve your own?
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's different from eMule/eDonkey protocol how?
Re:Let me see if I have this straight... (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.
Re:Everyone should be aware... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let me see if I have this straight... (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.