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."
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=
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:It's a good start... (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:Centralisation is why BT is so popular (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 prime time - things may change, and there do seem to be sort boxes for heart (which I assume is rating) and magnifying glass looking at a person's neck (which might be comments, but doesn't seem to do anything anyway).
I was hoping this could become a great way to find legal inde mp3s (people rate and comment, I filter by good rating and read comments then download, but it doesn't look like it's going to replace Demonoid without a pretty large critical mass of people.
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (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?
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?
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.
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (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.
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.
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (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:Everyone should be aware... (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.
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (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 chunk of a particular file from me via ed2k.
So, they both have their place. torrent is appropriately named and is great for newly popular content. ed2k is great for getting the fansubs of a 95 episode anime that aired on japanese tv 10 years ago. :)
Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (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 leads to people in turn sharing more which reinforces that trust. A simple positive feedback effect of a good trading system.
Note, that this happens even though some people can leech. As long as most ordinary good people concieve the other side as sharing, they will go to more effort to share themselves. If that trust changes, maybe by an influx of people who just leech, then sharing will start to go down.
Contrast that with emule that claims to be a sharing network instead of trading network. What this basically means is that they pretty much don't reward sharing, and direct trading is discouraged or punished. This decreases trust in the system. Why should you share when you can't trust that the other side does. Therefore people share less and leech more.
The idea of trust is one of the basics in economics, which unfortunally is not so well understood by most, especially politicians. The goverment should stay away from things that reduce trust in the market and instead do neutral stuff (simple taxing without a myriad of exceptions) or even positive stuff that increase market trust (jailing scammer and liers as well as generally enforce laws or creating laws that make it more difficult to lie and scam)