P2P BitTorrent Tool Could Replace Pirate Bay

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.

Dude.

They haven't even passed their unconstitutional law. And here you are already defeating it. You're supposed to give them a few minutes of satisfaction.

Re:Dude.

Where in the constitution is the right to file share? Constitutional law isn't my field, but saying file sharing is a subset of freedom of speech seems like a stretch. I do agree though: this is closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

Yes. What's unconstituional

I have to agree with the parent here.

I've read the GP's post and I've been pulling out the Old Constitution trying to figure out where he's coming from.

We, the US, are governed by the rule of law. And sometimes, the rule of law is very unfair for a few of us. BUT, it will correct itself eventually and to be honest, I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.

Nonsense

We, the US, are governed by the rule of law.

Sure, if by "rule of law" you mean "arbitrary decree of unaccountable rulers".

And sometimes, the rule of law is very unfair for a few of us. BUT, it will correct itself eventually and to be honest, I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.

This is pure fantasy, and is the kind of thinking that leads to bloodshed. If abuses are not resisted through active, vigorous civil disobedience, then your "eventual correction" IS a bloody revolution.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

We, the US, are governed by the rule of law. And sometimes, the rule of law is very unfair for a few of us. BUT, it will correct itself eventually and to be honest, I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.

The problem is that, for the moment, the will of the people is being overshadowed by the will of the corporations/rich/government/folks-in-power.

Companies spend literally millions of dollars lobying the lawmakers. They give them various gifts, incentives, and outright bribes. Pretty much anyone elected to office, beyond the very local level, is in somebody else's pocket. Which means that the laws that get passed are not the ones that the nation as a whole wants, but rather what the people with lots of money to spend want.

The only thing that we the people can do about it is oppose those laws at every possible opportunity, and oppose them loudly. Protest peacefully but loudly. Civil disobedience. Circumvent whatever technical hurdles are placed in our way.

Perhaps this law is not actually "unconstitutional" in the literal sense of the word... I sincerely doubt if there's any text in there about a right to P2P... But I garontee that the founding fathers did NOT want us ruled by a government that doesn't listen to its citizens.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

I prefer "eventually" to a bloody revolution. I mean "bloody" in the "folks are dieing in the streets" bloody - not the British version.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."

by:

Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source:

November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

I completely agree with Thomas Jefferson, but the few of us (relative comparison) are the only ones who care, the masses are too busy watching American Idol, Survivor, sensational news to pay attention to any of this anymore. So recently I have really taken to an excerpt from Fahrenheit 451:

Granger: "....When the war's over perhaps we can be of some use in the world."
Montag: "Do you really think they'll listen then?"
Granger: "If not, we'll just have to wait.....But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them."

So even though we check slashdot everyday and post these stories and our replies. The masses will not listen until they want to. They would rather be tuned out to reality and no one can force them to tune in.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

Congress can create whatever laws they want. Sure, the supreme court can strike down those laws, but they can also let them stick, at their discretion. It's not like the supremes are any more accountable than congress is.

I agree that free sharing of information (in all its various forms) is beneficial in a utilitarian sense. However, I think it's more important to point out that we do have the individual right to freely share information. The constitution and the law can infringe upon that, but they can't revoke it.

Re:Yes. What's unconstituional

The Bill of Rights doesn't give a list of rights you posess, it gives a list of rights that the government cannot take away under any circumstances. It's also stated in the constitution that any power not explicitly given to the federal government belongs to the states or the people.

Re:Dude.

Cubit [sourceforge.net]

This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks...

As I contemplated when AT&T started saying they want to fight piracy on the wire [blogspot.com], the most effective way is for the ISP to cooperate with the MPAA, where the MPAA gives a graph of "These people are exchaning a large copyrighted file, block it".

If ISPs move in that direction, this defense won't help, and thats probably the bigger threat for blocking P2P piracy, as there are always countries of convienece to set up piratebay like operations.

Encryption doesn't help...

Encryption doesn't help. You can participate as clients of a swarm to get the identity of the members of the swarm, which is the information the ISPs need to block the swarm.

Re:This can't stop "graph takedown" attacks...

Nope. There are other things you can do of course. Reputation based schemes like Credence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(reputation_management_scheme [wikipedia.org] ) applied to peers could help you boot off peers out of swarms with no or poor reputation. This would force certain organizations to build reputation up first, but keeping that will be a tough cookie. Won't be fool-proof, but will make it harder. Not many people will give RIAA/MPAA the thumbs up.

Then there is small world theory. Downloading stuff through trackers from people you don't know is somewhat silly. You should be able to get the same content (though a bit slower) through semi-trusted contacts. The only way to defeat that is infiltration by certain organizations, but, rather tedious and difficult.

You can also create a scheme where you us peers as proxies. Instead of downloading something directly, you ask a peer to relay a bunch of encrypted anonymous bytes for you. Will slow down speeds well over 50%, but difficult to defeat.

There about a billion more ways. The fact that they are not implemented yet, is simply because most p2p-apps/networks don't want to start an arms race.

A poor replacement.

Use of this will significantly increase the number of fake files uploaded.

At least TPB allows file comments which allows fakes to be spotted pretty fast.

Also, do not forget about the amount of traffic private torrent sites get - which this is not a real alternative to.

Self Healing

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -Joe Gilmore

Re:Self Healing

John Gilmore. :p

poison?

I think that the hardest part of adding search to any p2p system is that it is too easy for malicious users (*IAA thugs) to poison search results, and I don't see anything on their page that deals with that.

To design a reliable search system, you need to have a good rating system, and a solid trust model. At the same time, you need to avoid making the trust model so tight that new users cannot get any search results (freenet).

Also, I think it should be noted that a lot of bittorrent usage is moving towards the subscription model, so people should be able to search for channels as well, not just single files.

I am interested in seeing where this project leads, but I don't think people will be completely abandoning the well organized, well moderated torrent sites any time soon, but it will be nice to be able to search quickly for files without needing to open a browser.

Re:In *WHAT* network?

And when can we expect *that* to get shut down?

      Just a couple months after everyone has stopped using it and is using something else.

Re:In *WHAT* network?

It seems to work the other way. It'll get shut down about a year after a better solution is developed and about a month before everyone starts using that better solution.

Re:Kademlia

To my knowledge, Kademlia uses exact keyword searching, not approximate searching. While distributed hash tables are a fairly effective decentralized searching mechanism, it's tough to move them from exact-match searching to more general searching.

Other DHT systems are also used to list peers for trackerless torrents and to find peers for particular files on networks like eMule (by searching by hash).

Re:Gnutella

* The network is much more efficient.
* All this network is sharing is torrent metadata (.torrent files), while a BitTorrent client is doing the real transfer.
* Their keyword searching system, while allowing for finding the k-nearest keywords, is not fully general like searches on a Gnutella-like system could be.

Re:Gnutella

I think there is already a mostly-unused torrent-tella-like system. It's really a very good solution, since Gnutella provides very powerful searching and BitTorrent provides high-bandwidth data transfer. This is actually more like using eMule's Kad to share .torrents.

As I mentioned somewhere else, though, people won't move from the index site + centralized trackers + a BitTorrent client until enough indexes and trackers get shut down that they need a new solution.

Re:But...

No. The decentralized-tracker problem is a ton easier than this problem, and there are already multiple decentralized-tracker solutions. Decentralized trackers are just done with simple distributed hash tables. What they've done is make a fancier DHT system for finding "near matches".

Re:Limewire/Frostwire?

Gnutella (LimeWire et. al) has more than one way of searching. Through Ultrapeers, Ultrapeers and OOB-replies (e.g. not routed back through Ultrapeers) and Mojito (DHT).

Using Gnutella to search/index .torrents is already a long time feature of G2 (Gnutella 2, though it is NOT the successor of Gnutella), with Shareaza being the main client for the G2 network (along with very basic support for Gnutella, BitTorrent and eDonkey2000).

DHT-networks can be more efficient, but they are also vulnerable to attacks and pollution and are somewhat lossy.

Re:Good!

30 years from now.... "Dude! Some of my friends and I found like these things in my attic. You can use them to make sounds and stuff. It's like video games but real! We were able to like play a song but it was like not a song from a game or the internet! It was like new!"