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Researchers Decentralize BitTorrent
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday October 28, @01:01PM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
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."
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P2P BitTorrent Tool Could Replace Pirate Bay 413 comments
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.
Firehose:Researchers Make BitTorrent Truly Decentralized by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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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=
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Insightful)
And exactly how many joe averages run Opera?
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:4, Funny)
Me, for one.
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
You're replying to a slashdot comment saying that you run Opera. What makes you think you qualify as Joe Average?
He said "Me, for one" instead of "I, for one"? /. elitist would munge their grammar in such a fashion
No
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
No /. elitist would munge their grammar in such a fashion
I propose that the poster is so elite that he is completely out of touch with Joe Average. Alas, due to this, his attempt at pretending to be average failed.
The correct response should have been
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
He said "Me, for one" instead of "I, for one"?
I, for one welcome our new Joe Average Opera-using overlords.
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
funny you mention that.. people whos computers i have had to clean viruses and crap off of because it was obvious they where browseing porn with IE.. install opera and inform them to use it instead... they have a odd face but hey i havn't had to touch any of their comps again (thankfuly)
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Re:It's a good start... (Score:5, Funny)
Opera and myself have been browsing the web for porn since 2000 :) I never leave my pants on the floor without it :)
Uhh, too much inf... No wait
-1, Informative ;)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone should be aware... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the website, Tribler will exchange torrent downloading history by default.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:eDonkey/eMule anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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] .
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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.
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