BitTorrent Client Offers P2P Without Central Tracking 218
Shiwei writes "While BitTorrent is the most popular P2P protocol, it still relies on several centralized points for users to find the files they are looking. There have been several attempts at making BitTorrent more decentralized, and the latest Tribler 5.3 client is the first to offer the BitTorrent experience without requiring central trackers or search engines. Tribler offers some very interesting technologies; the latest version enables users to search and download files from inside the client. Plenty of other clients offer search features, including the ever-popular Torrent, but Tribler's results come from other peers rather than from a dedicated search engine. Users can search and download content without a server ever getting involved; everything is done among peers, without the need of a BitTorrent tracker or search indexer."
What (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot UTF fail. muTorrent, or utorrent, not Torrent.
Re:What (Score:4, Funny)
He is talking about a million uTorrent.
Bittorent Without tracker... (Score:3)
...welcome back to 2005 and enjoy Gnutella
Re:What (Score:5, Funny)
"A hug."
Hilarious, heart-warming and creepy, all-in-one.
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"A hug."
Hilarious, heart-warming and creepy, all-in-one.
FWIW, the text is quite obviously a machine translation from Spanish.
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Don't ask me who "they" are.
P.S. Of course it was spam.
To clarify (Score:4, Informative)
The summary (and TFA) is misleading. This client isn't the first to support trackerless downloading. Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.
What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago), but it does appear they put some thought into making their feature set more user-friendly, with categorization ("Channels") and such.
Re:To clarify (Score:4, Interesting)
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While the ratio concept is a good one, it's totally borked by ISPs providing things like 3Mbps down and 64kbps up. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get a good ratio.
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I think the other factor is likely to be "get onto the torrent early". If you are limited to a tiny up speed like that I don't expect many clients are going to bother you much if there are plenty of other available peers that'll serve faster.
If you are there near the start when the seed may be bottle necked your 64k will be valuable and will remain so until there's more seeds than demand.
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This
I've tried leaving certain torrents sitting there seeding and get zero leechers ever, presumably because I have bugger all bandwidth.
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It's probably more a lack of leechers than anything else. Private trackers reward people for seeding, so most of the stuff is overseeded. Most of them have occasional free leech periods or other programs to stimulate the credit economy, look into them. Generally it's only in the beginning that you have ratio troubles on a private tracker.
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I would say the advantage of eDonkey2000 (or eMule now) is the lack of ratios per file. You share large numbers of files and download large numbers. What gets uploaded is what's needed and requested by others, not necessarily a specific torrent you want to get a higher ratio on.
The no comments/fake filtering/requests/reseeds can be mostly solved the same way as Bittorrent has solved it, with a link site/forum community.
The other major advantage of ed2k is that there won't be two separate swarms for the same
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Then they should implement the concept of "authoritative peers". Peers that have a secret key that gives them special powers over the swarm, such as kicking them out or regulating their participation.
It would also solve another problem with torrents: incremental updates. Today, if you want to do a minor alteration to one file out of 100 in a torrent, you have to publish a different torrent, tell all the peers to swit
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Have you tried changing the ports and forcing encryption [torrentfreak.com] (disabling legacy connections)?
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I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXeem [wikipedia.org]
It failed however, due to the initial version having spyware and subsequent loss of users.
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What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago)
Yup, the eMule/aMule network has had serverless search via the Kad Network [wikipedia.org] for years. Works pretty well.
Re:To clarify (Score:5, Interesting)
Bootstrap is the interesting issue.
You can't have a situation with no server involved, ever, unless you're distributing the software on a friend-to-friend basis. There *has* to be a root node or selection of root nodes that the software knows about when it's installed, unless they have sufficiently advanced technology that it's indistinguishable from magic. Or they use some sort of brute force search....
Sure, once a node is online and given enough other nodes stay online enough of the time, it would be possible to have a persistent network.
I suppose you could do something like search google for random torrents, join in, test the folks you connect to for being part of the decentralised network, grab network info from there etc. It still uses google as a central reference point but it would be more robust than having some sort of hard-coded 'peer tracker' server, or using any sort of brute-force port scan of the internet.
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Bootstrap is the interesting issue.
It is indeed. The bittorrent DHT solution is based on Kademlia [sourceforge.net] (or the BEP for Bittorrent specifically [bittorrent.org]). If you google a bit you'll find a few papers and some interesting things, including attack vectors. I'm implementing a version of Kademlia at the moment to have nodes in a network find other nodes for accepting work in a distributed environment, and bootstrapping the thing is "the weakest link". You could set up multiple bootstrapping nodes, but suppose that a network failure takes out your access to the
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Well, the TFA says - "Users can search and download content without a server ever getting involved"
And I was trying to figure out how that might work. If it's "no servers after the first time" or "no servers after a tribler peer has been found", that's fine, but you need something that fits the description of a server at some point in that. I was just thinking aloud at methods that might not require any user action and work straight off without requiring a specific Tribler central server.
'cos you can't jus
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Cloud is just the latest word for "outsourcing". Although they do not want to call it that, because in many cases, outsourcing simply does not work or is not cheaper.
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Don't forget, all the hardcore private torrent sites will ban you if you enable all those extra "features" like DHT and PEX.
Ok, but. (Score:5, Insightful)
With a large public tracker like PirateBay there are mods and members who weed out and delete the malware, spam, and bad torrents that are on the tracker. Wouldn't a distributed system like this actually make it easier for "bad" content to get uploaded? Its like Limewire all over again.
The idea here seems to be that "you cant stop the signal". But I am not sure how they get around the fact that you don't have to kill the signal, just garble it.
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But how does moderation work then?
Throw in web of trust?
Send in $1 to get your 'reviewer' certificate signed by some trusted entity. Sort search results by number of signed positive reviews; and then number of downloads which "reviewer nodes" saw occuring.
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So if you want to shut the whole thing down, you go after the "trusted entity". Sort of destroys the point of decentralizing.
Re:Ok, but. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have downloaded a torrent signed by someone before and been happy with it your software might be happy downloading more from them without warning. If you haven't seen anything from that person before your software might poll your peers to see if they will vouch for it and ultimately give you a choice one way or another.
Various key servers could be set up to serve trust information but would not present a critical point of failure or (for dodgy torrents) be at much legal risk because they wouldn't be serving anything remotely related to other peoples copyrighted information.
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Didn't email and pgp prove once and for all that WoT and convenience is pretty much direct opposites? You don't get a straight answer, you get a bunch of complicated information and choices on who to trust. Also, many people need to do it in order for it to function and most people won't so people won't think twice about downloading a torrent with no trust. Those who try will have huge problems with malware makers and MAFIAA goons trying to poison the well. Not only can they create as many fake identities a
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The experience with email and PGP just proves that most people are boneheads. The only places I see PGP (well, GPG) signatures are on software development mailing lists.
"email" is the wrong metaphor. It misleads people into believing their messages are secure, because they are used to their mail being enclosed in an envelope - just like the one that basically every email program with a GUI depicts somewhere. It's more like a postcard. One that gets delivered via a network of disreputable postmen, some in th
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Except 10,000 people probably won't be retarded enough to just keep around garbage files that didn't work when they downloaded them.
Way to miss the point.
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Also, botnets.
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So just because a file says it has 17543 peers, it really doesnt.
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Too easy to fake. Look at how many limewire spam files are supposedly with 100+ peers
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If you're at a point where you need a botnet to make a spoofed file look legit, you're doing pretty well. Using a botnet is a lot of effort for fairly little gain. However, AFAIK there are (or were) other ways of faking the number of peers without resorting to "brute force". Still, looking at the number of people associated with a torrent is a moderately good metric of its quality, though it's obviously not the only.
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Like many of the things I look for. (video of Zappa concerts from the '70s, old Canadian kids TV shows, etc)
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Common sense and an antivirus software could be used to weed out a majority of the malware. As for the spam and bad torrents, I have no idea.
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Antivirus is useless if the user doesn't even know what a file extension is, let alone a friggen .exe. People will click files labelled pop trash.mp3.exe.
The thing about common sense. Common sense simply isn't that common.
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Wow. p2p is turning net into a huge cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
i, for one, am not suprised that the ones to save net freedom, are ending up being people who have been accused of piracy. after all, if it is not detrimental to the control of private interests, why villify something in mass media, right
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Not that any of them actually do ever rip off anyone's work or spread it around, of course.
This whole thread is full of comments tap-dancing (badly) around the fact that the real driver here is the ability to avoid getting busted for ripping off copyrighted works. Yes, the technology is compelling (if, as described, a huge magnet for malware and bot-net bullies running the show), and has legitimate uses. But this particular twist on the torrent landscape is driven
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Why can't you do it on an application level, based on allocated IP lists? Back when we had a distinction of national and international traffic here in Portugal (international capped to 10GB, national unlimited) somebody made a eMule fork called Blowfish which had an IP based filter, and would let you download only from you isp or nationally.
The same system could be used to give priorities instead of simple blacklisting.
Excellent Work You've Invented Gnutella (Score:5, Insightful)
Giant waste of time, bittorrents benefit is from the community bitching about bad torrents, you cant do that without a web of trust or a trusted third party.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
So what's missing? (Score:2)
If you want to add trust capabilities to the mix there are non-centralised ways to do it such as allowing digital signatures.
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And how, pray tell, do you differentiate legitimate users from malicious ones? Karma works because a trusted third party maintains it.
Still IP data available (Score:2)
There's still the fact that IP data is available. Any user on the network will be broadcasting their activities making them vulnerable. Protecting users' anonymity is just as important as decentralizing any part of the network. In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of P2P that needs to be fixed. Not that I have any novel ideas on how that can be done....
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This way if you serve a file you'd have no idea who actually downloads it - you'd only get requests from random clients which are not actually downloading the file.
You can further complicate this by not making the request directly
The future. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not to say that ICANN and especially the RIAA et al. aren't problems, but I don't see this becoming a viable solution. So I'm a skeptic, for now.
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Criminals have always been quick to pounce on new technology. That's no excuse for killing the technology so that nobody else can use it. I doubt very much the picture is as gloomy as you make it out to be. And even if it is: prior restraint is not the answer.
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No, centralized control of the internet is a bad thing. Also, why should the US be in control, why not $VeryReligiousMuslimCountry, China or North Korea? I'm sure they would like to shut down some sites too.
And botnets can cause problems in the current situation too. However, I still think that properly implemented decentralized DNS is a good thing. A completely decentralized P2P system that's actively in use will make torrent sites obsolete and make it harder for US companies to take down the files.
We have
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Criminals can abuse almost any technology, but that does not mean that everybody else should be prevented from using it:
Do you use encryption to do your banking? Do you know that terrorists use encryption too?
How about anonymous networks (tor etc)? Terrorists also use them.
A knife is useful to cut food. It is also easier to kill someone with a knife than just bare hands.
A car is useful for going long distances. It can also be used to deliver illegal drugs or run someone over.
That wasn't parent's argument - it was that it would be impossible to use due to being flooded with crap. And it does happen, just look at eDonkey networks. I stopped using it when 6 in every 10 files were fake.
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Interesting, a few months ago when I used eMule to find a certain song, I managed to get the real file on the first try. Actually, other than the download speed, eMule is quite OK, especially for rare files (ones that nobody bothers creating a torrent for).
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nice (Score:2)
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Outlaw crypto and those TCP/IP tricks. Make possession of software that uses these technologies prima facie evidence of conspiracy.
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Infringing technology detected on your PC (by method of our complementary rootkit) includes (but is not limited to):
- FileZilla
- Putty
- TrueCrypt
- PGP
- And last but not least: mTorrent (the evilest)
We hope you enjoy your offline existence banned from the interwebs.
Frankly, we think you got off easy and deserve much worse you terrorist pirate scum.
Regards,
MAFIAA lawyers
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Yup. Something like that. Only it would be local police coming to arrest you and impound your computers, acting on an anonymous tip from concerned citizens in the RIAA.
Not new (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds very remenicant of Kazzaa/limewire (Score:2)
Democracy needs P2P (Score:3)
But wasn't this problem solved before? (Score:2)
Before torrents, there was Kazaa, Gnutella,Limewire and eDonkey. (They still exist). All of these support searching peers from within the client without any intermediary website. I always wondered that bit torrent seems like a step backward - since it relies on websites and trackers that can be shut down, or seized and have the users traced from the logs.
So why is BT so popular as compared to the earlier services? Is it a more efficient P2P protocol? After all you still require a client to download and you
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Don't worry, nobody will care this time either.
People keep trying to do this. At first we had P2P clients with integrated searching. None of them ever got all that popular. Then BitTorrent is launched, and it didn't have any searching, and relied on the much more familiar and comfortable web for that. It became a huge hit. What do these people do? They think, "Wow! BitTorrent is pretty great! But wouldn't it be even better if it had search?"
Predictably, though, they fail completely, every time.
Re:Back in Time. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you are saying that Napster never got very popular?
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol, and thus worked better for large files like videos and games. It had nothing to do with people being turned off by integrated search.
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The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
A lot of that wasn't really the protocol as such, it's that you actually got faster downloads for faster uploads so people turned off all their caps. Napster etc. didn't really reward uploads much, you got the files at pretty much the same speed no matter what. Proper incentives are everything.
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The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
No, it became popular because Napster was sued out of existence.
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I disagree. Having separate trackers with their own community was a big part of BitTorrent's success. It brings people together, they actually talk about what they're sharing, and they can organize to put together big projects that just didn't happen before bittorrent. It's not exactly the lack of integrated search that did it, but the lack of search pushed people to the web which is a much better platform for collaboration and communication. If this client doesn't even let people make and read comments
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It was the only P2P client at the time. It was also never as popular as BitTorrent.
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Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down (like they did to other p2p programs in the past that were not open source like kazza)
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"Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down..."
I more concerned about Big Business getting their fingers in the pie.
From Wikipedia:
"After a dozen downloads the Tribler software can roughly estimate the download taste of the user and recommends content.[4] This feature is based on collaborative filtering, also featured on websites such as Last.fm and Amazon.com."
The problem is that collaborative filtering drives everyone in the same general direction--it is essentially distilling down o
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You see this as a bad thing, and personally, I agree. However, it's probably time to face reality. In this long September, the internet has taken a new shape: a hive mentality. Gone are the days where we just grab whatever information we come across because it is unique and exciting.
The net has simply become too large for that. These days, people seek features to cut down the signal to noise ratio. This in itself isn't a bad thing, but it's based on taste, and the taste is that of the majority who only care
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I think that integrated search is a good idea - now if I want to download something, I have to search on pirate bay, if I don't find it there, I go to isohunt and so on. I'd like the ability to search on all public trackers at once. As a mater of fact I'd also like to be able to search all private trackers (that I am a member of, or optionally can become a member) at once. Centralized search would be bad, but a decentralized search that looks like centralized (you only search in one place) would be great.
An
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Torrentz is a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of torrent search engines
www.torrentz.com
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Ironically, the day they invent a Bittorrent client that can suck you off will be the day they kill Bittorrent. At least for porn.
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Re:Back in Time. (Score:4, Funny)
No Bittorrent client will be complete until it has an email client built in. A flight simulator would be nice too.
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Is it 1997?
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Since you didn't seem to get the point, let me summarize:
Decentralized, search: All P2P clients except BitTorrent. All failed.
Centralized, no search: BitTorrent. Wildly successful.
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No, the protocol is splitting, with one fork preferential towards pirates and the other honoring the original aim, the legitimate publisher.
Re:Back in Time. (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean the legitimate publisher who wants to leech my limited monthly cap for their own purposes?
I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.
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I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.
My sarcasm detector is out of batteries. Does WoW really require subscribers to donate their upstream bandwidth for patches? Honest question.
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Yes, they use a torrent based distribution system for their patches. So, yes, while you are gaming, you are typically using some of your upstream bandwidth to help deliver patches to others.
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Woah Woah Woah. Yes they offer a torrent based system by default but turning that off is as simple as clicking Options->Uncheck peer2peer downloading.
So it's by no means forced and anyone with a bandwidth cap can easily turn it off.
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Yes.
In fact, some games (Lord of the Rings Online, I'm looking at you) install a content distribution service (Pando) where you basically agree to be part of their content distribution network, all the time, and not just while you are gaming. Unless you switch it off in the service panel, of course.
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Re:Another Victory (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine!
Re:Another Victory (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to Cory Doctorow. [craphound.com] I've slightly edited the quote for brevity, and the emphasis is mine. If you want to read the whole text, it's in the forward to Little Brother. The link is to the entire text of the book.
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Because you can't rely on google or the website being there when you need them. The Wikileaks conspiracy is a case in point. Their DNS provider, their money transfer companies and their hosting company tried to make them disappear. So far, Google is working as intended, but for how long? Also, organizations with fewer resources might wither and die under such attacks.
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If the website with the legitimate torrent doesn't have links to infringing content, what reason would there be for someone to try to make it disappear?
There's plenty of websites that provide non-infringing content via torrents, yet I cannot think of a single one where the necessity of a dedicated torrent search engine would be remotely necessary in order to find it.
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