Decentralizing Bittorrent 674
An anonymous reader writes "Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous. "
Potential.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Potential.. (Score:4, Insightful)
But -- maybe we could use checksums of the encrypted files and have some kinda hash table to make it faster.
Waste + Decentralized Bittorrent --> Death of RIAA + MPAA.
w00t!
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Insightful)
With RIAA/MPAA hunting users with blowtorches and ISP's sniffing users IP packets to collect evidence for law suits, encryption will become a standard feature of P2P platforms in the future i'm pretty sure. Ofcouse there is a performance/bandwidth pentaly involved with encryption, but I think the benefits of secure transfer will be greater than the drawbacks.
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Informative)
Your local machine generates keys for key pair A, the secret key resides localy on your peer and the public key is sent to the remote peer.
Remote peer does the same, it generates key pair B and sends its public key to you.
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA and the MPAA also use encryption to protect their IP from infringement, and they don't want to lose that either. In other words, encryption isn't going anywhere, period.
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who relies on encryption? You, me, government, business, charity, church... Everyone. I don't care how powerful the RIAA or MPAA is, they're not more powerful than the rest of the nation's trade industry, and the weight of a few hundred thousand businesses would drown out the record and movie attorneys easily. In order to get rid of encryption, you'd have to return to roughly the technology in use about forty years ago, and no one is going to put up with dealing with the lines required then for things like unemployment, DMV, and taxes. Far too many government agencies are required to make available information to the public, and that information has to be encrypted. You'd end up with around 5000 pages of changes to law, tying up Congress for years, if not decades, just on that.
Believe it or not, the government isn't afraid of you using encryption. The NSA moved off of SHA (yes, I know it's a hash -- it's an example) to SHA-1 several years before the public realized there were issues with it, and they're constantly updating the nation's existing protocols. If necessary, they can get a court order to do a black-bag op to get the password -- the younger Gotti used PGP to encrypt files, but a simple keyboard sniffer grabbed the password (his father's prison ID number, IIRC), and in the operation that planted that, the FBI had snagged the key files.
If they need it from you, they'll get it. Encryption is often the strongest link in a weak chain.
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Funny)
I talk to God (the Jehova one) over a 1024 bit 3DES encrypted tunnel. I don't want those bastards like Vishnu, Allah or Qetzoctl listening in.
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Allah != Jehovah (Score:3, Insightful)
not in the cards (Score:3, Insightful)
SSL is encryption, too. Forbid encryption and that lock icon gets broken on every site in compliance with the law.
But there are plenty of outcomes short of that which can interfere with our civil liberties. And more importantly, our ability to do business. You want to send NDA information in plain text over the Net, you go right ahead.
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're addressing the problem of an attacker (the RIAA or their agents) finding you by looking at your network traffic. That's not what they're doing. They are finding nodes that offer files. The problem for the non-lame P2Per is that their node must tell good guys that they have lots of files and must tell bad guys that they have no files. The difficulty is that you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys on the network. One solution is to use private overlay networks, although the recent Finnish case demonstrates that it's hard to keep the "bad guys" (law enforcement in that case) out of the overlay network. Another solution would be use to use recommender systems, perhaps in a PGP style, but I haven't seen a P2P filesharing system that does that yet. Finally, Freenet attempts to give a sending node plausible deniability by hiding the true contents of a file from the sending node.
Oh, in case you meant that you were trying to hide network traffic from your network administrators (also "bad guys" from your point of view), then it would be simpler to use encryption (perhaps layering P2P communication over HTTP/SSL or SSH to avoid arousing suspicion).
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Interesting)
So the *AA can see that <file_name> is being transmitted. Big deal. If they can't figure out where the data is coming from or where it is going, who can they sue? (Hmmm... is that possible without encrypting the data at all?)
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also no catagory for "illegal" applications in any country I know of. So even if it is prevented from being released someone will leak it and lots of people will use it.
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are describing Gnutella1 which is incredibly inefficient (someone does a search query and it gets passed around the network for days in most cases, even though the user is only online for an hour or so) and generally, very crap.
Most modern p2p networks work off a 'supernode' principle which is users that the network has chosen (automatically) because it has fast upload or long uptimes on the network etc. This then runs the search queries for all the leaf nodes connected to it, which really decreases the amount of network inefficiency because the supernode is like a central server, it knows nearly all the of the files because it connects to other supernodes and in turn they index the entire network. Interestingly you can find yourself connected to splinter networks where by some odd reason the supernodes haven't found each other and split into multiple networks.
You are describing a network where everyone is a supernode. This is useless because many users don't stay online for more than an hour and in the end you basically have a huge search query swapping contest.
Re:Potential.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Potential.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It might have been more than technical.
But remember! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But remember! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't find it unethical to give a copy of a TV show to other people, especially when it has not been edited. The networks broadcast these shows freely, but somehow I'm not permitted to watch it at a different time, or download it from someone and watch it on my computer?
I'm sorry, but being a mindless consumer who does whatever the corporate CEOs tell me does not equate with "ethical". Maybe it does for you, but don't assume everyone else has no spine.
Re:But remember! (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were giving away milk for free, would it be wrong to take some extras and bring them to some friends, so that they didn't have to go to the trouble of going to the free-milk place themselves?
What if some stupid executive said you were only allowed to get it yourself, and couldn't give any to friends, because he's worried you might pour the milk into another container, and throw away the original container which has some ads on the back, before giving it to your friends? I'm sorry, I'd have no guilt in taking the extra milks and giving to my friends despite this stupid executive's pronouncement (which isn't even firmly backed by any law). Of course, I wouldn't bother giving my friends new containers either, because that's just unnecessary work on my part.
Re:But remember! (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone comes along and takes a copy of a digital work from me, they have not deprived me of a physical object and I can still sell that work. Yes, I do agree it is wrong for someone to take a work from me without permission. I am just making a point how it is _very_ different then taking a physical work from me which will be in limited numbers. That _would_ be depriving me of a potential sale.
I agree with you about doing the ethical thing (in my case just not buying the copyrighted works). However I feel that copyright has gotten very bad and unbalanced. I think because of this, many people do not feel it is unethical to _copy_ digital content. Add to this the fact that producing an _exact_ copy requires no capital and results in no loss of goods, and you have the P2P vs. unbalanced copyright war we have now.
With the ??AA, BSA, etc all dumping millions every year into the pockets of our corrupted politicians to continue to swing copyright in their favor, you will just see more consumers fighting back. Maybe if these big corps get hit with the clue-stick, things would get better. However, I don't ever see that happing.
Re:But remember! (Score:4, Informative)
Why do you insist on using anologies that simply don't apply? This is why I call you people copyright drones. You have no logic to back up your argument, so you use old theories that have been proven false. Yet you continue to use them. It doesn't help your cause in any way. Copyright is as depicable as trickle down economics. In fact they are the same. Let a guy make millions at public expense, and maybe, just maybe he might leave a few more crumbs on the floor for the rest of us. It's a horrible concept. Under this system, the only motivation to create anything is money, little more. Under this system, people create useless stuff, and then they're spamming us at dinner time ringing my damn phone telling me "Buy my shit! C'mon godammit, buy it! If you don't buy it you're a damn thief! Buy! Buy! Buy!" It's because of IP that we have so much crap on the store shelves. Junk is being invented simply because you can find a sucker that will buy it.
Re:But remember! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh what the hell...
Copyright laws are nothing more than a bad reaction to new technology(the printing press in this case). They were designed to protect an obsolete industry. That industry had friends in high places. Laws were bought and sold, just like today. There is nothing ethical about that. I don't give a damn if somebody keeps their ideas to themselves because they can't make million bucks overnight. They're greedy bastards. Somebody will come along with the same or better idea later, because they will understand the value of the idea is the idea itself, not the guy who invented it. To demand a monopoly on an idea is extremely selfish. Airplanes and steam engines(to name a few) might have developed much faster if not for the stranglehold the the inventers had on the patents. The patent on the diesel engine had to expire before anyone could improve it enough to be practical. The tired old cliche still holds true: It's like prohibiting the use of the automobile to protect the blacksmiths, carriage, and buggy whip manufacturers. I hope that can hold you over until you check out what others have to say.
Hype (Score:4, Funny)
But... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hype (Score:5, Insightful)
They already have it up and running with over 5,000 members. They're just removing the website trackers and making the clients into trackers in and of themselves. It's not so hard, and it's a good idea too.
But as anothe user pointed out, it would slow down your system a real lot.
Long live SuprNova (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Long live SuprNova (Score:5, Interesting)
This is also what I worry about. A hostile peer is one thing. You can just choose not to receive packets from them. But what about a hostile tracker sending your client on a wild goose chase?
text not quoted correctly (Score:5, Funny)
its potential for lawsuits from 'artist' organizations is enormous
Wonderful! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Your honor, the defendant wasn't just a person sharing the file, our records indicate that he was the person sharing the file, running a server, not just a client on a network with files to share"
Re:Wonderful! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful! (Score:3, Interesting)
The big deal is that if you are caught running a big mp3 server you are dead meat pretty much everywhere. In the U.S. that can mean an appearance in federal criminal court on a felony charge of copyright infringement.
Haven't we heard this song before? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
I say let's give it a chance - never know, it might make up for what you miss:-) Worst case, no one will use it and everyone will stick with regular bittorrent.
Re:Haven't we heard this song before? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, and a while back, they were saying the same thing about that new-fangled "horseless carriage."
If this is a really good/new thing, it could conceivably replace the old things entirely.
Re:Haven't we heard this song before? (Score:3, Informative)
I remember in the glory days of Napster, when it was the only player in town, you could find damn near any mp3/album you wanted. Now with so many different apps and networks out there, I find it much more hit or miss. And i don't think it has anything to do with the RIAA crackdown. The files are still out there, just spread out across a bunch of different networks. I use Shareaza, and have decent luck cause it hits a few different networks, but nothing like Napster from 2000-2001.
Easier location of files (Score:2, Interesting)
This could be a really cool development, and there is a lot of research in the EE/CS community right now going in to studying these decentralized networks. They show great promise!
But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
If your computer has a IP address; your Microsoft is probably infected with a virus horse from one of the internets.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
If the Slim Whitman defense doesn't work out when Mars attacks, I suggest we use that phrase to make the Martians' heads explode. Gave me a headache just reading it.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is to move the bandwidth load of providing all those
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
When a friend a few months ago received a C&D, it included his IP, the time and date of the offence along with some info on the file... the ISP in question, just sends a warning letter on the first offense, unplugs you until you call in for the 2nd and unplugs you for 30 days on the 3rd, and this is only from the complaint.
You might have an open wap, or a trojan on your PC, or any number of other legitimate reasons of why your connection was used to DL unauthorized material in a way that was not authorized by you... it doesn't matter to this ISP, a complaint is a complaint, and as per the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, they act upon it.
Were you to get a 3rd C&D on this ISP and get unplugged for 30 days, you could always haul them into court and demand to get reinstated, but by the time you got your hearing, the 30 days would be over.
More so, it is the ISP's network, and by using it and paying for their services you agree to their rules, and if their rules say "we may suspend your access at our slightest whim should we receive information saying that you had allegedly infringed on someone's copyright", they can.
This is not the court system we are dealing with, this is free enterprise, and is little different than me refusing to personally associate with anyone under 5'0", simply because that is how I do business.
Shweet! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it doesn't require that. Basically, you just have all connections be 2-way. The key issue here is that you are all looking for the same file.
If client B wants to connect to client A and download some pieces, client A can decide on whether or not to allow this based on which pieces B can provide that A is missing.
If the connection is not mutually beneficial to both parties, one side closes it.
Combine this with a "generosity" setting, where some people sharing the file give away pieces for free, (and by default, when you finish a download you turn into "super-generous" mode until the transfer utility is closed), and the system will work fine, without any sort of central monitoring.
Basically, everyone is "trading" pieces of the download, and automatically discovering "local" peers which have uncongested links with each other.
Of course a good idea but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course a good idea but... (Score:2)
Re:Of course a good idea but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course a good idea but... (Score:3, Interesting)
In practice, it usually makes sense to have
The point of Exeem (Score:5, Informative)
Publishing a torrent is incredibly easy, drag the folder in, pick a category, click go. It hashes it and it starts seeding within seconds.
It still (obviously) needs some work doing to the app to make it more friendly but it's shaping up well.
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:2)
Not really much point if it is just as easy to be caught. You would think suprnova.org of all groups would want it this way.
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:2)
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you can completely remove the IP from the process (ie go through some anonymous proxy), you are still catchable once BayTSP and
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:2)
Re:The point of Exeem (Score:3, Interesting)
It's slashdotted, so I can't find these things out for myself. Is this just a p2p app for
I like Suprnova... (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
What I want to know is: basically, this is an indexing server that will allow torrents to be searchable. What happens with multiple versions of the same torrent? For instance, let's say there are 2 torrent distributions of Gentoo, identical files within the torrents. It would seem this server would ideally be able to recognize the similarities and kind of 'merge' the files - is this possible?
M
Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize that full anonymity is going to be a problem, but at least some degree of deniability and limited IP address propagation would be a boon. SuprNova might have the name recognition to really give something like that a good start.
Re:Most important thing (Score:2)
I mean, when everybody slashdotted Scaled Composites' server for a video file, they just put a torrent up.
So SuprNova may end up doing more damage than aid.
Think of the convenience! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just be clear: BitTorrent is legal, and can be very useful
but the trackers on suprnova.org pretty much all link to ILLEGAL pirated files.
Re:Think of the convenience! (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, it's despicable, how can people distribute and watch TV shows that are normally viewed for free!!! This must be incredible loss of revenue for rightsholders, mustn't it? Especially when they don't care enough to release those shows on DVD.
Frankly, I'd prefer them make those shows strait-to-dvd so I could buy them for 20-40 bucks a season. Maybe this way no power-hungry fatass exec would cancel shows like Farscape, Firefly, Jeremiah or Angel. No more fucking games with "ratings-scheduling feedback loop", just simple rules -- either it sells with a profit or it doesn't.
Robert
Freenet? Hello? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Freenet? Hello? (Score:5, Informative)
Freenet's purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
Its intent is to allow people to publish *information*, ( i.e. WebPages ) in an anonymous fashion.. So judging it by 'speed' of your file downloads is an unfair judgment
Anything else that is grafted on, such as p2p type downloads, chat, etc is just that.. stuff grafted on.. and veers away from the original intent.
Re:Freenet? Hello? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. You can't host files, and it takes a long time to insert large(medium even) files.
3. Files are dropped if not popular. Thus, you can't get rare files, only popular or recent ones.
4. It DOES NOT WORK reliably.
And this coming from a guy that hopes beyong hope that one day it WILL work. Today is not that today. Tomorrow doesn't look good, either.
Re:Freenet? Hello? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some random thoughts... (Score:2)
The *first* thing to do... (Score:2)
MUAHAHAHAHA then nobody will be able to shut them down! MUAHAHAHA!
Cringely's rule (Score:4, Interesting)
Bittorrent needs a replacement (Score:2)
Very Borg-like (Score:2)
DECENTRALIZED LOOKUP SERVICE (Score:2)
Sites dedicated to piracy (Score:5, Funny)
Help With This One Anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
2)The RIAA and their comrads are lawsuit crazy, but you haven't seen any "cease and decist" orders issued out to projets like this. A bigger thing to note is the fact that everyone seems to be a target - except companies like LimeWire who actually sell the P2P service and make money off of it (they get paid for the ads in the free version as well).
3)How the heck
Not much to talk about (Score:5, Interesting)
There are serious problems with decentralising BitTorrent. One of the reasons that people have such good transfers on BT is that there is central tracker supervising particular file and knowing all users serving bits and pieces of this file. This way in case of high demand/high popularity files I achieve speeds over 1MB/s (yes, that's megabyte).
Depending on design choices you can have couple of trackers with subset of users on each of them, or every user seeding file has his own tracker. In first case your client wouldn't be able to use all cloud, and in second tracker would disappear when original seeder turned off his computer.
You can of course design some communication between trackers, or elections or some other magic, but it's too early to tell at the moment. I'll wait for more information.
Whatever they do, I hope that there will be some console based client for this, because asymmetric connections at homes plainly suck at upload (hence on torrent at download too), and I'd rather keep running my torrents on the server plugged into the fast network.
Robert
Bah! (Score:4, Interesting)
My ISP, Mediacom, scans my network packets to determine if I'm grabbing a torrent of questionable nature. If they see it, they'll send me a nasty email. Hence, I'm on the edonkey networks now because BT is clearly not an option at the moment. I'm sure they'll scan those packets, too, at some point.
Unsecured BT is fast, sure, but if your ISP is snooping...well. And illegal or questionable content aside, it'd be handy for distributing other files to people in a more secure manner.
Or is this out there and I'm just missing something?
Re:Bah! (Score:3, Informative)
This eliminates BitTorent's great advantadge (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This eliminates BitTorent's great advantadge (Score:3, Interesting)
It is possible to provide the same chain of trust in a decentralised network, just digitally sign the release notes and hash values. By checking the digital signature you can check that the file has been announced by the same group or person that announced previous files.
If content announcers issue digital certificates you could pa
Anonimity ( Redundant I hope!) (Score:5, Interesting)
Any new big thing needs absolute anonimity. I already worry for all of the innocent civilians out there using bittorrent now to get their favorite shows and movies. I'm sure their transgressions are all being logged for future lawsuits.
And yes they are INNOCENT. Here's one good reason why. We first must ask, why did the founders of the US constitution feel it was important for accused criminals to be convicted only by a jury of peers?
I believe this is because they knew that honest citizens doing honest activities will often run afoul of the law, especially in a broken government where England (back then) or corporations today make all the laws. The jury of the peers is built into our criminal justice system in order to prevent just this kind of thing. I mean the hope is that a jury of bitorrent users will never convict a fellow bit torrent user. That's probably why we're only seeing civil lawsuits today by the RIAA and the like. I think I criminal jury trial for file sharing would be quite interesting.
Could be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
This should be good... BT is without question the fastest p2p app (in fact, the only thing that has ever topped out my 'net connection), but it needs two features to kill off the others in my book:
1. Search - it's no fun to rely on third party websites to find things. Hopefully now we'll be able to do this.
2. Anonymity - BT could use an option for a system like Freenet's for making it really hard to tell who's serving who. Combined with the distributed nature of BT, it would be difficult to prove anything at all about BT users.
The article is
Here's another thought: the current BT system is really good at dispersing new content, like distro ISOs and TV shows, through RSS feeds from central websites. It would be cool to be able to subscribe to network-wide custom feeds, to stay informed about new files that match certain criteria.
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) having a search that only indexes trackers, and can then launch an external app of your choice to do the torrent download
(2) improving the bittorrent protocol so anybody with a seed can failover as the tracker
When I want to download torrents, I want to use Azureus, regardless of whether it was a P2P searched torrent or one off a website. I don't want to have to use some all-in-one app that decides for me the One True Way that downloads shall be handled, merely because it implemented the search to find them.
I thought about that (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, whichever seeder is elected as tracker can advertise itself for indexing onto the "tracker search" network I proposed in my upthread post. So then new searches find the new tracker.
Third, the web pages or whatever that are linking the torrent can (manually?) re-link a generated new torrent for the new seed, which has meanwhile kept the torrent alive rather
No linux version for a LONG time (Score:3, Interesting)
Some other stuff:
"The main problem with kazaa is that it doesn't have hash system which means that if you make MP3 with same name and same size that's already on the network and someone downloads one part of this file from you the MP3 will be corrupted. (This is exactly what RIAA did to kazaa). And since people don't delete bad MP3's from their computer you have more and more of this files in the network. And here is where our client is different you wont be able to corrupt files in the network because they have hash.
One more difference from kazaa is that we wont have entire folders of files on the network only those that will be manually uploaded from users. Kazaa has so many viruses because users don't even know they have them on there computer. So I personally think that we will have a lot less fake files on our network and we also plan to implement rate system so that if people find fakes,
viruses, spyware in one of the files they will vote it as bad so hopfully not many people will download that file.
What we are trying to do is bring best of P2P world and best of bittorrent together."
About eXeem replacing suprnova:
"That's a reporters view on it. Remember, they probably know next to nothing about eXeem, and are doing what reporters do best: bullshit.
Serious problems with Exeem (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, it's in beta testing, but it's not ready for beta. It has some serious isses at the moment. Torrents disappear off the network for no reason is just one of them.
Second, they don't have 5,000 beta testers. They sent out 5,000 serials, but my best guess by looking at the network is that there are less than 1,000 actually testing it and never more than 200 or 300 people running it at the same time. They actually sent out new serials to all the 5,000 beta testers because they didn't have enough people.
Third, it lacks the details. With most BT clients, such as BitTornado and G3 Torrent, you can see all kinds of details about the file you're trying to acquire, how many seeds, portions of seeds, how many complete copies are distributed amongst the peers if there are no seeds. Exeem lacks all of these details.
Fourth, it doesn't use bitTorrent. It's based on bitTorrent, and uses libTorrent, but it's not a torrent. It's their own unique format. Exeem will not be compatible with other BT clients. It's use their client or don't connect. It almost appears to be a Kazaa rip off with bitTorrent features.
Fifth. 'But it's open source? Why can't we just write our own clients?' From everything I can tell, they have no intention of making this an open source project. They're talking about the type of ads they want to put in it.
Sixth: Pr0n. A lot of people like Suprnova.org and other torrent sites because there is no pr0n. Exeem has an adult filter, but 'Adult' is one of the more popular categories for Exeem users at the moment.
Exeem will not replace bitTorrent. The problem I see is that Exeem is being developed by the same guys that run suprnova.org. [suprnova.org] Whether Exeem ever works or ever becomes popular, will they take down what appears to be the most popular torrent site on the web because of it?
There are more problems with Exeem, but these are the major ones that I see. I'm sure some of the coders of Exeem will be reading this post. Please feel free to tell me where I'm wrong and why.
Aero
Virtual LAN (slightly offtopic) (Score:3, Interesting)
Platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the name, (Exeem), should we assume it is an exe file for running on Wintel platforms?
Suprnova used to have a significant collect of Macintosh resources listed.
Blech... (Score:3, Interesting)
One is that the Bittorrent protocol is thusfar the best protocol for transferring large files. The clients are designed to transfer large files. The Edonkey/Kademlia protocol exists to transfer large files as well, but it is just not as good as Bittorrent. It is much slower.
p2p has to be looked at as a process. There is the search for information. There is the response to the search. Then there is the request to download a file. Then there is the download of the file. Each of these parts is separate and important. In Bittorrent, only the last part, the download is decentralized. The prior parts are not decentralized, are not p2p - even the request to download goes to a centralized torrent.
Despite this, Many people figure that Bittorrent's partial file sharing, protocol attributes and program attributes are what make the downloading good. Of course, having a good source of current holders of the file - partially or fully, is important, as is having a good hash of the file, or multiple hashes in the case of Bittorrent. But this can all probably be done via p2p as well.
As far as the comments on hashes and file integrity, this is not a problem at all. There are many ways to deal with this. If you want, you can still have a central torrent, but you could only check it once instead of many times. Or maybe there could be distibuted PGP signatures of the validity of certain hashes.
As far as other comments, I'm interested in this so I'm glad to know, although I agree its vaporware until release.
As far as Freenet, encryption, IP addresses and so forth - I think for technical innovation reasons, unencrypting, non-masking p2p technologies need to be developed for now. I'm also glad, alongside this, anonymous, IP masking, encryption-capable p2p networks like Freenet are being created. And once p2p becomes mature, I hope the technologies implement any encryption and anonymity that does not put in too much overhead. Turn it on by default, and let people manually turn it off if they want.
As far as copyrighted material and so forth, I really could give a damn. Big corporations hate the idea of sharing, and trying to kill something like Linux or a GPL open p2p protocol and client is instinctive to them, just like the enclosure of the commons was.
And as far as non-centralization being one of the benefits of Bittorrent, and decentralizing ruining it, I completely disagree. As I said before, file integrity and hashes are not a problem, you can do PGP signatures on hashes or something. Any problem can be dealt with. Bittorrent is good because it is the best protocol to deal with partial file sharing of large files. Any of its centralized features can be decentralized, some of them very easily, as I'm sure Freem is doing.
Re:If it all works (Score:2)
PArent is informativbe (Score:2, Funny)
Re:All the 'fun' of P2P? (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot. News for Pirates? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate it when people equate copyright infringement with stealing. Illegal downloading is more like sneaking into a movie, concert or ballgame without a ticket than it is like theft.
MM
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Re:Slashdot. News for Pirates? (Score:3, Insightful)
copyright infringement != theft
copyright infringement != trespassing
trespassing != theft
Makes sense to me.
Re:Slashdot. News for Pirates? (Score:3, Informative)