New Auto-Seeding Torrent Server Released

ludwigvan968 writes "The University of Texas New Media Initiative in association with Google's Summer of Code program have been working on a project to make sharing files over the internet easier than ever before. Summer of Code intern Evan Wilson just released Project Snakebite, the first fully automatic BitTorrent server. Just as with a normal webserver, you drop files in a folder to share them. Snakebite takes care of generating torrent files and running a tracker and a seeder for each file. Additionally, it builds a user-customizable link page with all of your files. It will even register your Snakebite server with an easy to remember URL for people that can't remember their IP. Snakebite is free and open software and is currently released for Debian. It's fully portable to both Windows and OS X and the developers just need some help packaging it."

OK, but is it anonymous?

[mlwmohawk]

Sharing files is almost a capitcal crime in the U.S.A.

Source

[baadger]

For those wondering where the source code is (the website isnt really your typical open source project breed), this app is written in Python. Something quite interesting the article failed to mention.

Great automatic folder sharing

[LiquidCoooled]

How long until people start seeding "Inbox.dbx" or "Outlook.pst" and other fun files we all remember from p2p days?

Look out Google

[Goodgerster]

Next case: RIAA versus Google; Google is accused of funding piracy
Next case: Google versus the United Kingdom; Google is accused of funding the manufacture of items useful to terrorism (as the Federation Against Copyright Theft tells us, piracy funds terrorism)
Next case: RIAA versus Canonical; Canonical is accused of supplying Azureus, a piracy tool, to people
Next case: RIAA versus GNOME Foundation; the GNOME Foundation is accused of supplying a GUI library to piracy tools

WHEN DOES IT END?

Re:OK, but is it anonymous?

[LordLucless]

Actually, obtaining files that are copyrighted isn't a crime anywhere (that I know of) even the US. It's reproducing (ie: uploading) that's illegal, not the downloading.

Re:OK, but is it anonymous?

[Zigg]

Actually, enabling people to easily share their own torrents could help promote legitimate use of BT.

I've been personally involved in several situations where large, legal files needed to be distributed among a small group of people--unfortunately several didn't have the know-how to set up a tracker, and others simply didn't have the time to figure it out. A tool like this could enable every one of us to start it up on our own.

The one thing that I think it needs to also have is at least minimal security against discoverability--a password on the torrent listing page, for example. Would also be cool if you could control who was using the server, but I gather BT isn't too well-adapted to that requirement? Not sure.

Re:OK, but is it anonymous?

[LordLucless]

The person who owns the original media is the one whose generating the copy. The downloader is receiving it. An analagous situation: a guy is selling ripped-off copies of DVDs from a market store. Someone buys a copy. It's the seller (the distributor, the one who reproduced it) that gets busted, not the buyer.

Anti-Slashdot Effect for large content?

[BrynM]

Despite the posts trying to paint this into the next Napster/Limewire/P2P, I think it would be great for distributing large files that might get slashdotted/dug/whatever. I think it's a good way to have a sudden rush of trafic pay for it's own bandwidth. Sure, not everyone is at risk of a slashdotting, but it makes a good precaution. Since it's just some Python, I bet there wouldn't be too much trouble getting it up in a hury as the server starts to get hit (if you're lucky enough to notice). A bonus of planning ahead is that there's always at least one seed (the server) transferring at about the same rate a normal download would have for a single user in the first place. Scalable content rather than scalable servers. Interesting...

More and more like Gnutella

[ajs]

The more Bittorrent adds features, the more it becomes like gnutella. Fortunately, I have been able to just use Gnutella for the last couple of years ;-)

Bittorrent is great for very large, very popular files, but when you start dealing with small or unpopular files, I've never found an example where BT got me what I needed faster. Searching Gnutella takes longer than searching for a torrent on the Web, of course, but in the end, download times on very large files that aren't well seeded is radically different, mostly because of the larger chunk size and contingous second-block fetch in Gnutella.

Great for Home Videos?

[friedmud]

I've been thinking about setting up my own tracker to allow my family to download home videos from me...

I know that sites like YouTube are popular right now... but I really don't like the quality restrictions... and would rather family members could just download a nice sized full copy themselves so they could burn it to DVD if they like or whatever.

Bittorrent would be ideal for doing this... and this software sounds like just the ticket. All I would have to do is point my family at the page it generates... and when I finish editing a home movie drop it in the "upload" folder and wham... it goes out to everyone.

All it needs now is an "auto client" that you just give it the URL of the automatically created website and it will automatically download anything new that arrives (that's a lot of "auto" going on ;-) That way I could go around to all of my families computers and set them up with the software and then just leave it alone. Every once in a while they can look in the "Home Videos" folder for new videos....

I think it's funny that people around here always cry "Bittorrent doesn't have to be for illegal purposes" and then any time a bittorrent story comes up all they can do is argue the finer points of what would/wouldn't be illegal/enforceable if you use the new tech... sigh.

Friedmud

Re:OK, but is it anonymous?

[LordLucless]

No, I'm arguing that the person culpable (not necessarily the same as responsible) is the person who is offering the item for download. When you download something, your computer sends a request for data. The remote computer is the one that locates that data, and sends a duplicate down the wire to you. At the moment, asking someone for a illegal copy isn't illegal. Giving someone a copy is. That isn't to say it'll be that way forever; I expect the laws will be changed as soon as someone can be bothered prosecuting a downloader. For the most part, it's more efficient to sue and take down the uploaders - take the uploaders out of the picture and file-sharing dies. They're far fewer than the downloaders, it's easier to track them, and easier to prosecute them.

Re:Source

[TeknoHog]

Python is interpreted, not compiled. When you distribute a python app, you are distributing its source.

Actually, it's possible to compile Python into Java-style bytecode or native binary. See Psyco [sourceforge.net] for example.

While it's true that Python is mostly used as an interpreted language, it's not a part of the language definition. Conversely, there are interpreters for languages like C++, I've used one as a part of the ROOT [root.cern.ch] system. ROOT users often compile into native binaries when their code is getting into production level. The same goes for Matlab, for example.

On the other hand, I believe that distributing software as source is much better than the binary, even if you don't have a GPL-like permission to modify/distribute it further. I believe one reason why the www got mainstream is that pages were distributed as source, so people could learn HTML from each other.