BitTorrent now Trackerless
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The newest version of azureus has supported that for a while now, and probably other clones as well. Why does this count as news? 
Sorry for the ignorance, but what does that change for me, American Idol Downloader lvl 30?
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
_xxx_ said:
From what I've read, it actually uses a Kademelia protocol on top of Bittorrent, first seen in Emule/Edonkey, so that apect of it is quite similar. I don't know if Bittorrent has implemented peer-to-peer searching as per Emule, or if it's just peer-to-peer publishing of file and peer availability.
I think the idea is to decentralise a lot of the tracker functions in order to take load off the tracker, enable people without trackers to publish files, and take away the single point of failure the tracker represents.
It's really the next logical step given that other P2P apps have gone that route for the same reasons.
Another thing this is going to do is to kill, or drive way further underground, the 'private' ratio enforcing trackers. As it is with the latest Azureus a single 'peer sharing' client connected to such a tracker will cause all the other connected peers on a torrent to be exposed to those who previously would have been denied access.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
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Zaphod said:
Well the old tracker need not exist at all. It just becomes a website where torrent files are downloaded (though you could get those files just as easily from any other source, just like a ed2k:// reference). Any ratio enforcing would be done by the clients along with the tracker functionality that's been transferred to them.
Even if most people elect not to use the serverless protocol, all it takes is one person connected to an old style tracker to be using the serverless protocol for all the other not-connected-to-that-tracker peers to then find out about all the other peers and to try to connect directly to them.
I think a lot of people still don't understand that trackers don't download files to peers. Just like the old-style edonkey/emule servers, they just act as a mediation/matching service that connects peers to each other, who then do the file transfers themselves.
Now that clients can find other peers directly and organise file transfers amongst themselves, the centralised trackers are no longer needed.
That's what I was saying. What has been feeding the effectiveness of BitTorrent as a distribution channel, however, is exactly this hierarchy of increasingly bigger 'networks' with decreasingly rigorous internal rules and control. At least for content of 'debatable legal nature' killing (or at lest removing them further from the average user) these 'private' networks one will hamper the flow of files into the system as you are also removing the major incentive that exists in spreading them (prestige, community) as well as a layer of 'quality control'.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
mito said:
How would the server know who to ban? The non registered peers never talk to the tracker, they only talk to the other peers.
As I said above, I'm not au fait with the details of the BT implementaion of Kademelia, so I don't know if it's just used for finding other peers and then BT connects to them as normal, or if it requires all peers to be using it for any kind of data transfer to take place.
I know that Emule can use Kad to find and transfer files without any contact with a central server at all.
Do you mean banning clients or users? I predict that both will happen. The first one really won't work as Azureus is open source and it only takes one non-conformant peer to compromise the 'privacy' of the tracker. You'd need a protocol extension in the initial hanshake to the effect of 'supports distributed tracking' that's honoured by all clients in addition to rewrites of tracker software for this to be a proper solution for those wanting 'yesterdays' private trackers to continue as they were.mito said:
If you mean banning of individual users and thighter 'social control' this can work to some extent, but considering that it only takes 'one bad apple' the rigourness of this and the amount of work involved makes it implausable. I expect many tracker sites to either just shut down or revert from their pseudo-private state to beeing genuinely private.
Edit: It only uses the decentralised network to locate other peers. If an Azureus user tries to open a registered torrent and subsequently is 'told to bugger off' by the tracker it will recieve a set of peers if any one Azureus user is actively downloading the file - and any one Azureus user has at some point 'compromised' the privacy of the tracker by connecting to it the normal way while having distributed tracking enabeled. Unless I misunderstand the bittorrent protocol the peers that are using the tracker normally have no way of knowing that another peer that's initiating a connection did not recieve their 'peer identity' from the tracker itself.
DudeMiester
Regular
Couldn't they adapt the system to create special secure trackers. Basically, when you download from the tracker, you get a signature from it. Then you will only upload to other clients who also have the signature. Even if some bad apple lets his server become a gateway to the file, it doesn't matter as none of the trackerless clients can download from anyone outside their group as everyone else is operating on the secure system. So basically bad apples become their own network causing no harm to the other downloaders.
This is what they do now on when it comes to the tracker-peer relationship. Previously when the only way to get the identity of the other peers was, for every peer in the swarm, to periodically connect to the tracker. The tracker could then tell clients without the proper key identifying them to get lost or impose restrictions based on ratio and so on. Now, there's currently no such mechanism when it comes to peer-peer connections, so when you can get a list of peers from another peer the cat's out of the bag, so to speak. I guess they could implement some sort of 'private' client also and require every user to use it but this would involve contacting the tracker not only to get the peers, but to validate incoming peer connections and I dont't think that would be workable in the broader scheme of things.
