6 ms·

Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

178 points by Garbage 15y ago

grzaks 15y ago
Very nice. But the concept is not new. Don't you remember Kad/Kademlia network which was introduced together with eDonkey/eMule and invented back in 2002? It didn't get any traction then but it was completely decentralized (based on distributed hash tables).
- dissident 15y ago
  Kademlia did get traction; it is the protocol for BitTorrent's use of magnet links, trackerless torrents and other features. It was not designed to act as a gossip-like overlay network for indexing content (similar to eDonkey/eMule), it was designed to act as an overlay network for identifying metadata of known keys stored in DHT. The BitTorrent checklist is as follows: 1. [X] peer to peer file transfer 2. [X] Kademlia/magnet links for decentralized metadata 3. [X] Kademlia/peer exchange for decentralized tracking 4. [X] Gossip protocol for indexing magnet links 5. [X] integrated data proxying for anonymity/plausible deniability Tribler solved step 4, OneSwarm and some others are trying to solve step 5. We're indeed on the cusp of an impenetrable file sharing network.
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    >impenetrable Until they just block the protocol with deep packet inspection. (Encryption won't work, you can analyse packet size/timing to fingerprint protocols pretty accurately.)
    - Refringe 15y ago
      Rogers already does this (cripples download and limits upload to ~80KBps). They've forced me to switch to Usenet as even popular Torrents slow to a crawl on their Ultimate plan (50 down/2 up).
      - EwanG 15y ago
        Curious why you would move to Usenet unless you are using a free service? The remaining DDL services (such as DepositFiles and RapidShare) are cheaper and tend to have faster DL times. Something I'm missing?
        peregrine 15y ago
        Megaupload was taken down and people are leaving DDL serves in droves. Usenet is a relatively safe, very fast, and a service thats been around for years.
        Refringe 15y ago
        I pay less than $7/month for my Usenet connection, which is relatively cheap if you use it frequently. The connection is over SSL so it's completely secure end-to-end. My average download speed is 9 MB/s (saturating my line) which means I can download a 720p HD movie in just under 13 minutes. There's also (like with torrents) the ability to set-up TV show RSS feeds, so my shows automatically download to a folder, ready to watch, as they're released. It comes down to ease of use.
      - pyre 15y ago
        There's also the possibility of a 'seed box,' a remote server that downloads your torrents, then you just directly download them to your local machine from the server. I've heard of them (mostly through reading articles/comments on TorrentFreak), but I've never been curious enough to investigate the economics of them.
    - alextgordon 15y ago
      Wouldn't it be possible to randomize packet padding and delays to get around this?
    - troymc 15y ago
      If packet timing or sizing gives away the protocol, then it seems to me that one could re-rig it to mimic the timing and sizing of another protocol.
      - phillco 15y ago
        Interesting. Has there been any success in disguising encrypted BitTorrent traffic as another protocol? I guess it'd have to be a protocol whose packets contain a large amount of random data and a large number of connections with different foreign addresses. Hmmm.
        xorglorb 15y ago
        Skype would seem to fit the bill.
        phillco 15y ago
        That was my best guess too, and Skype is also ubiquitous and would be extremely difficult (popularity wise) to censor. But I doubt video data is truly random -- it probably has some structure to it.
        anthonyb 15y ago
        Encrypted video/voice data looks like encrypted Bittorrent data.
        phillco 15y ago
        Oops, forgot Skype video was encrypted. Duh. In that case it'd do fine.
    - dissident 15y ago
      It's important to note that, at least in the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that blanket censorship of online content simply because they can be illegal is unconstitutional. It is further reaffirmed in MGM v. Grokster that a filesharing service is only accountable for its actions if it advertises or supports the service's use of violating the law.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    This is absolutely inevitable. Attacking file sharing will just lead to better file sharing technology. We should be thanking the RIAA and MPAA really.
    - EwanG 15y ago
      Sort of like the rabbit thanking the eagle for the evolutionary pressure to make them faster and faster?
      - mike-cardwell 15y ago
        I was being sarcastic
        nwj 15y ago
        Sarcasm or not, it's a good point. It's hard to see a viable endgame for the MPAA/RIAA if newer file sharing technology simply routes around the obstacles they through up. The broad trend has been toward easier, faster, more secure file sharing. Does anyone really believe that trend is going to reverse course?
    - azxcnjdk 15y ago
      Oddly enough, the top levels of the piracy chain still use FTP and IRC. Even though security improved right after the early 2000 busts, it has remained relatively unchanged since then (even taking into account the RELOADED-related busts ~8-12 months ago). But I guess it all comes down to scale.. it's easier to control the security of 100 users over the security of millions.
Void_ 15y ago
Tribler.org is down, is there an alternative link?
savramescu 15y ago
This sounds to me a lot like DC++, but using p2p. Anyone remember that DC client that had multiple peers?
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  StrongDC++ was the one I used to use. There are many with swarming enabled.
nixle 15y ago
Honest question here: I always thought that Kazaa and eMule worked decentralized. How was that set up?
- roel_v 15y ago
  They were, the problem were that the protocol wasn't very good, and that they were closed source so there was a single point at which to cut them off - at the point of distribution. It seems to me that the same reasoning that was used in the lawsuits against Kazaa (which ultimately caused Kazaa's demise) could be applied to this product. Time will tell I guess, when it gets big enough to target - for now the centralized torrent trackers are a lot easier to use and more widely known. Tribler being open source might make it harder to suppress with legal tools. I think the logical step (if it would become mainstream) would be to sue uploaders individually.
  - jamii 15y ago
    Tribler might be helped by its veneer of respectability - its funded by P2P Next (http://www.p2p-next.org/ http://www.p2p-next.org/) as part of an EU wide program to create P2P distribution channels.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Alternative links for PC and Mac: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/File-Sharing/Tribler.shtml http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/File-Sharing/Tribler.s... http://download.cnet.com/Tribler/3000-2196_4-75329551.html http://download.cnet.com/Tribler/3000-2196_4-75329551.html
- synctext 15y ago
  Sorry for that, our central servers are flooded. We're bringing a few more online now for dedicated .EXE downloading. Should be running fairly quickly.
rb2k_ 15y ago
For people interested in the more "anonymous" parts of filesharing, I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on the subject: http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2008/07/23/the-current-state-of-anonymous-file-sharing/ http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2008/07/23/the-current-state-of-a... It's a bit dated at this point, but still give an ok overview of networks like Gnutella, EDonkey and Bittorrent and also goes into the more exotic ones. As far as I see it, the currently 'usable' clients that use darknets and turtle-hopping are Oneswarm (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu) and AllianceP2P (http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/ http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/) p.s. Sorry about the language, it was my first bigger paper written in English, so I'm a bit heavy on the passive forms and runaway sentences.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  What do you think of the Phantom Protocol? It's very focused on the anonymity part, but also aims to be "indestructible": http://code.google.com/p/phantom/ http://code.google.com/p/phantom/
  - rb2k_ 15y ago
    I remember adding it to my "read later" list at some point in the past, but that's an ever growing stack of PDF files :) While I can't say anything about it from a networking point of view, a big problem is that there is no easy "how can I use this" guide on the project page. I firmly believe that a well packaged implementation is the basis for anything :) It also seems to be an overlay network. I personally think that an encrypted friend2friend Darknet approach is more useful as an first step rather than trying to do it on an internet scale. "Social" Darknets offer a good balance between transfer speed, security and people being ok with their upload being used (since it's by their direct friends). I'm still waiting for a usable software that integrates within existing social networks (twitter, facebook, ...) to gather peers
- aw3c2 15y ago
  Sadly no mention of I2P even though it was working quite well even back then. http://www.i2p2.de/ http://www.i2p2.de/ You can use Bittorrent in it, there is a emule port, gnutella etc. Works quite well. I often have download speeds of ~50Kilobytes/s in Bittorrent. It is a self-contained net with some trackers.
brown9-2 15y ago
Doesn't Skype have a similar "superpeer" architecture? They showed with their outage last year that it is still possible for a decentralized network to go down.
- pyre 15y ago
  It's less likely that someone will be able to take out all (or most) superpeers at the same time... at least not as effectively as the core software malfunctioning.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    Less likely for sure, but it doesn't mean that a network relying on superpeers is invulnerable. The risk of a centralized dependency is spread out among many, many nodes, but the risk still exists (I'm just annoyed at articles like this that make the decentralized approach sound bulletproof, it's hyperbole).
    - pyre 15y ago
      The network itself is still resilient. Skype's issue was getting the P2P network back up and running ASAP because 1) people pay them for a service that was down and 2) (voice|video|text) chat generally has a higher priority than file sharing. People wouldn't be as ticked off if the P2P filesharing network went down for a few days (or a week) before rebuilding itself. What happens when all superpeers go offline at once is that the 'normal' peers then start DDOS'ing any remaining superpeers (or the few superpeers that are able to get back up and running quickly). As people settled down with trying to reconnect to the superpeers, eventually the network would rebuilt itself (possibly with completely different superpeers). Once you knock out all superpeers at once, the network becomes quite a bit less distributed. That said, once all superpeers are down, it could be easy to continue manually DDOS superpeers as their appeared on the network for a targeted attack. If someone was being malicious, they could keep up the DDOS even as regular users are letting up on their inadvertent DDOS due to the sudden change in network makeup.
- mseebach 15y ago
politician 15y ago
Does Tribler contain countermeasures for the Sybil attack?
- synctext 15y ago
  Sybil attack, insightful question.. Yes we protect against it: http://www.asci.tudelft.nl/media/proceedings_asci_conference_2010/asci2010_submission_14.pdf http://www.asci.tudelft.nl/media/proceedings_asci_conference... -tribler founder
  - politician 15y ago
    "The BarterCast mechanism was designed by Meulpolderet al. to distinguish free-riders and cooperative peers in ﬁle-sharing environments. After the ﬁrst release, Seuken et al. [?] proposed an improvement to make it more resilient against misreporting attacks. Their solution is based on ignoring some of the feedback reports. Also, this solution could cut down the severity of the attack, but on the other hand it increases the feedback sparsity." Do you have the cite handy for the paper referred to in section 2? I'm curious about the problem of network degradation due to pollution by an adversary whose clones attempt to maximize their reputation so as to isolate non-clones before initiating the attack.
joejohnson 15y ago
Every time I start the application, it creates a "TriblerDonwloads" folder on my desktop (I'm on a mac). I've even changed the default downloads folder to ~/Downloads/TriblerDownloads... it's still creates the desktop folder at launch. Also, is there a way to force outgoing encryption (you can do this in uTorrent)?
- Zirro 15y ago
  I remember testing Tribler a few months ago, and I while I think the idea is brilliant, I didn't keep it for long for the reason you mention above. One of the reasons I switched to OS X in the first place is the high quality of the applications. I would love to try Tribler again if they create a native version for each platform, or at least a version which looks and behaves according to the standards of each platform.
mikehuffman 15y ago
I wonder why people seem to avoid the fact that the laws already know it is impossible to shut down file sharing. It is a power play. Just like it is impossible to stop marijuana usage, but that has no affect on the repercussions of the laws and the results for certain corporations and those accused.
eridius 15y ago
Something I've always wondered (but been too lazy to research on my own) with this sort of thing is, in the absence of any centralized point, how do new users even find the swarm? My assumption is that all of these networks have at least one (or a handful of) centralized server that acts as a stepping stone to find the swarm. Is there something obvious I'm missing?
- SpikeGronim 15y ago
  That's the typical approach. Either the client ships with a list of IPs / hostnames for seed servers, or you update a single well known DNS name with a bunch of A records. For maximum resilience you can put a whole series of DNS names in the client under different national registrars. This is often how botnets receive command and control messages - lookup RANDOM_HEX.ch and download a signed script to run.
  - chli 15y ago
    What's special about the .ch ?
    - Raphael 15y ago
      Switzerland is neutral.
  - eridius 15y ago
    I figured that's what existing p2p solutions did. Does Tribler do that too? Because it can't really claim to not rely on central servers at all if it still needs them as a stepping stone.
    - majmun 15y ago
      from article: "One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders. “Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse. " I guess to solve that problem the distribution must be decentralized and supernode adress delivered with client (as stated in above comment)
StavrosK 15y ago
I don't see how this is any different (practically, not technically) from eDonkey/KaZaA/all the other file sharing networks of old. It sounds like it will suffer from the same problem of low SNR as the others did. Basically, when anyone can add any file they want (for example, eMule etc scanned directories and added whatever it could find), noise is invariably much higher. Torrent trackers act as curators, ensuring there's high quality of uploads (especially for private trackers), thus increasing SNR. I'd love it if someone could prove me wrong, though. Does anyone have any insight on this?
falala 15y ago
Coral Cache for Tribler Downloads: http://dl.tribler.org.nyud.net/download.html http://dl.tribler.org.nyud.net/download.html
greyish_water 15y ago
What do people do with this?
hmans 15y ago
If this mattered, people would be using Gnutella.
mydnite 15y ago
Not everyone wants to seed all the time so splitting up the program into a BT core and BT file manager might be an idea. The BT core program looks after the online user and search data, sharing this with other clients. This could be always on. While the BT file manager looks after seeding / leeching through the BT core program. This allows you to participate in the group acting as a super peer and having up to date search data while not having to have a full blown BT client running.

178 points by Garbage 15y ago

Very nice. But the concept is not new. Don't you remember Kad/Kademlia network which was introduced together with eDonkey/eMule and invented back in 2002? It didn't get any traction then but it was completely decentralized (based on distributed hash tables).

dissident 15y ago
Kademlia did get traction; it is the protocol for BitTorrent's use of magnet links, trackerless torrents and other features. It was not designed to act as a gossip-like overlay network for indexing content (similar to eDonkey/eMule), it was designed to act as an overlay network for identifying metadata of known keys stored in DHT. The BitTorrent checklist is as follows: 1. [X] peer to peer file transfer 2. [X] Kademlia/magnet links for decentralized metadata 3. [X] Kademlia/peer exchange for decentralized tracking 4. [X] Gossip protocol for indexing magnet links 5. [X] integrated data proxying for anonymity/plausible deniability Tribler solved step 4, OneSwarm and some others are trying to solve step 5. We're indeed on the cusp of an impenetrable file sharing network.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >impenetrable Until they just block the protocol with deep packet inspection. (Encryption won't work, you can analyse packet size/timing to fingerprint protocols pretty accurately.)
  - Refringe 15y ago
    Rogers already does this (cripples download and limits upload to ~80KBps). They've forced me to switch to Usenet as even popular Torrents slow to a crawl on their Ultimate plan (50 down/2 up).
    - EwanG 15y ago
      Curious why you would move to Usenet unless you are using a free service? The remaining DDL services (such as DepositFiles and RapidShare) are cheaper and tend to have faster DL times. Something I'm missing?
      - peregrine 15y ago
        Megaupload was taken down and people are leaving DDL serves in droves. Usenet is a relatively safe, very fast, and a service thats been around for years.
      - Refringe 15y ago
        I pay less than $7/month for my Usenet connection, which is relatively cheap if you use it frequently. The connection is over SSL so it's completely secure end-to-end. My average download speed is 9 MB/s (saturating my line) which means I can download a 720p HD movie in just under 13 minutes. There's also (like with torrents) the ability to set-up TV show RSS feeds, so my shows automatically download to a folder, ready to watch, as they're released. It comes down to ease of use.
    - pyre 15y ago
      There's also the possibility of a 'seed box,' a remote server that downloads your torrents, then you just directly download them to your local machine from the server. I've heard of them (mostly through reading articles/comments on TorrentFreak), but I've never been curious enough to investigate the economics of them.
  - alextgordon 15y ago
    Wouldn't it be possible to randomize packet padding and delays to get around this?
  - troymc 15y ago
    If packet timing or sizing gives away the protocol, then it seems to me that one could re-rig it to mimic the timing and sizing of another protocol.
    - phillco 15y ago
      Interesting. Has there been any success in disguising encrypted BitTorrent traffic as another protocol? I guess it'd have to be a protocol whose packets contain a large amount of random data and a large number of connections with different foreign addresses. Hmmm.
      - xorglorb 15y ago
        Skype would seem to fit the bill.
        phillco 15y ago
        That was my best guess too, and Skype is also ubiquitous and would be extremely difficult (popularity wise) to censor. But I doubt video data is truly random -- it probably has some structure to it.
        anthonyb 15y ago
        Encrypted video/voice data looks like encrypted Bittorrent data.
        phillco 15y ago
        Oops, forgot Skype video was encrypted. Duh. In that case it'd do fine.
  - dissident 15y ago
    It's important to note that, at least in the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that blanket censorship of online content simply because they can be illegal is unconstitutional. It is further reaffirmed in MGM v. Grokster that a filesharing service is only accountable for its actions if it advertises or supports the service's use of violating the law.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  This is absolutely inevitable. Attacking file sharing will just lead to better file sharing technology. We should be thanking the RIAA and MPAA really.
  - EwanG 15y ago
    Sort of like the rabbit thanking the eagle for the evolutionary pressure to make them faster and faster?
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      I was being sarcastic
      - nwj 15y ago
        Sarcasm or not, it's a good point. It's hard to see a viable endgame for the MPAA/RIAA if newer file sharing technology simply routes around the obstacles they through up. The broad trend has been toward easier, faster, more secure file sharing. Does anyone really believe that trend is going to reverse course?
  - azxcnjdk 15y ago
    Oddly enough, the top levels of the piracy chain still use FTP and IRC. Even though security improved right after the early 2000 busts, it has remained relatively unchanged since then (even taking into account the RELOADED-related busts ~8-12 months ago). But I guess it all comes down to scale.. it's easier to control the security of 100 users over the security of millions.

Void_ 15y ago

Tribler.org is down, is there an alternative link?

savramescu 15y ago

This sounds to me a lot like DC++, but using p2p. Anyone remember that DC client that had multiple peers?

JonnieCache 15y ago
StrongDC++ was the one I used to use. There are many with swarming enabled.

nixle 15y ago

Honest question here: I always thought that Kazaa and eMule worked decentralized. How was that set up?

roel_v 15y ago
They were, the problem were that the protocol wasn't very good, and that they were closed source so there was a single point at which to cut them off - at the point of distribution. It seems to me that the same reasoning that was used in the lawsuits against Kazaa (which ultimately caused Kazaa's demise) could be applied to this product. Time will tell I guess, when it gets big enough to target - for now the centralized torrent trackers are a lot easier to use and more widely known. Tribler being open source might make it harder to suppress with legal tools. I think the logical step (if it would become mainstream) would be to sue uploaders individually.
- jamii 15y ago
  Tribler might be helped by its veneer of respectability - its funded by P2P Next (http://www.p2p-next.org/ http://www.p2p-next.org/) as part of an EU wide program to create P2P distribution channels.

nextparadigms 15y ago

Alternative links for PC and Mac: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/File-Sharing/Tribler.shtml http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/File-Sharing/Tribler.s... http://download.cnet.com/Tribler/3000-2196_4-75329551.html http://download.cnet.com/Tribler/3000-2196_4-75329551.html

synctext 15y ago
Sorry for that, our central servers are flooded. We're bringing a few more online now for dedicated .EXE downloading. Should be running fairly quickly.

rb2k_ 15y ago

For people interested in the more "anonymous" parts of filesharing, I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on the subject: http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2008/07/23/the-current-state-of-anonymous-file-sharing/ http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2008/07/23/the-current-state-of-a... It's a bit dated at this point, but still give an ok overview of networks like Gnutella, EDonkey and Bittorrent and also goes into the more exotic ones. As far as I see it, the currently 'usable' clients that use darknets and turtle-hopping are Oneswarm (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu) and AllianceP2P (http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/ http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/) p.s. Sorry about the language, it was my first bigger paper written in English, so I'm a bit heavy on the passive forms and runaway sentences.

nextparadigms 15y ago
What do you think of the Phantom Protocol? It's very focused on the anonymity part, but also aims to be "indestructible": http://code.google.com/p/phantom/ http://code.google.com/p/phantom/
- rb2k_ 15y ago
  I remember adding it to my "read later" list at some point in the past, but that's an ever growing stack of PDF files :) While I can't say anything about it from a networking point of view, a big problem is that there is no easy "how can I use this" guide on the project page. I firmly believe that a well packaged implementation is the basis for anything :) It also seems to be an overlay network. I personally think that an encrypted friend2friend Darknet approach is more useful as an first step rather than trying to do it on an internet scale. "Social" Darknets offer a good balance between transfer speed, security and people being ok with their upload being used (since it's by their direct friends). I'm still waiting for a usable software that integrates within existing social networks (twitter, facebook, ...) to gather peers
aw3c2 15y ago
Sadly no mention of I2P even though it was working quite well even back then. http://www.i2p2.de/ http://www.i2p2.de/ You can use Bittorrent in it, there is a emule port, gnutella etc. Works quite well. I often have download speeds of ~50Kilobytes/s in Bittorrent. It is a self-contained net with some trackers.

brown9-2 15y ago

Doesn't Skype have a similar "superpeer" architecture? They showed with their outage last year that it is still possible for a decentralized network to go down.

pyre 15y ago
It's less likely that someone will be able to take out all (or most) superpeers at the same time... at least not as effectively as the core software malfunctioning.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  Less likely for sure, but it doesn't mean that a network relying on superpeers is invulnerable. The risk of a centralized dependency is spread out among many, many nodes, but the risk still exists (I'm just annoyed at articles like this that make the decentralized approach sound bulletproof, it's hyperbole).
  - pyre 15y ago
    The network itself is still resilient. Skype's issue was getting the P2P network back up and running ASAP because 1) people pay them for a service that was down and 2) (voice|video|text) chat generally has a higher priority than file sharing. People wouldn't be as ticked off if the P2P filesharing network went down for a few days (or a week) before rebuilding itself. What happens when all superpeers go offline at once is that the 'normal' peers then start DDOS'ing any remaining superpeers (or the few superpeers that are able to get back up and running quickly). As people settled down with trying to reconnect to the superpeers, eventually the network would rebuilt itself (possibly with completely different superpeers). Once you knock out all superpeers at once, the network becomes quite a bit less distributed. That said, once all superpeers are down, it could be easy to continue manually DDOS superpeers as their appeared on the network for a targeted attack. If someone was being malicious, they could keep up the DDOS even as regular users are letting up on their inadvertent DDOS due to the sudden change in network makeup.
mseebach 15y ago

politician 15y ago

Does Tribler contain countermeasures for the Sybil attack?

synctext 15y ago
Sybil attack, insightful question.. Yes we protect against it: http://www.asci.tudelft.nl/media/proceedings_asci_conference_2010/asci2010_submission_14.pdf http://www.asci.tudelft.nl/media/proceedings_asci_conference... -tribler founder
- politician 15y ago
  "The BarterCast mechanism was designed by Meulpolderet al. to distinguish free-riders and cooperative peers in ﬁle-sharing environments. After the ﬁrst release, Seuken et al. [?] proposed an improvement to make it more resilient against misreporting attacks. Their solution is based on ignoring some of the feedback reports. Also, this solution could cut down the severity of the attack, but on the other hand it increases the feedback sparsity." Do you have the cite handy for the paper referred to in section 2? I'm curious about the problem of network degradation due to pollution by an adversary whose clones attempt to maximize their reputation so as to isolate non-clones before initiating the attack.

joejohnson 15y ago

Every time I start the application, it creates a "TriblerDonwloads" folder on my desktop (I'm on a mac). I've even changed the default downloads folder to ~/Downloads/TriblerDownloads... it's still creates the desktop folder at launch. Also, is there a way to force outgoing encryption (you can do this in uTorrent)?

Zirro 15y ago
I remember testing Tribler a few months ago, and I while I think the idea is brilliant, I didn't keep it for long for the reason you mention above. One of the reasons I switched to OS X in the first place is the high quality of the applications. I would love to try Tribler again if they create a native version for each platform, or at least a version which looks and behaves according to the standards of each platform.

mikehuffman 15y ago

I wonder why people seem to avoid the fact that the laws already know it is impossible to shut down file sharing. It is a power play. Just like it is impossible to stop marijuana usage, but that has no affect on the repercussions of the laws and the results for certain corporations and those accused.

eridius 15y ago

Something I've always wondered (but been too lazy to research on my own) with this sort of thing is, in the absence of any centralized point, how do new users even find the swarm? My assumption is that all of these networks have at least one (or a handful of) centralized server that acts as a stepping stone to find the swarm. Is there something obvious I'm missing?

SpikeGronim 15y ago
That's the typical approach. Either the client ships with a list of IPs / hostnames for seed servers, or you update a single well known DNS name with a bunch of A records. For maximum resilience you can put a whole series of DNS names in the client under different national registrars. This is often how botnets receive command and control messages - lookup RANDOM_HEX.ch and download a signed script to run.
- chli 15y ago
  What's special about the .ch ?
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Switzerland is neutral.
- eridius 15y ago
  I figured that's what existing p2p solutions did. Does Tribler do that too? Because it can't really claim to not rely on central servers at all if it still needs them as a stepping stone.
  - majmun 15y ago
    from article: "One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders. “Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse. " I guess to solve that problem the distribution must be decentralized and supernode adress delivered with client (as stated in above comment)

StavrosK 15y ago

I don't see how this is any different (practically, not technically) from eDonkey/KaZaA/all the other file sharing networks of old. It sounds like it will suffer from the same problem of low SNR as the others did. Basically, when anyone can add any file they want (for example, eMule etc scanned directories and added whatever it could find), noise is invariably much higher. Torrent trackers act as curators, ensuring there's high quality of uploads (especially for private trackers), thus increasing SNR. I'd love it if someone could prove me wrong, though. Does anyone have any insight on this?

falala 15y ago

Coral Cache for Tribler Downloads: http://dl.tribler.org.nyud.net/download.html http://dl.tribler.org.nyud.net/download.html

greyish_water 15y ago

What do people do with this?

hmans 15y ago

If this mattered, people would be using Gnutella.

mydnite 15y ago

Not everyone wants to seed all the time so splitting up the program into a BT core and BT file manager might be an idea. The BT core program looks after the online user and search data, sharing this with other clients. This could be always on. While the BT file manager looks after seeding / leeching through the BT core program. This allows you to participate in the group acting as a super peer and having up to date search data while not having to have a full blown BT client running.