6 ms·

Unstoppable file-sharing network ‘Tribler’ spells trouble for copyright holders

32 points by zacharye 15y ago

pavel_lishin 15y ago
I wonder how well it would work as a way to access data from outside national firewalls. Seems pretty topical considering what's happening in Iran right now.
TheCapn 15y ago
Anyone have a summary of the bootstrap process for this? There is no "central servers" or the like but how does one client find the next?
- irickt 15y ago
  An overview is here: https://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible-to-shut-down-120208/ https://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible... It's based on bittorrent with search, metadata, and spam control all distributed among peers.
  - TheCapn 15y ago
    "Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down." Well there we go. A bunch of sensational journalism hype again. The problem with Tribler then is that the network becomes stagnent once the tracker goes down. Sure peers receive shared connections from one another to create a web architecture but unless you've dialed into a web that has the host of a scene group the group will stagate on content will it not? Without a central tracker to facilitate the sharing of new peer data to prevent the swarm from becoming stale the content will eventually all reach 100% download and remain so with no nocomers being able to find the network. My knowledge of the DHT and Peer Exchange protocol extensions to BitTorrent are limited but isn't this what they tried to accomplish? How does Tribler make this any better? I'm stuck on the fence now. Tribler doesn't appear to be new and fantastic because its still strongly relied upon by central servers for bootstrapping abilities. Sure the network established might be large in size but without fresh peer exhanges the swarm will die off once the tracker is brought down. Someone to enlighten me perhaps?
- Zaak 15y ago
  You have to start with at least one well-known host.
joejohnson 15y ago
Can anyone speak to how well the search function works within the Tribler application? I can't get it to return any useful results :(
rmc 15y ago
Some of this stuff, like peer exchange and magnet links, are not new and are in most torrent clients for years. Pirate Bay has started promoting magnet links and rumour is that they'll stop doing torrents all together. It's the search part that's hard to do, and I wonder how tribler do it? Anyone analysed their code? I wonder how you'd do a true decentralised p2p search system.... (i.e. do to p2p search what google did to web search, come up with a new algorithmic invention)
- Silhouette 15y ago
  It would indeed be interesting to know how they do it. If someone has finally developed a way of sharing large amounts of data in an efficient, decentralised, and secure way, then it's not just the copyright holders who need to be afraid, it's also anyone planning on investing in Facebook (or those operating any other content-driven walled-garden services).
  - sedachv 15y ago
    It's going to be very difficult to provide the same things Facebook does in a decentralized way (I've thought about the problems around such a project a lot and written up my ideas for an approach in a series of blog posts at http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/search/label/ClearSky http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/search/label/ClearSky - I've outlined the big problems and proposed workable solutions for all of them, but the implementation is difficult and will be hard to get right). Justin Frankel released WASTE in 2003 and it does the basic P2P friendnet thing, but without a great user interface, ability to log in via the web browser from any random Internet cafe/computer lab, and a load of luck ("traction"), it's not going to work.
- icebraining 15y ago
  eMule has had that for years, using the Kad network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.
cdi 15y ago
"Spells trouble to freedom of the net" is more like it. Copyright holders will push repressive legislation sooner or later, and will use projects like this as an example.
- Zaak 15y ago
  It's unlikely that the absence of projects like this would cause them to refrain from pushing repressive legislation.
  - cdi 15y ago
    absence of projects like this would make their arguments look weak.
taylorbuley 15y ago
These researchers view of technologies' I would consider to be quite robust -- "we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals" -- kind of blows my mind
- mikeash 15y ago
  I think they are shaky from the point of view of protecting against legal measures.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  Robust, from a legal standpoint. Robust as in "Government jackboots can't come in and shut it down". SOPA proved that any centralized service, whether that be DNS or HTTP, is vulnerable to governmental shenanigans. It's been on the back of everyone's minds since Napster, but this brought it to the forefront.
Silhouette 15y ago
> "Tribler" is a peer-to-peer file-sharing client that is completely decentralized. "The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down," the software’s creator says. Which is a pretty f--king stupid thing to say at a time when we are trying to avoid draconian, Big-Media-backed legal shenanigans like SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. Are they trying to demonstrate that the only way to enforce copyright law really is to monitor everyone's communications 24/7, assume that anyone who uses encryption to an unrecognised/unauthorised host an infringer, and ruthlessly cut off Internet access to any such person? Because anyone who thinks such a scenario is unrealistic hasn't been paying attention. People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity are the enemy of those of us who want to have such tools for legitimate purposes and of those of us who want to have the content we honestly pay for in unrestricted formats that don't get in the way of us enjoying them. <skeptic>Also, with my technical hat on, how exactly does this work? I'm betting you aren't really as isolated and decentralised as you think you are, because, well, you can't be off the network and yet still be on the network. The article says it's a BitTorrent client, so surely someone is seeding something somewhere.</skeptic>
- Karunamon 15y ago
  >People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity Except that's not what Tribler is. If you can't think of legitimate reasons for a decentralized, censorship-proof file sharing network that don't violate the law, I daresay your imagination is broken...
  - skymt 15y ago
    Go right ahead. Name some uses for a censorship-resistant network that doesn't violate the law of the country in question. (It doesn't count if the use merely breaks a law you dislike, as in Chinese or Iranian suppression of dissidents.)
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Distributing personal files without being subjected to fraudulent DMCA takedowns, like the ones that Warner Bros sent to any file containing the string "the box".
dwhly 15y ago
One word... Kadmelia! It's worth saying (and has been said elsewhere already) that fully distributed search has existed for years. Kadmelia is just one notable example in wide use. I do think it's great that it's coming to the torrent world though! The characterization of it by many seems to suggest that this is novel and groundbreaking. The statements made about how you'd have to shut down the internet to take it down are also a bit hyperbolic. After all, algorithms to sniff, detect and either block or throttle this kind of traffic are widely deployed. Of course it's an arms race and encryption and obfuscation are used to counter. I'm not sure what the current state of that battle is, but clearly the main tool in protecting these kinds of capabilities is our voices, not fundamental technical properties.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  For anyone searching, it's "kademlia".
nextparadigms 15y ago
Is Tribler "better" than Oneswarm and AllianceP2P? And if so, why? http://www.oneswarm.org/ http://www.oneswarm.org/ http://alliancep2p.com/ http://alliancep2p.com/ Is it because Tribler is more focused on having everything public, while the other 2 are more focused on "friend sharing" networks, so it's easier to find files on Tribler?? From what I can tell they have more security/anonymization than Tribler, and it's not just because of the limited access between friends.
rbanffy 15y ago
Quite the contrary - it may force them to evolve into companies fully adapted to thrive in this environment. No. Not really. What will most likely happen is that big-media will just use it to push legislation that assume the users cannot be trusted and that enforcement must be more thorough to catch all those bad guys. If you do a lot of high bandwidth encrypted data exchange, someone will have to search your computer for "stolen" content.
alex_c 15y ago
Flashbacks to Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc. Come on, that wasn't THAT long ago. Do people really not learn anything from history?
- Zirro 15y ago
  Are you saying that they were as decentralized as Tribler?
  - bonzoesc 15y ago
    Gnutella definitely was once you found another node to talk to.
  - alex_c 15y ago
    Napster was centralized, Gnutella was (is?) decentralized.

32 points by zacharye 15y ago

I wonder how well it would work as a way to access data from outside national firewalls. Seems pretty topical considering what's happening in Iran right now.

TheCapn 15y ago

Anyone have a summary of the bootstrap process for this? There is no "central servers" or the like but how does one client find the next?

irickt 15y ago
An overview is here: https://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible-to-shut-down-120208/ https://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible... It's based on bittorrent with search, metadata, and spam control all distributed among peers.
- TheCapn 15y ago
  "Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down." Well there we go. A bunch of sensational journalism hype again. The problem with Tribler then is that the network becomes stagnent once the tracker goes down. Sure peers receive shared connections from one another to create a web architecture but unless you've dialed into a web that has the host of a scene group the group will stagate on content will it not? Without a central tracker to facilitate the sharing of new peer data to prevent the swarm from becoming stale the content will eventually all reach 100% download and remain so with no nocomers being able to find the network. My knowledge of the DHT and Peer Exchange protocol extensions to BitTorrent are limited but isn't this what they tried to accomplish? How does Tribler make this any better? I'm stuck on the fence now. Tribler doesn't appear to be new and fantastic because its still strongly relied upon by central servers for bootstrapping abilities. Sure the network established might be large in size but without fresh peer exhanges the swarm will die off once the tracker is brought down. Someone to enlighten me perhaps?
Zaak 15y ago
You have to start with at least one well-known host.

joejohnson 15y ago

Can anyone speak to how well the search function works within the Tribler application? I can't get it to return any useful results :(

rmc 15y ago

Some of this stuff, like peer exchange and magnet links, are not new and are in most torrent clients for years. Pirate Bay has started promoting magnet links and rumour is that they'll stop doing torrents all together. It's the search part that's hard to do, and I wonder how tribler do it? Anyone analysed their code? I wonder how you'd do a true decentralised p2p search system.... (i.e. do to p2p search what google did to web search, come up with a new algorithmic invention)

Silhouette 15y ago
It would indeed be interesting to know how they do it. If someone has finally developed a way of sharing large amounts of data in an efficient, decentralised, and secure way, then it's not just the copyright holders who need to be afraid, it's also anyone planning on investing in Facebook (or those operating any other content-driven walled-garden services).
- sedachv 15y ago
  It's going to be very difficult to provide the same things Facebook does in a decentralized way (I've thought about the problems around such a project a lot and written up my ideas for an approach in a series of blog posts at http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/search/label/ClearSky http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/search/label/ClearSky - I've outlined the big problems and proposed workable solutions for all of them, but the implementation is difficult and will be hard to get right). Justin Frankel released WASTE in 2003 and it does the basic P2P friendnet thing, but without a great user interface, ability to log in via the web browser from any random Internet cafe/computer lab, and a load of luck ("traction"), it's not going to work.
icebraining 15y ago
eMule has had that for years, using the Kad network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.

cdi 15y ago

"Spells trouble to freedom of the net" is more like it. Copyright holders will push repressive legislation sooner or later, and will use projects like this as an example.

Zaak 15y ago
It's unlikely that the absence of projects like this would cause them to refrain from pushing repressive legislation.
- cdi 15y ago
  absence of projects like this would make their arguments look weak.

taylorbuley 15y ago

These researchers view of technologies' I would consider to be quite robust -- "we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals" -- kind of blows my mind

mikeash 15y ago
I think they are shaky from the point of view of protecting against legal measures.
Karunamon 15y ago
Robust, from a legal standpoint. Robust as in "Government jackboots can't come in and shut it down". SOPA proved that any centralized service, whether that be DNS or HTTP, is vulnerable to governmental shenanigans. It's been on the back of everyone's minds since Napster, but this brought it to the forefront.

Silhouette 15y ago

> "Tribler" is a peer-to-peer file-sharing client that is completely decentralized. "The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down," the software’s creator says. Which is a pretty f--king stupid thing to say at a time when we are trying to avoid draconian, Big-Media-backed legal shenanigans like SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. Are they trying to demonstrate that the only way to enforce copyright law really is to monitor everyone's communications 24/7, assume that anyone who uses encryption to an unrecognised/unauthorised host an infringer, and ruthlessly cut off Internet access to any such person? Because anyone who thinks such a scenario is unrealistic hasn't been paying attention. People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity are the enemy of those of us who want to have such tools for legitimate purposes and of those of us who want to have the content we honestly pay for in unrestricted formats that don't get in the way of us enjoying them. <skeptic>Also, with my technical hat on, how exactly does this work? I'm betting you aren't really as isolated and decentralised as you think you are, because, well, you can't be off the network and yet still be on the network. The article says it's a BitTorrent client, so surely someone is seeding something somewhere.</skeptic>

Karunamon 15y ago
>People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity Except that's not what Tribler is. If you can't think of legitimate reasons for a decentralized, censorship-proof file sharing network that don't violate the law, I daresay your imagination is broken...
- skymt 15y ago
  Go right ahead. Name some uses for a censorship-resistant network that doesn't violate the law of the country in question. (It doesn't count if the use merely breaks a law you dislike, as in Chinese or Iranian suppression of dissidents.)
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Distributing personal files without being subjected to fraudulent DMCA takedowns, like the ones that Warner Bros sent to any file containing the string "the box".

dwhly 15y ago

One word... Kadmelia! It's worth saying (and has been said elsewhere already) that fully distributed search has existed for years. Kadmelia is just one notable example in wide use. I do think it's great that it's coming to the torrent world though! The characterization of it by many seems to suggest that this is novel and groundbreaking. The statements made about how you'd have to shut down the internet to take it down are also a bit hyperbolic. After all, algorithms to sniff, detect and either block or throttle this kind of traffic are widely deployed. Of course it's an arms race and encryption and obfuscation are used to counter. I'm not sure what the current state of that battle is, but clearly the main tool in protecting these kinds of capabilities is our voices, not fundamental technical properties.

StavrosK 15y ago
For anyone searching, it's "kademlia".

nextparadigms 15y ago

Is Tribler "better" than Oneswarm and AllianceP2P? And if so, why? http://www.oneswarm.org/ http://www.oneswarm.org/ http://alliancep2p.com/ http://alliancep2p.com/ Is it because Tribler is more focused on having everything public, while the other 2 are more focused on "friend sharing" networks, so it's easier to find files on Tribler?? From what I can tell they have more security/anonymization than Tribler, and it's not just because of the limited access between friends.

rbanffy 15y ago

Quite the contrary - it may force them to evolve into companies fully adapted to thrive in this environment. No. Not really. What will most likely happen is that big-media will just use it to push legislation that assume the users cannot be trusted and that enforcement must be more thorough to catch all those bad guys. If you do a lot of high bandwidth encrypted data exchange, someone will have to search your computer for "stolen" content.

alex_c 15y ago

Flashbacks to Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc. Come on, that wasn't THAT long ago. Do people really not learn anything from history?

Zirro 15y ago
Are you saying that they were as decentralized as Tribler?
- bonzoesc 15y ago
  Gnutella definitely was once you found another node to talk to.
- alex_c 15y ago
  Napster was centralized, Gnutella was (is?) decentralized.