Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Danish company is not limiting its services to the RIAA though. It is also working with an Irish ISP to support their “3 strikes” regime, and in Australia the company also conducted investigations against alleged pirates.

Apart from their pirate tracking activities, DtecNet also has a business intelligence unit to help their entertainment industry clients “Understand what’s happening and where, and to develop smarter strategies to guide their development, marketing, retailing, distribution and investment initiatives.” The intelligence unit utilizes its insights into the file-sharing community to help out, but unfortunately the unit is not that knowledgeable.

In fact, the whitepaper (pdf) that was published by the DtecNet unit and mirrored all around the web during the last 24 hours, clearly shows that they have no clue about BitTorrent.

In the paper that deals with the recent downtime of the Pirate Bay tracker and how this affects BitTorrent usage, they make several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far, and it is already being cited by several respected news outlets.

Let’s take a look at some of the things DtecNet claims and why these claims are bogus, inaccurate or just plain stupid.

Claim: — “After Swedish authorities forced the Internet disconnection of The Pirate Bay, online piracy worldwide dropped substantially on BitTorrent networks as file traders scrambled to find replacement trackers.”

This claim is based on a graph presented by DtecNet (see below) which shows that the number of infringements recorded by the company dropped significantly. This is of course a direct effect of the Pirate Bay tracker downtime. Companies like DtecNet use the tracker to find and report pirates and if it goes down there are less recorded infringements. However, there is no evidence that piracy went down. Most BitTorrent transfers were working fine due to the wonders of DHT (trackerless torrents), including the ones that were using only the Pirate Bay tracker.

Claim: — “The impact of the shutdown is strongly obvious, [...] file trading on BitTorrent, easily the world’s most popular peer-to-peer protocol, dropped virtually overnight by nearly 80 percent.”

This second claim is even more absurd because it suggests that BitTorrent usage dropped by 80 percent based on a graph of recorded infringements. Remember, DtecNet doesn’t track any BitTorrent traffic data. The only thing that their data proves is that, because of the tracker downtime, DtecNet was unable to connect to some of the trackers listed in their database of torrents. Again, the torrents might have worked just fine for users because of DHT.

Claim: — “Over time, infringements through that network [BitTorrent] began to rise again as new trackers became available.”

This seems to suggest that after the Pirate Bay trackers went down several new trackers have appeared, which is simply not true. In fact, DtecNet uses OpenBitTorrent and the Denis Stalker tracker as an example in their paper, two trackers that are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay tracker. The only reason the number of recorded infringements began to rise is that these trackers also suffered downtime from which they recovered. DtecNet however seems to be unaware of the relation between the three trackers.

Claim: — DtecNet has created a nice graph (below) that “illustrates the chaos the shutdown caused among various BitTorrent tracker networks, and how more recently the situation appears to be clarifying itself as users find new favorite sites.”

The only confusion we see here is at the DtecNet offices. The company apparently fails to understand that a tracker is something different than a site. There is absolutely no indication that BitTorrent users were looking for new sites (note that The Pirate Bay site was still up), but even if they were this does not mean that there will be any changes in the usage of the various trackers.

Claim: — “About two weeks after the Pirate Bay shutdown, two of the successor trackers – OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker – temporarily shut down, possibly because they could not handle rising demand.”

This claim is almost hilarious. As pointed out earlier, OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay. It takes no genius to figure this out, and this should be especially obvious for an outfit that deals with BitTorrent trackers on a daily basis, trying to catch pirates. So, the two successor trackers did not collapse under the increased load at all, they went down together with The Pirate Bay.

We could go on for hours refuting pretty much every sentence in the report and we are not the only ones who dispute the know-how of DtecNet’s self-proclaimed business intelligence unit. P2P expert Dr. Pouwelse of the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology looked into the report as well and told TorrentFreak: “They are completely technically incompetent, they are just trying to get sensational press coverage, or both.”

“Mixing up terms like trackers versus website and failure to do basic homework like DNS lookups means they would fail our master course in P2P. Their work suffers from a fundamental methodological error: what our company can’t see does not exist, thus we can make wild absolute claims on a complex global phenomena,” Pouwelse said.

Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and the business intelligence they claim to offer. Considering this position it is striking to see how little they actually know about what’s going on, and we fear that this amateurish white paper might actually lose @DtecNetBI some customers, instead of adding new clients to their portfolio.

Chances are, DtecNet will be responsible for gathering evidence against British file-sharers so that Peter Mandelson can have them kicked off the Internet in 2011. Nice to know that important job will be in safe hands.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

For that experiment the stream was only broadcasted to a select group of people and not the entire Internet. Today, however, the lab’s researchers will launch their second BitTorrent streaming experiment on a much bigger scale, as they will broadcast a live stream of a live music performance for all the world to see.

“The setup is very simple at the cinema – we have a standard computer connected to audio and video mixers, which then feeds the P2P network,” Dr. Njål Borch, a senior researcher involved in the project told TorrentFreak.

The software they use to stream the performance is from the EU-funded P2P-Next project and several of the partners are also donating bandwidth for the experiment to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

The performance will take place at Aurora Kino in Tromsø as a part of the Insomnia electronic music festival. To spice things up, the lab is also sending a live feed to the Notch festival in Beijing, which is running in parallel with Insomnia, and to Skjervøy kulturhus in the far north of Norway.

However, since the broadcast is public this time, everyone with an Internet connection can tune in. The only thing required to watch the stream is the Swarmplayer software, or a browser plugin (Windows only). Both are linked on the project’s website.

According to Borch, this BitTorrent live streaming experiment is not just a proof of concept, it might eventually play a significant role in the future of live streaming on the Internet.

“If the scalability is good for live streaming, this can increase the amount of viewers without massive bandwidth bills. Another effect, which I am currently very much a fan of, is that adding more bandwidth is very easy – put up a seedbox and hand it the torrent. No administration otherwise necessary,” he told TorrentFreak.

Anyone who would like to be part of this world premiere can tune in at 5 pm CET when the broadcast will start. If all goes well you’ll be able to see a live performance of a new soundtrack to Pudovkin’s 1926 film, “Mother”.

Update: The broadcast ended and it’s replaced by a 5 minute clip of the concert so people can still test the streaming technology. It was a great success with visitors from all over the world.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today’s report is based on data from over 17,221 unique users in a few dozen public BitTorrent swarms, collected by the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with our previous reports, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 14 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up in the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our September report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent extended its user base and now has a massive 60 percent market share. Vuze, BitComet and BitTorrent’s Mainline client all lost market share.

Transmission, on the other hand, keeps on growing. Its market share increased 23 percent and might take over BitComet’s fourth place soon. More on this in our December report.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Thus far the demand for video continues to grow, and it is even expanding to live video. To keep video services from collapsing and to save bandwidth costs, it seems almost inevitable that content providers will have to look at P2P-based streaming solutions. Last year we reported that CNN had experimented with a P2P-based live stream, and the Tribler research team has already shown that it’s possible to use BitTorrent to stream live footage.

There are currently a few dozen people working on P2P-based live streaming, and they are soon to be joined by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. Last week he tweeted that he will beat Tribler’s solution in terms of delay. “Tribler’s live streaming benchmarks are a joke. I’m going for < 5sec delay," Bram wrote.

This comment did of course peak our interest, so we decided to get in touch with Bram Cohen to ask him what he’s up to exactly. He told us that his BitTorrent-powered live streaming implementation is still in an early stage of development, but he hopes to have a working version ready “sometime next year”.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date noone has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told us.

There are still a lot of problems to solve though, before the first version becomes available to the public. Getting BitTorrent to work effectively with live streams requires several major adjustments.

“Doing live properly is a hard problem, and while I could have a working thing relatively quickly, I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way,” Bram told TorrentFreak. He further explained that everything has to be redone in order to make BitTorrent compatible with live streams, “including ditching TCP and using congestion control algorithms different from the ones we’ve made for UTP,” Bram said.

“I am fundamentally a technologist, and am simply not interested in working on something which doesn’t solve the fundamental problem it’s supposed to tackle, especially in a market where there have already been so many bad technologies which failed to succeed based on sales and marketing,” he added

In his tweet Bram Cohen focused on an extremely low latency of less than 5 seconds, so content will not have to buffer for minutes before the stream starts. According to some, such a low latency could mean that a lot of potential upload capacity would go lost. However, Bram disagrees on this, as he explained to TorrentFreak.

“Lower latency doesn’t require extra bandwidth, it just requires that everything be designed from the ground up for low latency. In terms of overhead, I’m shooting for making a swarm able to work with only 20% extra upload capacity, which is subtly different from having 20% extra overhead – because there’s noise in real networks, there needs to be some slop for when things get bad.”

“My actual extra bandwidth used will be less than 10%. This very important benchmark number is generally speaking not even mentioned for most p2p live streaming solutions, and I get the feeling that the developers don’t even know what the value is. I’m taking an approach of viewing all the important benchmarks (latency, extra bandwidth necessary, offload percentage) as central to the whole thing, and running realistic simulations constantly to get a good idea for what they are and help optimize them.”

“Oddly, most live p2p solutions don’t even make coherent claims as to what latency they can provide, and when they do it’s a delay which hardly qualifies as live. My offload of course goes over 99% on large swarms – without that it’s hardly p2p,” Bram said.

The big question is of course how BitTorrent’s inventor will try to solve this puzzle. Many researchers including the Tribler team are looking into P2P-powered live streams, and not all of them agree that the tit-for-tat algorithm based on reciprocity is suited for live streams. However, when we asked Bram whether he is looking into a new algorithm he was very clear.

“No, the low latency requirements basically preclude any competitive algorithms and I’m going with a cooperative approach. It does do a very good job of squeezing out every little bit of upload capacity all the peers have though, and doing it with the same ISP-friendly properties as UTP,” Bram said.

Quite a few ISPs are complaining bitterly about the strain BitTorrent puts on their network, so they will be delighted to hear that they are not being ignored in the development process. If done right, BitTorrent-powered live streams may accelerate the availability of live streams on the Internet.

Not only will existing broadcasters be able to stream their content at low costs, individual users will also be able to stream a live feed to tens of thousands of Internet users from their home connection without having to invest in bandwidth. More than ever the public will be in charge of distribution, while BitTorrent-powered TV moves one step closer to becoming reality.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today we present our second report based on data from over 165,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology.

The results in the table below show the market share for each individual client. In common with the June report, only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 20 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

The changes in market share compared to our June report are also included, and these show some interesting trends. First of all, uTorrent kept its dominant lead and even extended its market share to 56.81 percent. BitComet – ranked fourth again – is this month’s loser with a drop of 38 percent, falling from 6.50 to 4.71 percent market share.

On the winning side we see gains for Transmission and Vuze. Transmission’s market share increased to 44 percent and may move up a few spots if it maintains this growth rate. More on this in our October report.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The lab’s launch was held at a local movie theater where the film “Carved” by Jonas Rejman was projected, with consent from the copyright holder of course. To our knowledge this is a digital streaming world premiere for BitTorrent, and one that shows how the technology can actually help digital cinema and independent filmmakers.

Many independently produced films never make it onto the big screen simply because the costs involved are too high. At the moment most digital movies are distributed “over land” on hard disks costing up to $2000 for each copy. BitTorrent has the power to change this outdated distribution method and get smaller budget films onto the big screen.

The Far North Living Lab’s experiment shows that it’s even possible to stream movies if the connection is good enough, but Dr. Njål Borch, a senior researcher involved in the project added that downloading the film beforehand is probably a better option.

For this test run the researchers did not use a real-life BitTorrent swarm, since that would make it pretty much impossible to get the 19mbit/s download speed required to stream the film onto the big screen.

“We didn’t use a publicly available torrent, as not many would put out those kind of bitrates,” Borch told TorrentFreak. “We seeded it from our own computers including some local seeds in order to get the speed up, but we’re currently upgrading the connection to the cinema to a 1 Gig fiber optic cable that will allow us to perform these kind of experiments with no local seeds.”

The lab’s next stunt will be to stream a live concert to the city of Beijing as well as a few selected rural areas. “We want to participate in the world even though we are physically placed way beyond what most people find inhabitable,” Dr. Borch said. “We’re not afraid of the future, the Internet will not kill creativity. Quite on the contrary – we are very exited!”

We only hope that this excitement will get the movie industry interested, so BitTorrent can actually be used for what it’s intended – promoting unlimited creativity. The MPAA will probably be scared to death though, since it allows independent filmmakers to compete with large budget blockbuster productions.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today we present a more robust report based on data from over 150,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology. The research team will continue to supply TorrentFreak with bi-monthly updates so we can discover new trends and shifts in the usage of the different clients.

The results in the table below give the market share for each individual client. Only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 19 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

Both uTorrent and the third placed mainline client are developed by BitTorrent Inc, meaning that the company holds an impressive two thirds of the market. The only main contender at the moment is Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, with nearly 17 percent. BitComet, which used to be a major contender, is in fourth place with just 6.5 percent.

The data also gives us more insight into the size of the BitTorrent ‘network’. In December we reported that uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and based on this figure that might have grown even higher in the recent months. It is safe to say that there are roughly 50 million active BitTorrent users on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see how the market share of the clients changes over the coming months. Will uTorrent be able to keep its dominant lead? What will happen to Transmission’s market share when they release their Windows version? Will there be any new clients to compete with the top three? Lots of questions that we hope to answer in the future.

Stay tuned!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today the Tribler team releases the test builds of their V5 client. To silence some of the critics and to ensure compatibility with standalone devices they have redesigned the user interface, which is now much cleaner so it can be easily navigated with a remote control.

When you launch Tribler all you have to do is put some keywords in the search box and you can download torrents instantly. The search results are ranked by relevance and torrent quality, and if the torrent is well seeded you can play it instantly without having to wait for the download to complete.

Another key functionality of the new Tribler client is that the torrent search is fully distributed, meaning that the torrents come from within the network of peers and not from a torrent site or a central server. This could potentially make BitTorrent indexers such as Mininova and isoHunt obsolete.

The downside of this type of search is that it is impossible to remove or moderate fake files. In order to solve this problem the Tribler team will soon launch moderation and playlist features.

“We aim to make P2P easy to control and use. The power of P2P can be included in every television if we solve this issue,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “We are continuously working on simplifying P2P and are moving towards making it suitable to operate with a remote control.”

The scientists behind Tribler are part of the EU funded P2P-Next project. They work together with the BBC and several other European television broadcasters, as well as hardware developers such as Pioneer.

A test release of Tribler 5 is available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. Tribler’s Johan Pouwelse encourages everyone to give it a try, and provide feedback so the team can improve the client and help to bring BitTorrent to your TV as quickly as possible.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, took an in depth look at the ‘ratio economy’ at various private BitTorrent trackers. Interestingly, they found some striking similarities between this virtual economy and some of the recent events in the global financial system.

In the paper, the researchers looked into the BitTorrent share ratios of members of a private TV-torrent tracker. They found that the current ratio system is heavily skewed towards a small group of people with a lot of upload capacity, often armed with seedboxes. These greedy ‘rich peers’ take away a disproportional of the available upload ‘credit’ so that new peers, or poorer ones have trouble keeping their ratio above the required figure.

In addition, several variations of swarm populations were simulated to see what their effect is on the users’ share ratios. Overall, the researchers found evidence of a credit crunch in the current ratio tracking schemes currently employed by most private BitTorrent trackers. Even when everyone has similar bandwidth limits this credit shortage still occurs.

“We discovered a strange phenomenon in existing private BitTorrent communities,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “Lack of credit is hampering performance. We have been able to reproduce this effect in a simulator to further understand it. It has many similarities with the credit crunch where the greasing oil of the world economy is drying out.”

“Lack of credit makes for bankrupt states and poorly functioning BitTorrent communities,” Pouwelse added. While it is unlikely that the trackers will collapse from it, the paper indeed shows that the current emphasis on share ratios is not fair to all members of the community.

Previously, Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol has spoken out against share ratios. “A better approach would be to not count it against people when they download from heavily overseeded torrents. Or to just not use total upload/download ratios at all, or if you do only make them advisory and not a source of banning,” he said at the time.

There are indeed hundreds of alternatives to the current ratio calculation, and most of them will indeed guarantee a healthier sharing environment (less favorable towards ‘rich peers’). In the paper, the researchers show that a ’seeding bonus’ where peers get more credits for their uploads may help and others have suggested to use the total seeding time instead of the upload/download ratio.

While the paper presents some interesting findings, it doesn’t say much about download speeds on private trackers, which tend to be much higher than on public trackers. The parallels with our collapsing financial system are interesting, and with the only difference that a ‘bailout’ or ‘bonus’ would actually help the poor peers on private BitTorrent trackers, we can’t be too sure if that’s also going to work in the real world.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In order to get an accurate estimate of the tracker load a single person connected to three torrents is counted as three peers. In the picture below, we see that roughly 5 million peers are connected to a torrent that uses only The Pirate Bay (single). Another 5 million have more trackers in the announce list, but use The Pirate Bay as the primary tracker. For the remaining torrents The Pirate Bay was added as an additional (foreign) tracker.

The Pirate Bay is by far the largest BitTorrent tracker, followed at a distance by Sumotracker, Torrent.to and Torrentbox respectively. Unfortunately, this dominant position can result in a horror scenario if the Pirate Bay tracker fails.

Raynor told TorrentFreak that if The Pirate Bay goes down, many of the other trackers might collapse as well. “If The Pirate Bay goes down the load will automatically shift to others. This is because most of the Pirate Bay swarms also include other trackers. When Pirate Bay goes down it would overload others until they fall also. Meaning even more stress and further casualties. This is likely to end in a BitTorrent meltdown.”

So what’s the alternative? How can we fix this vulnerability? The obvious option is to rely less on the Pirate Bay’s trackers, but this is easier said than done. Although there are thousands of smaller trackers on the Internet, it has proven to be hard to convince people to actually use these.

Perhaps we should find an alternative for the traditional BitTorrent tracker then? A truly decentralized form of filesharing, that doesn’t rely on the philanthropy of three Swedish guys? Attempts have been made to decentralize trackers, and most of the major BitTorrent clients support “trackerless” torrents through DHT.

DHT is not the silver bullet though, as it is lacking in speed and efficiency according to Tribler founder Johan Pouwelse, and the mainline Bittorrent client “has a faulty DHT implementation and many people will be left in the cold”. Researchers of Tribler found several DHT flaws. One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only “stumble upon success”, meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.

“The DHT concept is proven to be broken and just invites DDoS attacks,” Pouwelse added. “People have proposed repairs to the DHT, but only at the cost of too much performance or global trusted servers.”

Dr. Pouwelse says that there have been ideas to deal with BitTorrent’s Achilles’ heel, but none of these have materialized. This summer Raynor hopes to have an operational solution in their Tribler BitTorrent client. They think the trick is to include the SQLite database engine in every Tribler client. This enables abuse prevention and fast starts, however this complex task could be delayed until Christmas (of some year to come).

So is BitTorrent going to die? No, not by a long shot. However, this research does point out that the ecosystem depends on The Pirate Bay. If their trackers go down for whatever reason, others are likely to collapse because of the increasing load and many torrent download will slow down significantly or stop entirely. So please direct your prayers to trackers around the world. May they function in peace and prosperity.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Offering a decent quality stream can quickly cost tens of thousands of dollars a month for medium sized sites, and millions of dollars for bandwidth hogs such as YouTube. So, why not share this burden and throw in some P2P? That’s probably what CNN thought too, as they offered a P2P supported live feed of Obama’s inauguration. With 25 million viewers on CNN.com, this was probably the largest P2P live stream ever, although CNN did not reveal how many people used the P2P plugin.

CNN has been working with the Denmark-based company Octoshape for a few months now. Users have to install the Octoshape plugin for their web-browser, and this makes the regular Flash player through which they view the stream, P2P compliant. This means that users who download the video partially to their computers also share it with others.

Thus far, CNN has not commented in public on their use of Octoshape’s P2P plugin. However, from an insider who’s familiar with the technology, TorrentFreak learned that approximately 30% of the bandwidth for CNN’s live stream comes from peers. This obviously results in a significant reduction in bandwidth costs for the broadcaster. The rest of the bandwidth still comes from central servers to ensure that there is enough available for everyone.

CNN’s live stream was only boosted by Octoshape for those who watched it through the default Flash player, not the Windows media stream. The Flash team from Adobe has been working on their own P2P Flash implementation for a while, but thus far we are not aware of any public tests of their technology.

It is interesting to see that CNN supports P2P based streaming solutions, even though it’s a shame that they went for a closed source solution, instead of an open source product. Last year, the Tribler team showcased their open source streaming application which relies solely on P2P, through BitTorrent. Tribler is currently working with several European TV-broadcasters to test this technology in the real world.

In theory, broadcasters can send a live stream to millions of people by only sending out the stream once, from a single server. With the current upload speeds and the throttling efforts by ISPs, this still only works in theory. Nevertheless, since more and more TV is being watched online, filesharing technology is the future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Gottfrid, aka Anakata of The Pirate Bay offered to become Mininova’s temporary host, with the site moving again later on to be hosted by Gary Fung of isoHunt. As the site continued to develop, Mininova needed their own servers and in the years to follow its growth has been nothing short of spectacular.

From a standing start in 2005, by mid-2007 Mininova had entered the list of Top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet with 2 million daily visitors, an amazing achievement.

Then, at the tender age of just three years old, Mininova was breaking more records. By January 2008, the site was serving 3 million daily visitors who were downloading almost 10 million .torrent files every day. In February the site introduced torrent streaming and by the end of that month had served over 4 billion .torrents.

The innovations didn’t stop there. In March last year, Mininova began its Beta testing of BitTorrent powered video streaming. The new streaming feature allowed users to watch videos instantly, streamed from .torrent files. The Open Source “Swarmplayer” was developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam.

In April 2008, the BitTorrent community realized just how big Mininova had become, after technical problems took down the site, resulting in massive traffic surges on other indexers. Although the site quickly returned, May was disappointing, as anti-piracy outfit BREIN flexed its muscles and threatened the site – filter, or else. However, by the end of the month it became clear that Mininova’s popularity was far from on the wane, as it served up its 5 billionth torrent.

Niek, CEO of Mininova, told Torrentfreak: “The growth rate is above every expectation. Mininova’s download numbers almost doubled this year – and the number of visitors grew almost just as hard. We are excited about the coming year and its challenges: stay tuned for some important announcements in the coming months.”

Just a few days ago, Mininova announced it had delivered its 7 billionth torrent, which left everyone wondering where it was all going to end. Today, the BitTorrent behemoth reached its 4th birthday and like someone else with a birthday today, the dream appears to have turned into reality.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Up until now, central servers have always been required in order to use BitTorrent effectively. Although the transfer of files via BitTorrent has always been decentralized, the .torrent files that are required to start sharing are always hosted on central servers, those of The Pirate Bay or Mininova for example.

The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam.

BuddyCast, the decentralized search feature of the Tribler client is able to do so. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak: “It has taken us many years to get the zero-server search infrastructure called ‘BuddyCast’ running fast and efficiently. We believe that today BuddyCast is the most efficient, scalable, and battle-hardened algorithm out there which is also ready for user tagging and ratings in true buzz-compliant 2.0 style.”

In addition to the decentralized torrent distribution and search capabilities, Tribler aims to make the BitTorrent experience more social. For instance, users will have the option to boost the download speed of friends, the client will give recommendations based on your download behavior, and it rewards users who are good sharers while punishing those who leech.

“Tribler peers all work together towards a common purpose: fast search and downloads,” Pouwelse explained. “Peers recognize fellow ‘tribe’ members and are pre-programmed with the notion that embracing mutual self-interest is good. This is a radical deviation from the core BitTorrent tit-for-tat mantra dictating pursuit of self-interest only and no memory of past experiences.”

Although this is only the first public implementation of the decentralized search feature, it seems to work pretty seamlessly. Obviously, the content is more limited than on the large BitTorrent sites, since it comes exclusively from other Tribler users, but this will grow as soon as more people start to use the client.

Decentralized BitTorrent search has the potential to make public BitTorrent sites no longer necessary. For now, we think that such a radical shift is not going to happen anytime soon, however, since the top-three BitTorrent sites are involved in legal action in some way or another, you never know when you might need it.

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The P2P technology inside the box is Open Source software, and allows the user to stream live content via BitTorrent (picture here, via NTV). Broadcasters will be able to stream to thousands of people, using around the same amount of bandwidth they would use to stream to one or two people. Recent tests have shown that it’s possible to offer high quality video via BitTorrent, which might change how on-demand TV is broadcast.

During a tutorial session at the P2P 2008 conference, Mark from Pioneer presented the new device, and said: “By leveraging the next generation of P2P networking technology, Pioneer is taking steps to bring scalable TV broadcasting and vast on-demand media collections into the Living room.”

The device is 4th generation P2P, which means that it doesn’t use central servers to distribute or moderate the content. Pioneer, nevertheless, made it clear that it will only be possible to access legitimate content with their box “Access to a vast range of on-demand content and broadcast TV in High Definition over the Open Internet is becoming more believable with the integration of 4G P2P technologies into consumer devices,” Mark said.

Worth mentioning, is that the box runs on a 266MHz processor with just 128MByte of RAM. By doing so, Pioneer has set a new standard for what a low-cost processor can deliver using BitTorrent. Several European TV broadcasters are watching the project closely, and we expect to see some consumer trials with this new BitTorrent box in the future.

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The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The scientific director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it’s not just the BBC interested in this new technology: “We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future.”

If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth. YouTube 2.0, sort of.

Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and Open Source. “As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don’t already have, without needing to worry about business models,” he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.

“To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible,” Pouwelse said. “However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.”

“Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just in time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.”

Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different than downloading a huge video file. What the Swarmplayer does is download and buffer one minute’s worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.

A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the “UnDownload()” functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you’re watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7 year old code.”

For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a 5 minute weather report (not live) from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are also available.

The Swarmplayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still work in progress. “We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month,” Pouwelse said, “then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more.” We will certainly keep an eye on these developments, as it may change the way we watch video online.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

At the moment, the top three BitTorrent sites host are handling the majority of all BitTorrent users, and even worse, The Pirate Bay tracks well over 50% of all public torrent files. BitTorrent has welcomed many new users over the past three years, and we are now in the uncomfortable situation where the downtime of one of the larger sites may cause problem for the others, simply because they can’t handle the traffic.

This is exactly what happened last month when Mininova was offline for a day due to a hardware problem. Mininova has well over three million visitors a day, these people went to other sites while Mininova was down, and this increase in traffic got some sites in serious trouble. The question is: Is there an alternative?

The answer to this question is yes and no. A solution to the tracker problem that works pretty well is DHT, or “trackerless torrents”. With DHT you can still connect to other people who are downloading the same file, even when the tracker for that torent is not working properly. Thanks to DHT, people were able to download torrents that were tracked by Demonoid.com, up to six months after the tracker went down. The downside of DHT (the mainline version) is that not all clients support it, and that it is maintained by one company, BitTorrent Inc.

Replacing BitTorrent sites is even more complex. How do you find torrents when there are no BitTorrent search engines that store them? A possible solution to this problem comes from researchers of Cornell University, who developed an Azureus plugin named Cubit. The Cubit plugin allows you to find torrents, and doesn’t require a centralized server as BitTorrent sites do. You basically search for torrent files among other peers, similar to Kazaa and Limewire. An interesting concept, but unfortunately, this also has a lot of downsides.

Cubit opens the gates for floods of spam, because it misses one key feature: moderation. Since BitTorrent has become so popular, anti-piracy organizations like MediaDefender and BayTSP are constantly uploading fake files, and scammers are uploading malware and spyware, often wrapped in fake media players.

To most people is goes unnoticed, but sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay have a dedicated team of moderators that remove hundreds of fake and scammy torrents a day. Together these moderators remove more than a thousand torrents per site, day in and day out. In addition, most BitTorrent sites also use IP-filters to prevent known scammers and anti-piracy outfits from uploading their content again.

So, for now, Cubit is not yet going to replace BitTorrent sites, as they need to address the lack of moderation first. Tribler, another application that is developing a BitTorrent site replacement that seems to be far ahead of Cubit, already implemented such moderation features and spam filtering. Branded as the “social” BitTorrent client, is also has community features that many people appreciate.

In sum, I think it is safe to conclude that BitTorrent as it is has some weak spots that could cause problems in the future. The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – the top three BitTorrent sites – are all involved in a court case. Depending on the outcome of these cases, the need for alternative search technologies may become more apparent. For now, however, we need BitTorrent sites, and in particular their moderators.

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The Open Source “swarmplayer” which is used for the video streaming service is developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam. Tribler is also working together with the BBC and several other European broadcasters, and they recently received a $22 million grant for P2P research from the European Union.

The swarmplayer has also been demonstrated for a 100+ audience of media industry insiders in Geneva at the European Broadcaster Union event on Open Internet TV this week. The streaming magic comes from replacing the tit-for-tat algorithm with Give-to-Get. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse stated after his keynote speech at the conference: “the attitude of several key media stakeholders in Europe are shifting and they are now exploring P2P on a serious scale.”

Mininova is still looking for people to test the streaming service, as Erik writes: “We are looking for people who would like to be in the first testing group who test the software, report suggestions and bugs you find. Please reply in this topic if you want to participate in this closed beta.”

Mininova already has a music streaming feature for their content distribution platform, based on the Java applet developed by Bitlet. The site currently has over 300 premium publishers, and Mininova’s CEO Niek told TorrentFreak last month that they will focus on extending and improving their content distribution service.

“Publishers will see more distribution options in the near future, and users will be able to find featured content easier. Our plan is to offer the most sophisticated and scalable distribution service of the future. Functionality of “regular” torrent files will of course be kept as it is now.”

Over the past months we have seen more and more P2P streaming alternatives. One of the main problems seems to be that it is practically impossible to make a high quality video streaming service profitable because of the immense bandwidth costs but P2P streaming solves this problem.

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One of the biggest names taking part is the BBC, who will use the new BitTorrent client to stream TV programs. Other partners in the P2P-Next project are the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The main goal is to develop an open source, BitTorrent-compatible client that supports live streaming.

Approximately 50% of the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time download TV shows. The current project will help broadcasters to find better ways to reach this online audience, and offer high quality on-demand television.

“This cooperation with both the British and German public broadcasters indicates that P2P is here to stay. We welcome the decision of the European Union to award this proposal around P2P. This means that Europe can expand it’s roughly two year lead in this important area,” Tribler’s Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

“Tribler serves as a testing ground for several world-first innovations. It serves as a living lab for P2P research. Key to our endeavor is an academically pure architecture: no central servers exist in Tribler in combination with being backwards compatible with BitTorrent,” Pouwelse added.

As part of the project, the Tribler team, together with Harvard researchers, implemented the “Nobel prize winning” mechanism design theory into their BitTorrent client. The ultimate goal is to encourage people to share as much as possible without imposing share ratio sanctions, and to let users moderate the available content.

BitTorrent sites are watching the P2P-Next project closely, and some might even be interested in experimenting with the new technology. We asked Johan Pouwelse if he sees possibilities to collaborate with BitTorrent sites, and he said: “We are creating tools for traditional broadcasters and also new entrants to the distribution market.”

I guess we should take that as a yes.

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TorrentFreak spoke to Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on P2P technology at Delft University of Technology, who is currently working with the Harvard mechanism design group. He told us: “We use the Nobel prize winning theory as a recipe for improving BitTorrent.”

A lot of people probably wonder how an economical theory can improve the performance of a BitTorrent client, Pouwelse explains: “A structured scientific advancement of P2P file sharing was really lacking. With Mechanism Design we can go beyond the current trial-and-error methodology. We are working on a mechanism design based solution for all 9 elementary actions in P2P by using a distributed reputation system and mechanism that does not degrade to a single shot prisoners dilemma, such as BitTorrent tit-fot-tat”

What Pouwelse is basically saying is that the mechanism design theory will be used to improve download speed and to make sure that content will be available for the long run, even when it’s not really popular. This is especially useful in BitTorrent streaming solutions where the incentive to keep sharing is relatively low.

The Nobel-powered BitTorrent/P2P client supports both regular .torrent downloads, but can also be used to stream videos from YouTube and Liveleak. As we reported earlier, the client also enhances the standard tit-for-tat BitTorrent algorithms with a so called give-to-get algorithm where bandwidth is used as a currency.

It is good to see that – unlike what others claim – p2p innovation is still alive and kicking, even in the land of the free and the home of the RIAA/MPAA.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.