Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid?

Traditionally, BitTorrent and cyberlockers are generally seen as two entirely different file-sharing platforms, but the newly launched Netkups shows that this doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, supporting both direct downloads and torrents can have benefits for both site operators and users, the founders claim.

hi elliot, this is the netkups logo BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers have a few things in common.

Both have dozens of millions of users every day, and they also share the wrath of the entertainment industries. But, that’s generally where comparisons stop.

The founders of the new startup Netkups thought this was odd. Why not incorporate the two technologies and make a new hybrid file-sharing service? Why not allow people to upload files and share them through direct links and torrents?

There is indeed nothing that prevents both platforms from being combined and so Netkups was born.

“The hybrid model is a win-win situation,” Netkups founder Adrian told TorrentFreak.

“In our case, we can save on bandwidth charges and enable a faster growth, while we guarantee that the file is seeded by us as long as it is downloadable. At the same time, users can enjoy the benefits of torrent files and download as many files as they want, using part of our bandwidth and bandwidth from other users.”

In common with most cyberlockers, Netkups has no built-in search engine. Users can upload files up to 1 gigabyte for free, and share them with friends or co-workers, or keep them private. If users choose to share the files, these can be downloaded for free from Netkups’ servers with a speed limit of 300 kBs.

And there’s more. Since Netkups also creates a torrent file, people can also use that to download without speed restrictions. All free of charge. For the uploader there’s an added advantage that Netkups will always seed the torrent file in question, so they don’t have to.

BitTorrent of direct download?

screenshot of the netkups download options, torrent or direct download

Adding a torrent also means that the files will remain available even if the Netkups site ceases to exist. The torrent files created by Netkups use public trackers so they can be easily uploaded to external torrent sites as well.

Sites that operate file-sharing services need to be cautious of copyright infringement issues, and Netkups are no exception. After the Megaupload shutdown in particular, the site’s operators are smart enough to make sure that they’re not breaking any laws.

“We’d be fools not to worry about that. That’s why we have a serious DMCA policy, as well as a serious legal agreement. That said, we watch out for censorship and abuses of any kind. ”

Netkups’ founder told TorrentFreak that copyright holders have to file proper DMCA requests to take content down, and that they are wary of automated censorship requests with huge lists of allegedly infringing links.

“People might not like seeing some things published, but that doesn’t mean all files should be removed. We care about everyone’s rights – not just users, not just creators.”

The Netkups service has been running stable for a few weeks and the site’s founder welcomes people to check it out. While there’s a premium package available with added benefits, the site can be used for free with limited restrictions.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, Netkups is not the only cyberlocker that has BitTorrent support.

4shared also allows users to download files through torrents. However, 4shared appears to log the IP-addresses of downloaders to prevent sharing on external sites.

Previous Post | Next Post

Follow @torrentfreak

Telezarz

I hope they havnt servers in USA…
- Pzf
  
  Megaupload had no servers in the USA…
  - Telezarz
    
    Yes they had.
    - Pzf
      
      OK, I guess I was wrong, Megaupload was not in the US, they just rented servers around the world. But I’m thinking that the way the US took down megaupload, not having servers in there will not help much anyone.
  - Anonymous
    
    Don’t care. I WANT A FKIN MAGNET LINK.
- ayman
  
  Free servers are from OVH, dunno about the others?
- O’lay Pirate
  
  I recon they paid Torrentfreak to write this article tbh ^__^
  - Neutragena Pirate
    
    Didn’t you already know? It’s totally the in thing right now. Write one or two articles about new technology per month and rake in millions of dollars. Easy street, here we come! :^p
- yello
  
  welcome back KIM DOT.COM…
  a nice new site i see
  - Camilo
    
    More like kim.com. By the way, the site DOES return a (pseudo-blank) page, with html>body empty tags.
Anyone

do they have magnet-links?
otherwise with DMCA the torrents could be removed as well
- http://theupwind.blogspot.com HostFat
  
  I asked them and they replied:
  
  @HostFat it is in our roadmap :)
- http://www.facebook.com/newton.antony Newton Antony
  
  in theory magnet links would go on forever as long as u have the addresss even if u remove the page pointing to the magnet, so im confused
  - Anyone
    
    exactly, I was asking if they have magnet links or just .torrent files
    it seems so far they only have .torrent files, which will be removed with DMCA (of course if you already have the .torrent it would continue to work)
- Sizelimit
  
  too bad that they only allows the torrent uploads for the files with more than 10mb size.
  - Anyone
    
    why would you want to share smaller files with more people?
    - Anonymous
      
      I’m assuming sarcasm, but two filetypes come to mind: MP3s (not all of us want/need FLAC or lossless MP3s… especially those of us with bandwidth limitations) and ebooks.
      
      I’m not familiar with the site or its procedures, but If an album is 60MB and the songs are 5MB each, would you be able to share the collection, or would you have to share on a file-by-file (song-by-song in this case) basis? I guess the work-around would be padding a .zip/.rar to hit the 10MB limit, but that seems inefficient. (My other concern would be .srt files, but there are sites dedicated to subs. Matching the proper timing with a generically-named files can be a hassle, though.)
    - Anyone
      
      true, didn’t think of ebooks
      and I am so used to torrents containing multiple files that I didn’t think that cyberlockers don’t work like that, you’d probably have to .zip/.rar the album, sharing songs individually seems silly
Anonymous

This is what I have been talking about in the fast few topics! :D Finally someone has the brains to do it! XD
- You invented everything ?
  
  Steve Jobs….. is that you ?
Goosmoo

Free vs premium:

http://netkups.com/?page=premium

I don’t see myself buying their service. It’s an interesting concept but to me it’s not worth that much.
- Anon
  
  They have ads even on premium. BIggest BS ever.
- http://twitter.com/icanhazsake Ninja
  
  I’m not sure, think about it for a moment: consider you want a torrent that’s larger than 1Gb seeded and you don’t want to pay for a seedbox. Or you want fast direct downloads. I believe there are costumers that will need the service.
  
  I probably won’t pay (never paid for cyberlockers or anything besides put.io) but I’ll surely be using their service.
DomRanana.

Finally! I I expected something like this for a long time. It’s a perfect idea: torrent + DD! I really like this service.
- http://twitter.com/icanhazsake Ninja
  
  Epic win indeed.
http://twitter.com/al_d_25 booda dass

why would you want to host this kind of site on a “.com” ?
- Anyone
  
  some like to play with fire ;)
Anon

4shared has this option.
- O’lay Pirate
  
  Thank you!! I thought the exact same thing.
  
  Not unique idea… been done before.
  
  I prefer 4shared.
  
  Either way, I find it quite a coincidence that my current website under development had the same idea behind it lol.
http://www.scripting.com/ Anonymous

Amazon S3 has had this feature for years.

http://carltonbale.com/how-to-create-and-seed-a-torrent-download-on-amazon-s3
- Anonymous
  
  True, we actually wrote about that years ago.
  
  But Amazon S3 isn’t generally sen as a cyberlocker I think, and it costs money
Anonymous

.com domain and hosted at OVH. avoid.
- Lakisha La~Monic
  
  ovh has anti piracy servers and also pirates use their service. Their official policy is that they are neutral even though their machines are fighting each other basically. Why avoid ovh?
devilmaycry

i have ever seen this on 4shared. more sites should come up with this
Trustnoone

Great idea, I know I’m going to sound like a pessimist here but somehow I still get this feeling that if this actually becomes huge it will get sued :( whether its legal and they have a great takedown program or not :(.
OFFLOAD FTW!

Why on earth are they using public .torrents that expose your IP address to criminals instead of OFFLOAD torrents that are anonymous and provide safety from scammers and trolls?
- Anyone
  
  what are offload torrents?
  - Offload FTW!
    
    Full info here:
    http://offload.sourceforge.net/
    - Justin Smith
      
      The project doesn’t appear to be supported any longer. I’ll test this application thoroughly though, there is usually a flaw in applications like this though. The only one that seems to have really nailed it is Freenet. I find that the most secure network is the one where people are doing the most illegal things. When you look at Freenet you see find a lot of reports of unsavory material… luckily the way the network propagates data you can’t prove who’s storing what, who’s downloading what, who’s requesting what, etc.
    - Waseihou
      
      Owner Free Filesystem:
      
      Offload is a buggy client to OFFsystem network.
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem
      
      Another clients are original OFFsystem and BlocksNet. The idea is good but overhead is still too big. To download 10GB of useful data, you need to download 25GB of junk, and of course 25GB of junk needs to be distributed among users, so it is wasting disc space and network connectivity. Still much better than darknets where the overhead is much greater making darknets useful only to exchange OFF URLs.
      
      I like the idea of Owner Free Filesystem, but it has to be simplified, I have today started experimenting with an idea of a new protocol (just a draft on paper).
      
      The idea goes like this:
      
      In torrent there are files, and each file has blocks of some size, say 128KB each block like in OFF system. It would be nice to have a “cache” for those blocks spread over internet, but we can’t allow it to have it so much overhead. How to do it?
      
      Encoding:
      
      Let’s look howto process one file: file consists of blocks S0, S1, …, Sn
      
      Take first block S0 of the file and use some of it’s data to seed a good random number generator and use it to create a random block R of the same size as S0. So anyone having first block of the file can create R, because the algorithm will be public knowledge. Then make a xor operation over all blocks of the file and create a new set of blocks B0, B1, …, Bn so that Bi = Si xor R. Then compute md5 hashes for each of blocks and make an ordered set HS of them, so that HS = (md5(R),md5(B0), md5(B1), …, md5(Bn)).
      
      Now HS could be stored into distributed hash table (DHT) like Kademlia network by concatenating string values of md5 hashes into “value” and usign md5 of the first block as “key”: md5(B0) -> md5(R),md5(B1),…,md5(Bn)
      
      But the list of md5 hashes is probably still too big for storage in this network, so concatenate the list into another blocks H0, H1, …, Hm and use exactly same procedure.
      
      Then into DHT store md5(B0) -> md5(HR), md5(BH0), md5(BH1), … md5(BHm)
      
      The number of hashes m will be much lower than n.
      
      Into the distributed filesystem (=between sharing nodes of the network) will be stored (R, B0, B1, …, Bn, BH0, BH1, …, BHm) = (U1, …, Un) = U = upload set
      
      If the torrent has a magnet, then into DHT will be also stored pair magnet->md5(File1.B0), md5(File2.B0), …, md5(FileN.B0). So with magnet we find hashes of first blocks of each file in the torrent.
      
      Nodes and uploading:
      
      Each node will generate it’s own RSA certificate and make a md5 hash of it’s public key, this will become the user’s ID.
      
      Each node’s IP is publicly known or can be obtained by some means similar to PEX which could be probably modified for this purpose.
      
      When someone will be uploading all the blocks in U, then he will compute distance (for example hamming distance, or use xor as metrics, that is something I have to thing about later…) between md5(Ui) and some user’s ID. For now use hamming distance like OFF system is using. He has list of users, of course.
      
      Distance = f(ID,md5(Ui)) = hamming_distance(ID,md5(Ui))
      
      If the distance is small enough then it means that Ui will be upload to the cache of the user with that ID. So it means that the Ui will be replicated to cache of more than one user. Each user will announce not only their ID, but also maximal hamming distance they support.
      
      Retrieval:
      
      Nodes identifies to each other by their ID’s.
      
      To retrieve a block, client application will ask all nodes he knows which can have that block. Those are nodes which have low enough distance between md5′s – less or equal than announced one.
      
      If some node asks for hash which have higher hamming distance than that of the node being asked, then after several such attempts from the asking node the asking node will be added to a blacklist of asked node. There is one exception to the rule: asked node can ask for block with md5 which it was asked for if it does not have it because it can suppose that asking node sooner or later retrieved it somehow. There should be a time limit for how long after being asked it can ask back. In this way the content is over time located to the nodes where it is expected to be found.
      
      Retrieving:
      
      User will get by magnet link md5(B0) of stored file, then it will retrieve md5(HR), md5(BH0), md5(BH1), … md5(BHm) from DHT and downloads those blocks from other peers. Then Hi = HR xor BHi and this is is used to get HS = (md5(R),md5(B0), md5(B1), …, md5(Bn)). Then he downloads blocks R, B0, B1, …, Bn. To obtain original blocks Si, he uses formula Si = R xor Bi. In this way any block can be retrieved from network.
      
      Anonymity:
      
      The users cannot know what data he is hosting in his cache, because they are naively encrypted with One Time Pad, and if the number of users is large then it can be supposed that the blocks of every file will be evenly distributed among all users of the network. While it is provable that someone was hosting a block of some copyrighted file, he can still defend himself that he did not know what the content was and that he only hosted a few blocks so the “measure of his guilt” is low. This system is based on the spreading the guilt among so many users that no one could be made preferable target for law enforcenment or mafiaa. It depends on country and it’s laws, but with this it would be much harderer to say: “Look, he knowingly hosted a file which breach my copyright”.
      
      Anonymity is lower than in OFF system or darknet, but there is not probably much so more overhead. Disk space is somewhat wasted as some blocks are duplicated among users while they are not useful for them.
      
      Anyway, this system which I described in this draft is meant as a CACHE for existing bittorrent users, so people will be downloading normal torrent and this cache will be used to obtain more data faster. It is meant to help to speed up torrents with low number of seeds or it could even be possible to resurrect dead torrent if the network was large enough.
      
      The drawback is that the anonymity is not as perfect and the user will have waste part of their disc capacity to help the community.
      
      I hope I have described it correctly, please look for logical mistakes in my description, I’m quite tired now so maybe there is some mistake in formulas but the idea is in my head ;)
      
      Waseihou
      the Czech Pirate Party registered supporter
    - Kaizoku
      
      I also agree that the OFFSystem is a great idea!! It may still need some work, but it is a good concept that more people should start supporting — at least, with the right client for it…. I’m not sure which one that would be at present, though.
      
      From what I’ve read, OFFLoad has made a few improvements along the way, but may not be quite there yet. BlocksNet appears to be adding some extra features to it too, although some of this seems to be more about storing your files than sharing them. I’m not sure which one of these ACTUALLY WORKS better, however! I do like the idea of “generic” multi-use blocks, since they can belong to any number of different files — so no-one can prove that they are meant for making any one item in particular, when they can just as easily be used for something else entirely.
      
      I wonder how much space it would take to store one copy of every possible block??? If you could fit them all on a 1TB hard drive for instance, then you could reproduce every piece of media that exists anyplace on the Earth (or ever will exist?!), as long as you can acquire the right hash keys to assemble the right combination of blocks together…. That would be AMAZING!!
    - Waseihou
      
      Reply to Kaizoku:
      
      No you will not be able to reproduce any possible file on planet, that would be infinite compression. In fact to store 10GB of useful data you need to store 25GB of blocks if it is done correctly and some are reused. So overhead 150% means 10GB*(1+1.5). Those 25GB should be dispersed among people so that shared files is not located at anyone’s computer.
      
      I’m not sure how much clients are compatible, but all projects seems dead, there was no need to use this system even if the idea gives good anonymity. To make anything like this useful, it MUST be done like an enhancenment to widely accepted filesharing application like bittorrent and even there it would be difficult to make people use it.
      
      I will try to create a simplified idea of OFF system with much less overhead, but I’m not sure if it will be possible. The trick is that every block will be part of some distribution of open source video Sintel which is legal to be shared because it is licensed under creative commons. For every block there will be a way how to prove that it is part of some existing representation of Sintel movie encode. So the overhead will be constant and only thing that that will have to be stored is the Sintel video AND structure that describes encodings in network so that every block will be provably part of Sintel at any time.
    - Kaizoku
      
      @ Waseihou:
      
      Oh, I know that what I’m describing is likely impossible with the current technology — but, I’m trying to think YEARS INTO THE FUTURE!! If there is a way to make the data blocks even more reusable in newer versions, then with the increasing availability of large-capacity hard drives that should soon be arriving (10TB, 20TB, 100TB???) in the marketplace, it might be possible to have a giant pool of blocks stored locally — and then perhaps only the hash keys would need to be shared…. or, if just the most commonly used blocks could at least be stored somehow, then you would only need to download the more exotic ones!
      
      Really, it’s only in past couple of months that people have started to seriously seek alternatives to the popular styles of downloading. So, as you said, there hasn’t been that much reason to push for development on things like this…. until now! Although I agree that it should be made relatively simple to use, as corporations and governments continue to threaten internet users, many more people are increasingly ready to try out something new — new is exactly what many of them WANT now, as long as it works easily and effectively. Whether the current clients are ‘dead’ now, I’m not sure…. but BlocksNet seems to be taking a long nap, at least! OFFLoad has been getting more attention, I think; but beyond that, who knows?!
      
      Some people seem to think that eMule might be something which could help support OFFSystem downloads (to search for hash keys, if nothing else)…. Not as popular as torrents, but maybe worth considering. Well, I hope that you report back if you have any success with any of this, or hear of something similar! Good luck!!
- Aguarate
  
  Netkups is the first seed.
Garythepairy

Paging FBI…FBI, please come to the front desk.
Anonymous

Their terms & condition is weak
Their DMCA page is weak…Don’t know which “strong” legal team they have.
Torrents AND cyberlocker? They’re asking for more unwanted attention. They’re biting off too much for their own good.

Good luck to them.
- O’lay Pirate
  
  no affiliate system makes it seem less ‘rogue’ so they might have a bit of a chance…
  
  I wonder if the torrents will still work if the files taken down (since they are the first seeder) .. they remove file from the server?
  - Anyone
    
    as long as there are other seeders out there it will work even if they no longer seed it.
  - Anon
    
    Someone needs to finish downloading and seed before the files are taken down.
- Anon
  
  Lol with this system Netkups will always be the first seed of any torrent. It will be too easy to prove contributory copyright infringement in court.
Anonymous

Sounds good, I like it when people have the energy to experiment and try new things. Now, I’ve never used a cyberlocker to download anything and since there are no built-in search engines in place how does people find content from sites like these in the first place? If you have to get the link from the uploader how can these sites grow so large? I’d appreciate some education on the subject.
- Anyone
  
  there are different blogs and forums dedicated to linking to cyberlockers
  usually just searching for a releasename on google will point you to a few of those
- Anonymous
  
  The cyberlocker only delivers the files. Other sites do the indexing, searching, and linking. By separating the functions, it’s harder to shut down. There are multiple forum sites and multiple lockers, so taking any single one down has no real effect.
Happy User

they did so many mistakes from the beginning. No way this will last long.

Good luck to them anyways.
- Whatever
  
  Care to explain more?
http://twitter.com/Anime4PSP Anime 4 PSP

I’m pretty sure ukrainian ex.ua has both torrents and ddl for files . and it was using both ddl and torrents for a long time. i don’t see how it is new
Pingback: Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid | Emmashare
Gj

why cant sites just ignore DMCA? what can they do? there not your masters. ignore them
- Garythepairy
  
  Why don’t you run a site and ignore dmca?
- Anyone
  
  TPB does ignore it.
  but you have to be quite careful running it if you do so, the MAFIAA has many countries in their pocket.
- Mwhahaha
  
  “what can they do?”
  
  They can burst in fully armed in whatever country you’re in, then extradite you to the states whilst at the same time shutting down your site.
  
  DMCA is there to basically ensure a veneer of legality to these sites whilst at the same time allowing us to be the moles to mpaa’s hammer in this giant game of whack-a-mole.
  - http://profiles.google.com/zerianis10 Christopher Kidwell
    
    They can try….. thus far, the only thing they have been able to do is the first and last thing…. I don’t see extradition happening in Kim’s case for many reasons.
    - Anonymous
      
      Watch….You’ll be surprised what will happen over the next 12 months. I do sincerely hope Kim won’t get extradited as that would clear way for the obscene charges he was slapped with.
  - MadAsASnake
    
    Hmmm. Abiding by DMCA didn’t stop that from happening to Mega…
  - Anonymous
    
    Unless we users fight back.
  - RodRussian
    
    I would love to see USA DMCA a-holes to try and take out service hosted in Russia. .RU-domain is the best choice for domain name also.
- O’lay Pirate
  
  you’re a dumb shit if you don’t know the answer to that question…
  
  try doing it yourself ;)
- Lexcell
  
  You can ignore it, but make sure you’re prepared for the consequences. Know beforehand that you can stand upto the weight that will be brought to bear on you if you want to survive.
http://twitter.com/FreePSDFinder FreePSDFinder

COOL! The new better Megaupload … WOOOOHOOO!!! :)
- Anon
  
  With their stupid free user restrictions, this is no way the new Megaupload.
Pingback: Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid | Best Seedbox
Mwhahaha

Any sign of a third party made search for this place yet? :)

Have to say I quite like the set up, but they’re saying they use less bandwidth than a cyberlocker, yet they use a huge amount more bandwidth than a torrent site. Which makes you wonder if it’s more than a gimmick.

The bandwidth reduction and use of torrents will only come into play with mass distribution items, which on the face of it would appear to be mainly illegal things, which leads you to think this place will have a very short shelf life.

Still here’s hoping they step into the space left by MU and hoping even more they don’t send each other dumbass emails giggling over all the crimes they’re committing.
- Offload FTW!
  
  Have you any actual proof that these alleged emails actually exist?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=753788298 Mike Buck

this is a gigantic middle finger to the government and the MAFIAA. “no matter what you do, the files will stay online”

good for them
- Anonymous
  
  Unless the FBI arrests it’s founder like they did with Megaupload.
  - Anyone
    
    torrents will continue to work in that case ;)
Pingback: Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid | Zombie Torrents - Ultimate Torrents Downloads
Alyssa Blindy

The site looks pretty nice, in my opinion. It seems quite cool.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002639684444 Ryan Smith

Kudos on entering the uncharted waters of distributing digital content in the age of free.

“attempt to compete with free content distribution among the public by offering quality, speed, seeding, security, user-friendly interfaces, operation cost reduction, less environmental impact, a larger library of available content, etc.”

http://blog.greenpirate.org/creative-content-distribution-from-then-till-now/
Waseihou

Just replicating my answer to one of posters below, now I noticed that no one could comment on this. Someone proposed to use offload network, this is my answer NOT ONLY TO HIM.

Owner Free Filesystem:

Offload is a buggy client to OFFsystem network.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O…

Another clients are original OFFsystem and BlocksNet. The idea is good but overhead is still too big. To download 10GB of useful data, you need to download 25GB of junk, and of course 25GB of junk needs to be distributed among users, so it is wasting disc space and network connectivity. Still much better than darknets where the overhead is much greater making darknets useful only to exchange OFF URLs.

I like the idea of Owner Free Filesystem, but it has to be simplified, I have today started experimenting with an idea of a new protocol (just a draft on paper).

The idea goes like this:

In torrent there are files, and each file has blocks of some size, say 128KB each block like in OFF system. It would be nice to have a “cache” for those blocks spread over internet, but we can’t allow it to have it so much overhead. How to do it?

Encoding:

Let’s look howto process one file: file consists of blocks S0, S1, …, Sn

Take first block S0 of the file and use some of it’s data to seed a good random number generator and use it to create a random block R of the same size as S0. So anyone having first block of the file can create R, because the algorithm will be public knowledge. Then make a xor operation over all blocks of the file and create a new set of blocks B0, B1, …, Bn so that Bi = Si xor R. Then compute md5 hashes for each of blocks and make an ordered set HS of them, so that HS = (md5(R),md5(B0), md5(B1), …, md5(Bn)).

Now HS could be stored into distributed hash table (DHT) like Kademlia network by concatenating string values of md5 hashes into “value” and usign md5 of the first block as “key”: md5(B0) -> md5(R),md5(B1),…,md5(Bn)

But the list of md5 hashes is probably still too big for storage in this network, so concatenate the list into another blocks H0, H1, …, Hm and use exactly same procedure.

Then into DHT store md5(B0) -> md5(HR), md5(BH0), md5(BH1), … md5(BHm)

The number of hashes m will be much lower than n.

Into the distributed filesystem (=between sharing nodes of the network) will be stored (R, B0, B1, …, Bn, BH0, BH1, …, BHm) = (U1, …, Un) = U = upload set

If the torrent has a magnet, then into DHT will be also stored pair magnet->md5(File1.B0), md5(File2.B0), …, md5(FileN.B0). So with magnet we find hashes of first blocks of each file in the torrent.

Nodes and uploading:

Each node will generate it’s own RSA certificate and make a md5 hash of it’s public key, this will become the user’s ID.

Each node’s IP is publicly known or can be obtained by some means similar to PEX which could be probably modified for this purpose.

When someone will be uploading all the blocks in U, then he will compute distance (for example hamming distance, or use xor as metrics, that is something I have to thing about later…) between md5(Ui) and some user’s ID. For now use hamming distance like OFF system is using. He has list of users, of course.

Distance = f(ID,md5(Ui)) = hamming_distance(ID,md5(Ui))

If the distance is small enough then it means that Ui will be upload to the cache of the user with that ID. So it means that the Ui will be replicated to cache of more than one user. Each user will announce not only their ID, but also maximal hamming distance they support.

Retrieval:

Nodes identifies to each other by their ID’s.

To retrieve a block, client application will ask all nodes he knows which can have that block. Those are nodes which have low enough distance between md5′s – less or equal than announced one.

If some node asks for hash which have higher hamming distance than that of the node being asked, then after several such attempts from the asking node the asking node will be added to a blacklist of asked node. There is one exception to the rule: asked node can ask for block with md5 which it was asked for if it does not have it because it can suppose that asking node sooner or later retrieved it somehow. There should be a time limit for how long after being asked it can ask back. In this way the content is over time located to the nodes where it is expected to be found.

Retrieving:

User will get by magnet link md5(B0) of stored file, then it will retrieve md5(HR), md5(BH0), md5(BH1), … md5(BHm) from DHT and downloads those blocks from other peers. Then Hi = HR xor BHi and this is is used to get HS = (md5(R),md5(B0), md5(B1), …, md5(Bn)). Then he downloads blocks R, B0, B1, …, Bn. To obtain original blocks Si, he uses formula Si = R xor Bi. In this way any block can be retrieved from network.

Anonymity:

The users cannot know what data he is hosting in his cache, because they are naively encrypted with One Time Pad, and if the number of users is large then it can be supposed that the blocks of every file will be evenly distributed among all users of the network. While it is provable that someone was hosting a block of some copyrighted file, he can still defend himself that he did not know what the content was and that he only hosted a few blocks so the “measure of his guilt” is low. This system is based on the spreading the guilt among so many users that no one could be made preferable target for law enforcenment or mafiaa. It depends on country and it’s laws, but with this it would be much harderer to say: “Look, he knowingly hosted a file which breach my copyright”.

Anonymity is lower than in OFF system or darknet, but there is not probably much less overhead, not sure. The trick is that each block of file is xored only with R which can be computed from the first block of file, so only few more blocks have to be downloaded: R and those blocks used for storing md5s of others blocks. Disk space is somewhat wasted as some blocks are duplicated among users while they are not useful for them, this is still a catch.

Anyway, this system which I described in this draft is meant as a CACHE for existing bittorrent users, so people will be downloading normal torrent and this cache will be used to obtain more data faster. It is meant to help to speed up torrents with low number of seeds or it could even be possible to resurrect dead torrent if the network was large enough.

The drawback is that the anonymity is not as perfect and the user will have waste part of their disc capacity to help the community.

I hope I have described it correctly, please look for logical mistakes in my description, I’m quite tired now so maybe there is some mistake in formulas but the idea is in my head ;)

Waseihou
the Czech Pirate Party registered supporter
- Waseihou
  
  Link to OFFsystem for those interested got wrong:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem
  
  Waseihou
- Waseihou
  
  Well a little mistake, blocks R and HR does not have to be stored because they can be computed from B0 an BH0, I’m really sleepy and I fixed my text to have them used because I thought that they also need to be stored, but they don’t. Lol ;)
  
  Waseihou
- Waseihou
  
  And the sentence should have been that there IS much less overhead ;)
- Waseihou
  
  There is a library openp2p which claims that it has implemented something similar: OFtorrent.
  
  http://openp2p.org/Main_Page
  http://openp2p.org/OFTorrent
  
  Creating a torrent
  
  Generate a random AES-256 key
  Encrypt the data with the key
  Split the encrypted data into appropriately sized blocks (generally from 16KB up to 4MB)
  Select an equal number of ‘randomizing’ blocks, either by using existing blocks (which could’ve been pulled from the network or produced after generating another file), or by generating them randomly
  Xor each encrypted data block with the corresponding randomizing block
  Store the result blocks
  For each result block, store our IP address on the DHT under the block’s SHA-256 hash
  Finally, generate the OFTorrent file containing the key and for each data block the SHA-256 hashes of each the blocks that need to be xor-ed together to produce it, and distribute this to users so they can download the file
  
  Downloading a torrent
  
  Connect to the DHT (or likely already be connected)
  For each of the blocks specified in the OFTorrent file, find the IP addresses of nodes seeding them in the DHT by looking up their SHA-256 hashes (as given in the OFTorrent file)
  Download each of the blocks from these IP addresses
  Decrypt the blocks with the AES-256 key given in the OFTorrent file
  
  source:
  hg clone https://code.google.com/p/openp2p/
  
  Personaly I do not like the idea that IP is stored in DHT, because IP can change over time and we need that one node is storing same blocks all the time.
  
  Why the hell they use AES-256 when One Time Pad is enough? This is good only for storing private files where password is not public, but we do not want someone stroring on our harddrives that is not being accessible to many, becaus it is a big waste of space. All what we need is to be able to deny that we knew what we were sharing so that we can’t be prosecuted.
  
  Anyway maybe worth looking. But not sure if their implementation of DHT can beat maidsafe-dht lib which seems to have good nat-traversal algorithms…
  
  Waseihou
4sharers

Not the first. 4shared had this first.
- Anonymous
  
  We added that to the post. They log people’s IP-addresses so the torrents can’t be shared elsewhere, so it’s not a full hybrid.
foff

I like it but if it gets big the FBI will swoop in with their helicopter gunships and m16′s and shut it down like a bunch of rabid dog whores.
Nnin

Not gonna work because of the 1gb limit and the premium feature.
- foff
  
  Why is that? That is a pretty standard thing on cyberlockers. They have to put limits in order to sell premium accounts. The site has to make make money duh!
- Anyone
  
  too bad the premium account also has a 2GB limit, that makes it worthless for HD rips
  - O’lay Pirate
    
    allowing 30GB uploads would be crazy… considering they pay for server fees and the idea behind allowing torrents as well as direct download was to provent bandwidth cost ^__^
  - Desu75
    
    Encode your stuff. HD with b-framesin x264 can be well below 2GB
    - Anyone
      
      a movie in 1080p even with x264 is usually bigger than 2GB
- Anonymous
  
  Wrong. The FBI will still shut it down if it gets out of hand.
Steve

A person named “Adrian” comes up with a service that is sure to draw fire, and I ask myself, who is “Adrian” really working for, and why should I trust an unknown service run by a person who doesn’t have a last name? If a friend of mine created such a business, I would think my friend to be insane for taking such a risk, unless, perhaps, my rotten friend planned to take the money and run … or worked for law enforcement.

Yes, I admit, I worry a lot. Sorry about that, everybody, especially Adrian. But why should anyone trust “Adrian” and a dubious service “that has been running stable FOR WEEKS?”

And doesn’t a fee of “free” smelly funny to anybody but me?
- O’lay Pirate
  
  it’s made by young adults/teenagers (if you look at the about page)
  
  i’m a teenager and i feel insane, i’d make a file host …
- anon
  
  “dont trust adrian” says “steve” lmao
  - Anonymouse
    
    You got a problem with the name ‘Steve’ ?
O’lay Pirate

Didn’t Furk.net do this as well…

lol
Ericpa06

i have this idea some time ago.. And that is pretty smart! I hope that be a ucess
Anonymous

I can already predict the MAFIAA reaction to this. It’s a clearly illegal law-violating filesharing pirate site designed to break the law.
What law, you ask? Why, the nonexistent part of the DMCA that requires every site on the internet to monitor and filter user content before hosting it, of course.
They’ll roll out some phrase like “willfully negligent”, then they’ll roll out ICE. I hope the Netkups people aren’t depending on due process; they won’t get any.
- Anonymous
  
  Not to mention forced to shut down too.
Anonymous

because nobody will bother using torrent if there’s a direct download option. you can’t combine the two because one would cancel the other completely, and there’s a very good chance this startup is going to get anally raped by MAFIAA lawyers. why do you think 4shared or mediafire doesn’t have torrent files?
- O’lay Pirate
  
  4shared does have torrent files though?
  
  also, it’s a great combo… for example, if I upload a movie (to download for personal use)… I want to download it faster so I use torrent… but if i want to download it onto my mobile (which doesn’t have bittorrent) i’d use the direct download…
  
  The site gives you more options to download, some people prefer direct links… others prefer torrents because they are faster.
  - Anonymous
    
    but there’s so many contradictions here. you upload a direct to cyber locker it’s gonna get flagged and taken down, you upload a torrent, it’s not possible to stop all the downloaders. so while direct download is great for torrents with no more seeders, it’s really self defeating to give these corporate thugs even faster and easier way to target both torrent users as well as direct downloads.
    
    I’m not saying im against this hybrid it’s just that well, it seems really pointless.
    - Bloaxor
      
      If the torrent gets spread though, the file(s) will still live on.
      
      It’s a win-win-win, so there’s no real point in “not” having it.
    - Anonymous
      
      that’s pretty much how piratebay and all the other torrent sites work.
- Glib
  
  Well, if all content that is put up on the cyberlocker is automatically put on a tracker, it is essentially a backup copy. Link crawlers can then put their torrents on their sites creating a nice distributed backup. If you want the speed, the cyberlocker will be pretty great. However, torrents have their power when well seeded. I saturated my 200MBit cable service often with torrents, something I was never able to do for free with any cyberlocker.
  - Anonymous
    
    it’s the other way around, if torrent files end up on cyberlocker, it would act as a backup when there’s no more seeders but, I just don’t see it working because they will just get taken down with DMCA and torrent files still suffer from time decay, after some length of time, unles the file is very popular, it will lose seeders, even if backup is available on cyberlocker, it can easily get taken down.
    
    it doesn’t matter if you back up the entire cyberlocker files to torrent because it still faces the time decay problem, if not enough people download it it will disappear, which is the beauty of cyberlockers because as long as nobody sends DMCA, it will live and at descent speeds too.
    
    Another problem I see is legal stand of view. If your servers automatically upload to cyerlocker which then propagates to torrent networks, you are facing two vectors of copyright infringement and illegal distribution claim. first the cyberlocker legitmacy and now spreading that file through torrent.
    
    it’s simply not worth the risk to add torrenting to already risky cyber locker business.
Anon

If this service hosts free content, it will survive. If it becomes a facilitator of infringement of copyrighted content, it will die a well deserved death. Sites like this can’t hide anymore.

This just keeps the FBI employed. Good.
- Anyone
  
  all content is free
- Fredrika
  
  > “If this service hosts free content, it will survive. If it becomes a facilitator of infringement of copyrighted content, it will die a well deserved death. Sites like this can’t hide anymore.”
  
  You seem confused, the courts have already put their foot down and decided that it’s completely ok for file hosters to offer as much infringing content as it’s users wish to upload, as long as they respond once they get a copyright notice about it.
  
  > “This just keeps the FBI employed. Good.”
  
  Are you saying that the biggest function of the copyright monopoly is to guarantee lawyers and certain law enforcement employed? This is interesting, that’s actually an argument for dismantling the copyright monopoly, since it’s not about keeping parasites employed. I will forward your point to some politicians, that’s been suspecting that that’s been the case in the last couple of decades.
- MadAsASnake
  
  DMCA safe harbour is irrelevant if you don’t like the service huh?
Anonymouys

I see that they insist on “help us, buy premium”? for me they are just some young profiteers…
- Server costs
  
  Or they’re just being funny.
  - Anonymous
    
    It will be more funny when they get your money than start deleting files & accounts for sharing MAFIAA “honey” LOL
666

Hosting the materials makes them very vulnerable, running a .com site makes them even more vulnerable.

Torrents / Magnet links are here to stay, even if the days of direct downloading are numbered for many legal issues.
- O’lay Pirate
  
  No… the idea behind newsbin/newsgroups etc will stay. So many dedicated servers can’t be seized :)
Kickstarter.com

If artists want to release albums and need funding, why go to a label? Get your butts over to http://www.kickstarter.com and you wont get crossed.
- Waseihou
  
  That is only for USA as far as I know. Not in Europe. Or is it possible in Europe too?
  - Anyone
    
    right now only in the US because of limitations of their payment provider
    you can give money from anywhere in the world, but to get money (ie start a project on kickstarter) you need an US address
    - Waseihou
      
      Then it’s not that useful outside Europe. We need a global solution which cross boundaries of continents and currencies. Maybe they should start using BitCoint for payment options too, while not still useful, someone might like it.
- O’lay Pirate
  
  I can +1 for that.
  
  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1595742649/help-us-fund-our-debut-ep?ref=ending_soon
  
  The idea behind it was spoken about in this; http://vimeo.com/4244922
  
  More they donate the more they get in return… $5 gives digital copy… $250 lets you sing in one of their songs etc etc..
  
  But then again…. you’ve just spammed torrentfreak with an unrelated link… not sure if I should flag or not ^__^
Anonymous

I always love how technical progress pushes the boundaries of the law.

To start with I consider it rather arrogant to say they are all lawful. No matter if that is the case or not then this will not stop the MPAA. RIAA and others wanting to drag them through court and to destroy them.

Then to provide BT network supply makes a very interesting case when no DMCA take-down request can remove a file from the swarm. We should remember that many BT sites are denied DMCA safe-harbour status for such reasons and that they do not actually host the file.

OK let me make this problem clear. One user uploads the pre-air of a very popular movie. Netkups then distributes this across the BT network. The raging MPAA then does DMCA take-down on this file, and sure enough removed, but the file is still distributed across the BT network.

We can begin to see after a series of such “initial seeder” acts that the MPAA would be wanting to remove Netkups from the market.
- Anyone
  
  who cares what the MAFIAA wants?
  they think they are above the law, and they paid to have the law perverted to their liking, but they are still not above the law.
  - Anonymous
    
    Well not many care what they want but they are still a major threat level. Some like US Government care through with major bribes in Congress and the MPAA have seats in the Whitehouse.
    
    Sure the MPAA are usually wrong but major damage is done in the attack. I mean even if MegaUpload is found innocent then major damage has been done and their primary market position has been lost to rivals.
    
    My point here is that Netkups through seeding the BT network are opening themselves up to a weak position that I predict the MPAA/RIAA will one day exploit.
Pingback: Netkups combineert bittorrent met cyberlockerfunctie | Techcube
Pingback: Netkups: descargas directas y torrents combinados | Cultura P2P
Pingback: Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid? | Emmashare
David Copo

You can win a 30 days premium account, there is more info in the twitter account.
https://twitter.com/#!/netkups/status/179265692699336704
Pingback: Inbox ICT » Netkups – direct download i torrent servis u jednom
http://perved.org/ PERVED.ORG

Awesome!
Avocado el Diablo

On top of that. I´ve just donwloaded a movie which was sold as “An awesome must be seen for those without prejudices”. This makes you thing there may be something good at the end of the download, but what I found was this bunch of bollywood crap… in hindi!!!

A good waste of time and bandwidth.
Argo

They don’t allow pornographic material lol

TorrentFreak

The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

Netkups: World’s First BitTorrent / Cyberlocker Hybrid?

BitTorrent of direct download?

Related Posts

Previous Post | Next Post

NewsBits

The Pirate Bay Isn’t Down Completely, Just Having a Few Issues

Pirate Bay Founder Gottfrid Svartholm on Freedom of Speech

Blu-ray Anti-Piracy Tech Stops Discs and Promotes Purchases

Foxtel Breeds Pirates by Locking Up Game of Thrones

UK Student Admits Breaching Sony Copyrights With Leak of PS3 SDK

MostDiscussed

Pirate Bay Takes Over Distribution of Censored 3D Printable Gun

Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

Copyright Trolls Threaten to Call Neighbors of Accused Porn Pirates

The Pirate Bay Moves to .SX as Prosecutor Files Motion to Seize Domains

Game Pirates Whine About Piracy in Game Dev Simulator

CopyQuote

PopularArticles

VPN Services That Take Your Anonymity Seriously, 2013 Edition

Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2013

Which VPN Service Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

What’s The Best VPN / Proxy for BitTorrent?

BTGuard Review: How Does it Work?

Optimize Your BitTorrent Download Speed

The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

Search TorrentFreak

BitTorrent of direct download?

Related Posts

NewsBits

MostDiscussed

CopyQuote

PopularArticles