On the one hand users sometimes complain about slow download speeds, but most of all, Internet providers are not always happy with the heavy load BitTorrent transfers put on their networks.

The Swedish based company Peerialism hopes to tackle these problems and make BitTorrent future proof. Aside from their issues with GGF, they are currently working on the release of a new Open Source BitTorrent tracker based on the OpenTracker software currently in use at most of the larger public BitTorrent trackers.

Andreas Dahlström, the CTO and founder of the company explained to TorrentFreak that the key to solving BitTorrent’s main problems is to make the tracker location aware, so that peers first try to share files with other peers that are closer to them.

“In standard BitTorrent the tracker chooses a totally random number of peers for you. There are some good reasons for this since random actually gives some nice and robust network properties but in many cases this will force you to download for peers far away from you,” Dahlström said.

“This has two effects: slower download speed and unnecessary network traffic for the ISPs. And since BitTorrent traffic causes so much problems for ISPs many use traffic shaping, causing even slower download speeds,” he explained.

The solution to this problem according to Dahlström is to make the tracker select peers more intelligently, based on their geographical location. The initial tests of this new methodology are very promising, as they result in faster download speeds for BitTorrent users, and less traffic going outside the ISPs network.

“We have built p2p algorithms which actually map the entire Internet. We can use this to let a BitTorrent Tracker assign you to the peers closest to you. The effect for the downloader is 30-150% faster downloads and 20-50% less traffic for the ISPs,” Dahlström told TorrentFreak.

This sounds like a classic win-win situation. If it’s implemented by most of the leading BitTorrent trackers, ISPs will have less trouble handling BitTorrent traffic and thus less incentive to slow it down. On the other hand, BitTorrent users will see a boost in their download speeds.

There is a minor drawback to the plan though. The new trackers will use more CPU and memory, which means that more power is required than with the current setup. This means that the people who run the trackers will have to invest in new hardware.

“We work hard to together with Ergeist [the creator of the original OpenTracker software] to minimize the extra load,” Dahlström said. “We do believe the extra resources are well spent compared to the improved download speeds and less ISP traffic.”

If Peerialism can deliver what they are promising, their new tracker will be one of the most significant advancements to BitTorrent in years. Although they are not the first to come up with the idea of location based peer allocation, some might remember P4P, the solution they offer is superior since it requires no changes to the existing BitTorrent clients.

In addition, Peerialism is already working together with the developer behind the most widely used BitTorrent tracker software currently in use by The Pirate Bay, OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent trackers. Thus, they are as close to the fire as they can be.

The Open Source tracker, currently codenamed OpenTracker 2.0, is set to be released in September. If some of the larger trackers decide to use it we might see a huge drop in Global Internet traffic instantly, along with faster download speeds for most BitTorrent users.

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

Opentracker is a lightweight BitTorrent tracker which uses minimal resources. The software does not store any data or log any IP-addresses, supports UDP-tracking and is more stable and efficient than most other tracker software. Last year, The Pirate Bay started using the software, which allowed them to handle more users with the same hardware.

As with most software, Opentracker comes with a license, although it is an unusual one. The software is published under a Beerware license, meaning that if a satisfied user should ever run into the developer, he or she owes the developer a beer. This is exactly what the German Pirate Party did, as the party is actively using BitTorrent.

As a token of appreciation for all his efforts, the party donated 50 litres of Augustiner, a German wheat beer, to Opentracker developer Dirk Engling (aka “Erdgeist”). “Pirates, P2P and especially BitTorrent is part of a new culture. Users decide on their own what kind of information they want to get, instead of simply sitting in front of the TV,” the German Pirate Party writes on their blog, as they thank the Opentracker folks for all their hard work.

The beer is well deserved of course, and it came as no surprise that Erdgeist promised to share it with the other congress goers.

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

Sometimes anti-piracy outfits use their own trackers to gather evidence. Last week we reported that The Pirate Bay started to actively remove these suspicious trackers from their torrents, with some help from torrenteditor.com. Running a tracker is not required though, to collect information from BitTorrent users. In fact, many attempt to use publicly available trackers such as The Pirate Bay to do so. However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.

Polluting the evidence works like this. When a client asks for a list of peers who are downloading the same torrent, the tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not in the swarm. They are based on existing sub-nets, but might be from people who may not even be aware that BitTorrent exists. This means that the evidence that’s being gathered by anti-piracy companies includes IPs that belong to people that were not downloading the movie or album they are accused of. Perfect deniability, as the people who coded the tracker software explain.

Of course, this doesn’t work when the pirate-tracking company requires itself to connect to the peer, before the IP-address is collected, since it is impossible to connect to a non-existing peer. A representative from BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they have such a requirement, but several others are less thorough, which makes their claims useless, and impossible to defend in court.

The best solution is of course to ban these anti-piracy companies from using the tracker in the first place. This is something The Pirate Bay is working on as well, and they have blocked many IP-ranges already, but it’s impossible to ban them all. Unlike most of the suits in Hollywood, the companies that go after illicit file-sharers are experts in their field, and know more about BitTorrent than many users. They try to circumvent blocklists such as PeerGuardian whenever possible, and change IPs when they are marked.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak that he has several criteria on which he can pick out the suspicious users that might be collecting IP-addresses. He also said that he’s working on a automated warning system which will operate as a sniffer on a monitor port. That project is far from complete, but has the potential to detect suspicious behavior more easily.

Nevertheless, it is impossible (as the name might give away) to keep the prying eyes of Hollywood off public trackers. Even private trackers are far from secure, as most anti-piracy companies have accounts at the larger communities. The private in “private tracker” merely refers to the fact that you have to login, and has nothing to do with “security”. The Pirate Bay (and other tracker owners) take several measures to prevent their users from being tracked by anti-piracy outfits, but there’s only so much they can do.

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

One of the latest changes is that they have started to automatically remove duplicate trackers from torrent files, to keep unnecessary connections between BitTorrent clients and their tracker to a minimum.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO explained to TorrentFreak: “It’s totally unnecessary to have more than one of our tracker URLs when they all have the same peers, they just ask the tracker for the same data lots of times.”

“Also, now we can strip out all bad trackers from anti-p2p companies, as well as old ones that stopped working years ago,” he added. So, while they were at it, they have also decided to remove dead trackers, and BitTorrent trackers that are run by anti-piracy organizations. This makes it less likely that the MPAA and RIAA , often though companies like Mediasentry, can keep tabs on the download habits of Pirate Bay users.

Another advantage, of course, is that the number of fake files and spam from companies such as MediaDefender are kept to a minimum. Fake torrents are often used to trick people into downloading useless data instead of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The Pirate Bay already had quite a good track record when it comes to removing fakes, and this will only improve with these latest changes.

The Pirate Bay currently has 13 servers dedicated to the tracker, and another 14 servers for the website itself. Yesterday, the tracker broke a new record, with close to 18 million active users on “TV-torrent Tuesday“, and at the current rate, they will be tracking 20 million peers a few weeks from now.

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