Even if all torrent sites were shut down today, Tribler users would still be able to find and add new content.

But the researchers want more. One of the key problems with BitTorrent is the lack of anonymity. Without a VPN or proxy all downloads can easily be traced back to an individual internet connection.

The Tribler team hopes to fix this problem with a built-in Tor network, routing all data through a series of peers. In essence, Tribler users then become their own Tor network helping each other to hide their IP-addresses through encrypted proxies.

“The Tribler anonymity feature aims to make strong encryption and authentication the Internet default,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TF.

For now the researchers have settled for three proxies between the senders of the data and the recipient. This minimizes the risk of being monitored by a rogue peer and significantly improves privacy.

“Adding three layers of proxies gives you more privacy. Three layers of protection make it difficult to trace you. Proxies no longer need to be fully trusted. A single bad proxy can not see exactly what is going on,” the Tribler team explains.

“The first proxy layer encrypts the data for you and each next proxy adds another layer of encryption. You are the only one who can decrypt these three layers correctly. Tribler uses three proxy layers to make sure bad proxies that are spying on people can do little damage.”

Today Tribler opens up its technology to the public for the first time. The Tor network is fully functional but for now it is limited to a 50 MB test file. This will allow the developers to make some improvements before the final release goes out next month.

There has been an increased interest in encryption technologies lately. The Tribler team invites interested developers to help them improve their work, which is available on Github.

“We hope all developers will unite inside a single project to defeat the forces that have destroyed the Internet essence. We really don’t need a hundred more single-person projects on ‘secure’ chat applications that still fully expose who you talk to,” Pouwelse says.

For users the Tor like security means an increase in bandwidth usage. After all, they themselves also become proxies who have to pass on the transfers of other users. According to the researchers this shouldn’t result in any slowdowns though, as long as people are willing to share.

“Tribler has always been for social and sharing people. Like private tracker communities with plenty of bandwidth to go around we think we can offer anonymity without slow downs, if we can incentivize people to leave their computers on overnight and donate,” Pouwelse says.

“People who share will have superior anonymous speeds,” he adds.

Those interested in testing Tribler’s anonymity feature can download the latest version. Bandwidth statistics are also available. Please bear in mind that only the test file can be transferred securely at the moment.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For a monthly fee they can sign up with a VPN or proxy to hide their IP-address. Free options with decent speeds or without other restrictions aren’t easily available.

This lack of fast, unlimited and free anonymous BitTorrent options is what the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology are hoping to change. Their Tribler client has been around for more than half a decade already, and during that time it’s developed into the only truly decentralized BitTorrent client out there.

Unlike traditional BitTorrent clients, Tribler does not rely on central servers or third-party sites. Users can search, download and moderate files from within the application itself, based on pure peer-to-peer communication. Quite a remarkable achievement, but it’s also just the beginning for the research team.

During a talk at the Stanford University this week, Dr. Johan Pouwelse talked about the past and the future of Tribler, announcing the ambitious play to add make BitTorrent transfers more private.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Pouwelse explained that the idea is to add a proxy layer where proxies act as “caches” of content. This can hugely improve downloads speeds, but also makes BitTorrent downloads more private.

“Our goal is to provide all users with the download speed which today can only be found in private BitTorrent communities, combined with the privacy that is currently only offered by paid VPN services,” said Pouwelse.

The Tribler team has been perfecting the technology for years and it’s expected to be released in two or three months. Initial tests show that even with the added anonymity, people don’t have to sacrifice speed at all. Quite the contrary.

“Experimental results have shown that the performance of the proposed mechanism is better than that of regular BitTorrent in a large number of scenarios. At the same time, the proxy layer can be used to offer the users a shield of plausible deniability enhancing their privacy,” Pouwelse told us.

With the new code Tribler says it outperforms other clients such as uTorrent in download speeds. Ultimately, the researchers hope to compete with on-demand video services such as YouTube.

“BitTorrent has served us well for 11 years, but modern features such as YouTube-like easy streaming, sharing of your 1 Terabyte harddisk and solid anonymity are needed. The BitTorrent protocol simply does not scale to safe private sharing of 1 Terabyte, which would begin to bridge the gap between the wealth of content on YouTube versus the weak archive capability of BitTorrent.”

Helped by money from European tax payers, the “understaffed” team say they are now at a point where Tribler can compete with some of the fastest centralized services. Their P2P streaming technology is currently under consideration to become an official Internet standard and is being actively tested by major broadcasting companies including the BBC.

The Tribler proxy layer is expected to be implemented this fall, but those who want to give the current version of Tribler a spin are welcome download it here. The client is completely Open Source and has a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

From SOPA to Megaupload, there is a growing uncertainly about the future of sharing.

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

Anonymous, decentralized and uncensored are the key and most sought-after features. For some this means signing up with a VPN to make their BitTorrent sharing more private, but new clients are also generating interest.

Earlier this month we wrote about Tribler, a decentralized (not anonymous) BitTorrent client that makes torrent sites obsolete. We’ve covered Tribler for more than half a decade, but it was only after our most recent post that it really took off with more than a hundred thousand downloads in a few days.

But there are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

“In January our downloads tripled when interest in SOPA was at its peak. It more than doubled again in February, when cyberlockers disabled sharing or shut down entirely. At the moment we are getting 10 times more downloads than in December 2011.”

RetroShare’s founder believes that there is an increased need for security, privacy and freedom among file-sharers, features that are at the core of his application.

“RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat,” DrBob told TorrentFreak.

“RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

It’s impossible to accurately predict what file-sharing will look like 5 years from now. But, a safe assumption is that anonymity will play a more central role than it ever has.

Recent crackdowns have made operators of central file-sharing sites and services more cautious of copyright infringement. Some even went as far as shutting down voluntarily, like BTjunkie.

In the long run this might drive more casual downloaders to legitimate alternatives, if these are available. Those who keep on sharing could move to smaller communities, darknets, and anonymous connections.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

So how does it work?

Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

The same is true for spam control. Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The latest addition to Tribler is a Wikipedia-style editing system dubbed “Open2Edit,” where users have the option to edit names and descriptions of torrents in public channels. All without a central server, totally decentralized.

According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shutdown, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

“The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.” Pouwelse told us.

One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

“Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

While the Tribler client only has a few thousand users at the moment, for avid file-sharers it must be a relief to know that it’s out there. No matter what crazy laws may pass in the future, people will always be able to share.

Those who want to give it a spin are welcome download Tribler here. It’s completely Open Source and with a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Unlike most other BitTorrent applications, this one is funded by tax money and coded by researchers of Delft University of Technology. This has resulted in quite a few unique features.

Last year Tribler became the first truly decentralized BitTorrent client that doesn’t rely on central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines.

Today the Tribler team expands the client’s functionality with a new way of presenting search results.

“Tribler’s magic search bundles similar items in search results together using text similarity functions and digit extraction,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“In bundled results lists, duplicates and near duplicates are displayed as conflated groups. The end-result is a cleaner list of search results which is easier to scan.”

“For example, sometimes like five identical copies of an episode exist and these copies clutter the search results list when they are all shown. Tribler’s new feature prevents this by collapsing these copies into a single search result,” Pouwelse explains.

“The “Magic” part of the new algorithm takes its best shot at figuring out how to bundle the items that match your query, but you are still free to override what Tribler has guessed is best. This form of feedback paves the way for further improvements of the bundling feature’s “Magic”.”

“We expect that this feature has to grow on people. It’s a different experience and we hope to hear from people what they think of this innovation,” Pouwelse concluded.

Want to give it a try? You can download the latest Tribler version here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Tribler’s BitTorrent client has been in development for more than 5 years and continues to deliver experimental improvements and innovative ideas. Last year Tribler became the first truly decentralized BitTorrent client that doesn’t rely on central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines. But the researchers have more in store.

The latest innovation from the Tribler team is promising something all BitTorrent users are interested in – faster downloads. The researchers came up with what they call a Superior Seeding Standard, a set of rules that reward users who put the most effort into sharing. The new standard is an alternative to the current tit-for-tat algorithm and is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies often seen at private BitTorrent trackers.

The researchers have carefully analyzed the effectiveness of private BitTorrent trackers and found that users achieve great speeds, but that the ratio requirements also discriminate against users who don’t have high-bandwidth connections.

The Tribler team proposes a new standard which rewards BitTorrent users independent of their connection limitations. Instead of looking at the share ratio alone, it uses the ‘seeding effort’ to reward BitTorrent users by giving them priority in the swarm and thus faster downloads. Again, all of the above works without a central server.

The Tribler team ran several experiments with their new Superior Seeding Standard and found that the download speeds for people who share fairly are greatly improved compared to current transfer speeds on public trackers. The initial results suggest that it is more fair to people who are good BitTorrent citizens than the classic tit-for-tat algorithm.

“One of the problems with tit-for-tat is that it provides no motivation for seeding the terabytes of long-tail content that’s out there on BitTorrent,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “We believe that people should be rewarded with priority downloads when they are seeding these more obscure files, especially the stuff which only gets a few downloads a month.”

“The ‘seeding rewards’ concept has been in the making for several years. It always required a central server, but we finally made it work in a truly decentralized manner with robustness against cheating. We implemented a first version of this proposed ‘Superior Seeding Standard’ in the latest Tribler release, and we expect that it will be tweaked and optimized quite a bit in the years to come,” Dr. Pouwelse added. “

The full technical specifications and several performance tests are detailed by these scientists in the paper titled “Fast Download but Eternal Seeding: The Reward and Punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement,” which will be presented at the P2P 2011 conference later this year.

As is true for many of Tribler’s innovations, getting it adopted by other BitTorrent clients will prove to be a tricky endeavor. Those who install Tribler will nonetheless notice that the concept of an entirely decentralized and fast BitTorrent network is already reality. The next and final step is to make it anonymous, that would certainly justify the millions of euros in tax money that has gone into the Tribler project in the last few years.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Besides these torrent sites, most BitTorrent downloads are still managed by so-called trackers. These servers coordinate the download process and make sure that people can find others who are sharing the files they want to download. To a certain degree, trackers are no longer needed with ‘trackerless’ technology such as DHT, but even DHT often uses a central server to get a torrent started.

Finally central servers are used by moderators to help hunt spam and malware. All file sharing programs without such central checking have become practically useless over time.

In the last years these ‘central server’ vulnerabilities have caused a number of minor inconveniences for torrent users. When trackers go offline, downloads usually slow down or may stop entirely, and when a torrent search engine such as The Pirate Bay has technical issues, users have to search for alternatives.

To address these issues, ideally BitTorrent downloads should no longer require a central server. P2P technology should not only facilitate the downloading and sharing process, but also the searching and storage of torrent files. This may sound like a technology that might only become available in the distant future, but in reality it already exists.

The latest version of the Tribler BitTorrent client (Win, Mac and Linux), released only a few minutes ago, is capable of all the above and many more things that could be described as quite revolutionary. The client combines a ‘zero-server’ approach with features such as instant video streaming, advanced spam control and personalized content channels, all bundled into a single application.

The Tribler team has come a long way to reach the point they’re at now. We first reported on the ‘tax-payer-funded’ BitTorrent client in 2006, and in the years that followed tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the client’s development resulting in the latest 5.3 release.

Despite the fact that only a few thousand people are using Tribler on a monthly basis, in technological terms it is one of the most advanced clients. People who install the client will notice that there’s a search box at the top of the application, similar to that offered by other clients. However, when one does a search the results don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come from other peers.

In fact, Tribler’s search functionality even has an auto-suggest function which is also built to work based on P2P data instead of a central server. Remarkably enough the response times for the searches and the auto suggest are both pretty fast, under a second in 99% of cases.

As for the downloads themselves, if one clicks on a ‘torrent’ in the search result, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

Tribler users can choose if they want to play the downloading file directly (if it’s video) with the built in VLC player, or wait for it to finish first. In addition to searching for files, users can also create their own channels or subscribe to those of others. Again, this is all based on technology that doesn’t require a central server. Other new features are subtitle integration, support for magnet links and advanced spam controls.

Spam control in a P2P program that actually works is something not seen before. The Tribler spam mechanism revolves around user generated “channels”, which may contain several thousands of torrents.
When people like a channel they can indicate this with “mark as favorite”. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The idea is that spam and malware will automatically be pushed down to non-existence in search results and the majority of users will favor the channels they love. In scientific terms, this is a classic case of survival of the fittest and group selection at work. Again, this is done without central servers.

With the combination of P2P-based search, torrent downloads and moderation, BitTorrent sites have been almost rendered obsolete. Although we don’t see torrent sites going away any time soon it’s ‘assuring’ to see that there are alternatives. Tribler’s cutting edge technology allows users to search for torrents and download files without the need for any central server. A revolution, not only for BitTorrent but for P2P in general.

As mentioned before, the Tribler project is funded by tax payers money, most of which comes from EU grants. However, according to Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology, those who complain that spending all this money on the development of a BitTorrent client is a waste, are wrong.

“Tax payer money is going into Internet research, which happens to use a very powerful technology called BitTorrent. That’s different. On a wider scale a few hundred million euros of research money is being spent on making computer networks more robust and improving video streaming. I think that is money well spent,” Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

Eventually, Pouwelse and his team hope to shape the future of Internet-based video delivery, and this won’t just be limited to PCs either. “Our architecture has unbounded scalability and in principle can work on all TVs, phones and other devices in the world simultaneously,” he said.

“22 scientists are working full time in the P2P research team i’m coordinating at Delft University of Technology. A lot of the algorithms and Open Source code we write ends up in Tribler. Roughly 6 other universities or organisations contribute code regularly to Tribler. It’s by far the largest science-driven P2P effort around,” Pouwelse added.

Aside from the fact that the technology itself is both exciting and fully operational in the real world, there are some issues that have to be overcome. Due to the low userbase of Tribler, the total number of torrents that are findable is relatively low. About 20,000, which is quite low compared to the millions of torrents most BitTorrent sites index.

This means that most of the popular content is available but that obscure files will be harder to find. The only way to really change this is when more people start to use the client, which might take a few more domain seizures than we’ve seen thus far.

Update: A message from Dr. Johan Pouwelse.

Many readers wonder why this is new compared to Kazaa, Exeem, LimeWire, Gnutella, eMule. Well, that explanation is a bit technical, here it goes. All these client either contain spam or use servers. For instance, Limewire Cooperation was sending out digitally signed instructions to block anti-piracy companies and spammers in general (157 pages of details).

Tribler does not use spam protection that originates exclusively from some cooperate headquarter or Swedish moderator server and does not use servers for search. After launching Tribler it quickly fills its integrated SQL light engine (pdf) with discovered content. It has a bias to talk to peers with the same download taste. Similar to how Google keeps out the Spammers using PageRank, Tribler uses a distributed reputation system (pdf).

Update: As pointed out by readers, there are other P2P-technologies that work fully decentralized, such as Kademlia. The decentralized “revolution” is limited to BitTorrent only.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The project has been awarded millions of euros in funding from the European Union. With this money, the researchers have been developing a new BitTorrent ecosystem where torrent sites are no longer needed.

To achieve this goal the search functionality of the new Tribler client 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 The Pirate Bay and isoHunt obsolete.

The downside of this type of search is that it is impossible to remove or moderate spam and fake files. In order to solve this problem the Tribler team has implemented a SwarmRank feature which ranks torrents based on their trustworthiness and speed.

“SwarmRank is inspired by Google’s PageRank algorithm which is used to keep Google search results neat, tidy and relevant,” Dr. Johan Pouwelse, lead researcher at the Tribler P2P team, told TorrentFreak.

Another new feature based on the trust idea implemented in the latest Tribler release is a reputation score for downloaders called BarterCast. With this feature the Tribler team hopes to achieve higher download speeds for users who share the most.

To reward seeding the Tribler client doesn’t rely on sharing ratios like most private BitTorrent trackers do. Instead, every peer that shares valid pieces of a file will simply become more trustworthy. The more users upload, the more their reputation score increases and the higher their download speeds will be.

Below is a picture of a previous version of Tribler which includes a test version of their BarterCast reputation system. It shows how peers automatically form a web-of-trust.

With the new SwarmRank and BarterCast features, Tribler has made a step forward in preventing spam filling up its decentralized BitTorrent environment. “By adding reputations for both swarms and peers we have a new tool against spam and pollution in Bittorrent, while we can reward seeding,” Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak.

We have to admit that the Tribler team is working on some fascinating stuff. However, thus far the client still has a very small market share which is not ideal for a decentralized system like this. Depending on what the future has in store for BitTorrent, this may change quickly. The good thing is that the client is entirely Open Source so other developers can take advantage of the research if needed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.