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: Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

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: Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

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: Researchers Improve BitTorrent Download Speeds

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: Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived

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: Tribler Evolves Its Decentralized BitTorrent Ecosystem

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: Bram Cohen To Deliver BitTorrent Live Streaming

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: Movie Theater Streams 2K Resolution Film Using BitTorrent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: BitTorrent Powered TV is Coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Tribler Set to Make BitTorrent Sites Obsolete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess we should take that as a yes.

Source: EU Invests $22 Million in Next-Generation BitTorrent Client

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

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

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

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

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

Source: BitTorrent to be Pimped by Nobel Prize Winning Theory

The Harvard project is all about a fresh new approach. To be honest, have we seen a new trick since eMule and Bittorrent started? Things have clearly slowed down in the last years.

The Harvard researchers are currently working on one of hardest P2P problems, ensuring uploads. P2P dies or thrives depending on how much upload people donate. By introducing electronic “currency” for uploads they think they can make P2P HDTV Video on Demand possible. With the minor detail that we all have to switch to their client…

The latest version of Tribler enhances the standard tit-for-tat BitTorrent algorithms with something they call the give-to-get algorithm (PDF article). This new algorithm allows their users to benefit from a good ratio without using a central server like private BitTorrent trackers do.

Tribler users can still join every BitTorrent swarm and play the tit-for-tat game with old-school BitTorrent users. But, when they meet another Tribler peer they switch to give-to-get mode where the currency meter is running. This turns the Tribler network into a private Tracker network without the central server. This basically means, the more you share, the faster your downloads will go.

Every Tribler client keeps an eye on MByte counts of fellow peers. They gossip around about who is a leecher and who is a top dog, without the details of which Hollywood movie it was. The only information displayed about this in the GUI is a list in your profile of the “Top 10 Tribler Uploaders”. For the next version of Tribler they plan to turn that list of top dog uploaders into a decentralized trust system and enable users to correct typos and add tags to the content. In short, BitTorrent would go “2.0″.

But let’s first see if they can really handle network pollution and spam without a central server. It will be quite tricky to get such “Google PageRank” trust algorithms working in P2P.

Source: Harvard Develops P2P Client that uses Bandwidth as “Currency”

Technologies like this could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. It is estimated that YouTube uses 45 terabytes of storage, requiring several million dollars worth of bandwidth a month to stream the content. Peer to peer streaming would significantly decrease the costs for YouTube, because most of the bandwidth would come from peers instead of YouTube’s own servers.

Solid State announced:

Solid State Networks is a developer of high-performance, content-delivery solutions, and the first commercial-class software suite based on the massively scalable BitTorrent protocol. Our flagship product, the Solid State Distributed Delivery Network, is a hybrid content-delivery solution that combines the economic and performance advantages of peer-assisted technology with the reliability of a traditional CDN. It now includes support for on-demand streaming of content.

Although Solid State can implement some of the features of BitTorrent, they have to make some concessions. A key feature of the BitTorrent protocol is that the pieces of the file are not delivered in a “chronological” order, to make it possible to give a high priority to rare pieces. This doesn’t seem to suit streaming.

In August we reported that the “social” BitTorrent client Tribler has plans to integrate YouTube videos in their client. Johan Pouwelse of the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are planning to index every one of the +6 million videos posted on YouTube.

A prototype of the YouTube indexing function from Tribler will be ready by the end of this year, and includes an Amazon like recommendation system, and video tagging features.

Source: Solid State to Launch Hybrid BitTorrent Video Streaming Service

Tribler is far from anonymous, and therefore probably not suited for sharing content you’re not supposed to share. However, the social aspect of Tribler has the potential to be helpful to sites like youtube, by saving them some bandwidth.

According to a Wall Street Journal article posted today, “youtube uses 45 terabytes of storage and requiring several million dollars worth of bandwidth a month to transmit”. Another interesting statistic from the WSJ article is that apparently people spent 9,305 years!!! watching Youtube since it started last year.

Assistant Professor Johan Pouwelse who’s coordinating the Tribler
project the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are planning to index all the videos posted on youtube (+6 million). This means Tribler users will be able to watch and share youtube videos with their BitTorrent client.

A prototype of the Youtube indexing function of Tribler will be ready in a month or two, and includes an Amazon like recommendation system, and video tagging features.

Tribler.org

Stay tuned.

Source: Tribler will integrate Youtube into their BitTorrent client

So what’s the deal?

Torrent Swapper is an open sourced powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client with special social abilities. That means you can get Amazon like recommendations from peers to find new and interesting files, and download double your current torrent download speed using uploading capabilities of your friends.

I haven’t tried “torrent swapper” myself, but I like the social functionalities. However, I also greatly value my privacy…

Torrent Swapper

Source: Yet another social BitTorrent client

Johan Pauwelse (tribler) and William Valkenburg (omroep.nl) shaking hands

Johan Pauwelse, one of Triblers developers said that IPTV should move away from the old fashioned way of distributing files and embrace BitTorrent. William Valkenburg manager of omroep.nl said that the “social” aspect of tribler was essential for the deal. Tribler allows people to maintain buddy lists, and recommend files to friends. Tribler also gives recommendation based on your personal downloading history.

The Dutch public seems to be ready for P2P TV. On the Dutch site uitzendinggemist.nl that currently lists streams of nearly all shows of the public broadcasting channels, 4 million tv-shows were requested in December, compared to 250.000 at the January 2005. The site lists 400.000 shows good for 15 terabyte.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow was also present at the workshop. He praised the Dutch Public Broadcasting Channel and the Tech People for discussing the legal opportunities of P2P technology. “He said: In the US half of the people would have left the room”.

thx R-win

Source: Dutch Public TV Channels are going to use BitTorrent

This first version is an extension of the existing ABC client and does not have all the proposed functionalities. However, the test version adds a new dimension to BitTorrent.

The extensions are :

-Strong peer authentication; enables groupware extensions and friends.
-Twice the download speed for ADSL users; you can donate your upload capacity to a friend
-Recommendation of files you may which to download
-Removal of .torrent files; replace by short Merkle Hashes which can be put in a URL.

Cooperative downloading (click)

But Tribler is still in its testing phase:

this is not a full public release. Only 1000 downloads will be allowed and then the link will be taken down. Please give it a try, so we can turn this into a public release soon. Please send the bugs you found or your comments to the Tribler sourceforge bugreport page.

Warning 1: For the internal test version, the software will output some debug text and error message to tribler.exe.log. Some of them are normal output, such as”secover: Handler registered for RESERVE_PIECES”, “buddycast: BuddyCast starts up”. If you see “Traceback (most recent call last):” in the log file, some errors may occur and please send your log file to us using the above bug report form.

Download The Test Version
Read our previous post on Tribler

Source: Social BitTorrent Client launched

More info
Tribler.org
Leaked Version

Source: Tribler: Social BitTorrent Beta version Leaked

“Most current P2P file sharing systems treat their users as anonymous, unrelated entities, and completely disregard any social relationships between them. However, social phenomena such as friendship and the existence of communities of users with similar tastes may be well exploited in such systems, to increase their usability and performance. In this paper we present a novel socialbased P2P filesharing paradigm that exploits social phenomena by maintaining social networks and using these in content discovery, content recommendation, and downloading. Based on this paradigm’s first class concepts such as taste groups, friends, and friendsoffriends, we have designed and implemented the TRIBLER P2P filesharing system as a set of extensions to BitTorrent.”

user interface overview (click)

Taste Buddy’s
A buddy list based on your personal preferences will help you discover new content. Taste buddy’s will be determined by comparing your personal profile to that of other peers.

Cooperative downloading:
Peers from the same group can speed up the downloading by engaging in cooperative downloading. Peers can donate bandwidth to their friends and act as a collector or a helper.

“A collector is the peer that is interested in obtaining a complete copy of a particular file, and a helper is a peer that is recruited by a collector to assist in downloading that file.”

Cooperative downloading (click)

The software will be launched next month, we will keep you up-to-date.

Source:
Peer-to-Peer content sharing using social networking, content recommendation, and cooperative downloads
J.Pouwelse, P.Garbacki, J.Wang, A.Bakker, J.Yang, A.Iosup, D.Epema, M.Reinders, M. van Steen, H.Sips

Source: Tribler: A social based, BitTorrent powered p2p network