Tribler Set to Make BitTorrent Sites Obsolete
Written by Ernesto on October 28, 2008The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
We have reported on Tribler and it’s development several times already. Previously, the researchers introduced BitTorrent streaming, and new algorithms that will improve the sharing behavior of BitTorrent users. The latest innovation, however, might have even broader consequences, as it creates the world’s first ‘True P2P’ BitTorrent Client.
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.
Previously: Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent
Next: P2Pnet Wins Landmark ‘Hyperlinking” Case
92 Responses
interesting…
If this works then all i can say is AMAZING.
Nice!
P2P continues to out-innovate Hollywood.
So I’m sure Hollywood will stop dragging people to court. They now understand that P2P+Creative Commons is the only future-proof model.
Obsolete? This wont replace private trackers.
Why?
Quality control. The reason private trackers are so successful is because the uploaded content is usually done with the punishment of poor quality, ban from downloading content.
Expect a mass of broken low quality files, viruses, and probably even completely incorrect data within your torrents.
Basically.
Yeah
It just like P2P.
Perhaps I misread but this sounds to me like a Frostwire/Kazaa/Bearshare/etc type client but for torrent files in that in order to be effective, other people would have to keep it running all the time to broadcast what torrents they have. However, torrents on torrent sites are there all the time.
Also, this could easily be abused when the major recording, movie, and game industry starts polluting the network with fake torrents (for big name movies, bands, and games) that either have no seeds or peers (and never will) or are just outright fake. It’s far easier to spot fakes on torrent sites because of the comments.
lmfao when will ppl learn private is not bittorrent.
so you find torrent files through peers, how do you find the peers in the first place?
Just an article or two back on TF they mention how some anti-piracy @ssholes are using hashes to screw DC++/Kazza/Bearshare etc users and how BT is not affected (read the article to see reasons why)… but using this architecture wont BT be affected as well?
If no, then this is def a good step forward, if yes… back to the drawing board boys!
tried the client and it seems to be designed for people who discovered the internet in 2008
also, searching for youtube videos? no thx thats why i have firefox
MPAA/RIAA is crying now lol
If they shut down ThePirateBay, how will they shutdown pirate members PC ?
Via Tribler, now we can share Movies/Music/Games/Appz without uploading .torrent file to thepiratebay :)
great one Tribler. thanks
Just tried this and it is awesome! I get hundreds of files with only 30 people connected! Now we don’t have to worry about TPB dying.
hmmmm seems like an interesting concept, i wonder if people will take it up or whether it will shrivel and die. . . personally i think this is a good step forward
Blimey Hell Govnor
I got search hits in 2 to 3 seconds.
Better than what I get on minova.
this will only gonna werk, if the torrent search will be truly open, free and censorship resistand, and content neutral….
torrent neutrality so to speak. if they cant exclude unwanted stuff, or anti-copyright, anti-this, anti-that, anti-i-dont-like-your-content then it might work. anti-terrorist, anti-consumerist, anti-leftist, anti-corporatewarmongering, anti-militaryindustrialilluminati
other than that it will utterly fail.
welcome to the real world.
This is a nice idea, but from the article it seems to only move the storing of the torrent files to a p2p file system, which isn’t really a pure P2P system. The torrents still need trackers to coordinate the torrents. I personally don’t see this as a game changing idea, because MPAA and RIAA can still take down trackers.
as soon as running tracker becomes unprofitable bitorrent will die
Well, lets call this tool :
Public-Trojan….with this its easy now to find out who, etc dl that and that…so stay/go way the old way.
This Software will sure “save and send” certain data, like what torrent u dl and of course a piece of the ip…a good way to create statistics.
I will keep oldskool, search at mn, pb or web search eng.
But you can do whatever u wan´t with ur “Data”.
“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.”
Private BT sites have great communities, aimed at these same goals. I dont understand the criticism.
Unfortunately I can´t install the programm. I really would like to test is a little while.
Just for fucks sake.
But then again, I am much too paranoid to really want to use it for real. Iam quite able to get all the stuff I want via torrents. And I wouldn´t want to miss the level of moderation that sites as mininova offer.
So, thanks, but no thanks.
No need for tribler here.
I think i just creamed my pants..
The future is here..
Oh thank you tribler.. omg i cant wait.
They re-invented emule! All the features mentioned are available in the ED2K network, and have been for years.
@16 gh
lol if only you knew what you were talking about.
I will give you that certain sites MAY go down if they are not able to afford server costs.
But as far as bittorrent protocol in general.. you dont seem to realize how incredible the technology is.
Go out and compare other distribution methods..
Bittorrent is not a ‘profitable’ business, it is exactly what it claims to be, a means to share for absolutely free.
Hopefully your not implying that the current distribution methods being used by outdated and pathetic industrys is somehow better then bittorrent..
Let me put it in a way you might be able to understand..
if it wasnt an incredible world changing technology.. why would there be so much insane buzz about it? Why would there be so many people using it?
You can go so far as to say the only people who DONT use it, is only because they dont know how. And then mabye theres your kind of people, who are just ignorant and too dumb to learn anything better.
Tell ya what, im gonna go on ahead with the future.. you can stay and collect dust.. lol.
So many people seem excited by this.
The concept is great, the idea that you can get the torrents you want without the need for a central reserve.
A few bad points:
– The client is cluttered. Make it look less like Kazaa and more like uTorrent
– Maybe make the searching more intuitive?
I just got annoyed looking at lists of things appear, and random torrents appearing on my desktop.
I have a sinking feeling that this is going to turn into the days of searching on Kazaa when it was difficult to find anything and you could never be sure what you saw was real or not.
The system we have works because it’s easy to find what you want (searching on torrent sites) and you know that 99.9% of the time, what you get what you wanted (torrent site moderation).
I couldn’t see this on the client… maybe it’s there, but it was crunching my RAM, so I closed it.
#20.
EXACTLY.
i really don’t see what’s so impressive about turning BT into something that’s been around for years.
Sounds like eMule!
“Perhaps I misread but this sounds to me like a Frostwire/Kazaa/Bearshare/etc type client but for torrent files in that in order to be effective, other people would have to keep it running all the time to broadcast what torrents they have. However, torrents on torrent sites are there all the time.”
Yes, and half those torrents are *DEAD*. Seriously, do a search on Mininova and look down the list at the seeds and peers columns. The first couple will have a good amount of both, but toward the bottom of the list, there will be tons of torrents with 0 seeds and 1 peer.
what a load of shit,
this is not the first client to try this, Exeem anyone?, when suprnova got shut down they launched exeem which was a torrent client that didnt require a tracker.
the problem with all this crap is any decent torrents are from private trackers and have dht disabled making them useless with crap like this,
exeem failed, tribler will fail, usenet already won btw, it won about 40 years ago
The benefit to the pirate bay is that they actively moderate their tracker, minimizing the damage caused by the RIAA/MPAA/etc. I think I’ll prefer them for the moment, but it is good to have backup.
Of course, the ED2k comparison is also dead on.
I will NEVER top using the Pirate Bay-uTorrent combo.
What we really need is technology to protect the IP #’s in swarms.
Why is everyone bitching about the missing quality control. As far i understand it. They find users with similar taste. So if you download legit Files you will find more similar ones. You only will find fakes if you and your “Buddies” only are interestet in fakes.
So long as torrent files remain in that grey zone in courts, this is a good idea. Once torrent files/if torrent files become illegal, then this is just identical to Limewire/Kazaa. They can just trace you exactly as they did in those programs. Not to mention now that there will be thousands of dummy files.
Just imagine, the MPAA are already putting dummy torrents on torrent sites, which are pretty much being kept at bay. But this software, all they have to do is connect. And then put their folder of 20′000 fake torrents online and BOOM. Good luck finding a decent .torrent file amongst the shitwaves of fake files.
Was eager to try but am left very disappointed.
-Confusing and immature interface. -Several bugs which suggest a pre-beta stage of development, though version 4.5
-Complete lack of interface configuration options
-Lots of wasted screen real estate
-Why Youtube and LiveLeak in there?!
-After restart doesn’t remember last size, and keeps coming back using thumbnails instead of list.
-Player hung at first use
-Easy to start with, hard to continue
-Top right info disappears with maximize, and doesn’t return
-Tool tips are long, vanish too quickly, and are hard to get back
Nice idea maybe, but no. I’ll wait for someone else to do this well, thank you.
So basically its a Peer to Peer (P2P) network like LimeWire or Morpheous.
Jiff
http://www.anonymity.cz.tc
great! now make it all encrypted, so no-one will be convicted for using it
Nooo! i like my privacy , private trackers all the way :D
way to turn bittorrent into unmoderated, virus-ridden limewire-like bullshit
how much is TorrentFreak getting paid to advertise this bollocks?
what about comments i mean come on they are often a very useful way to determine what is actually in the file. bt sites are important.
uhh..
its called limewire.
exactly the same idea except you have to download a little file first.
next idea..
If it still needs a server running an announce I don’t understand how this makes it any better, it just means if you run a tracker you still have all the legal issues but you cannot support your server by running advertising and donations
Like what my friend always say… “When it’s not broken, DON’T FIX IT!”
But I like torrent sites :(
as long as the private trackers keep on going this could be good, if you need a movie or a full game you go to your tracker of choice, if you want something small like a song or something old and hard to find, you don’t need to use emule
I can see no motivation for making decentralization because it does not perform better than centralized servers providing the torrent files. In addition, as others have already said, it has been done before.
Roze
Tribler should be renamed to KaZaa II.
and then MEDIA DEFENDER DOS’S everyone using it, gather intel on everyone using it and whats thepoint of DHT NONE.
SAFER BEING PRIVATE
“users will have the option to boost the download speed of friends”
you have GOT to be KIDDING ME
Sorry, but I am not seeing why this is so “superior”, especially when you have friend lists etc. The whole concept of “boosting” someone completely violates what p2p is supposed to be. Also how does it determine friends? IP? Not all of us are on static IPs. Login info? That just screams of someone spoofing to me. If it’s by some embedded identification number then where is the “security” this claims to have.
Maybe I am missing something, but this seems to suffer greatly from lack of security measures to prevent IP harvesting, as well as the ease of file flooding by entities like the MAFIAA.
Also, as long as a client has extra crap like a youtube viewer built in as a “feature” I feel justified in calling it bloatware. Those features are uneeded, and pointless for a p2p application.
@27 qoute “exeem failed, tribler will fail, usenet already won btw, it won about 40 years ago”
To bad Usenet didnt exist 40 years ago genius.
Hmmmm, very cool.
Rapidshare links please!
Too bad the Tribler client totally blows.
Need an invite to waffles.fm? Just ask shane: shinikaru@waffles.fm
This is really similar to the old Kazaa and Limewire way of doing things and you can expect to see a lot more virus downloads to appear. Without reading comments on the files who knows what you are downing and whether that source is a trusted source. Stick to torrent sites for now it is safer for you and your computer.
tribler, challenge me. i will stand in a lecture theatre with 50 of your best men and demonstrate how tribler is BULLSHIT in caps. we will discuss information economics and real time systems network behaviour. i will produce 5 years of real life stats from the top 30 sites. i will bring me 5 admins from the worlds greatest. we will hold a vote and if 50% of the participants do not agree i have a case then i will waive my fee (if i score a 78 then you double the fee and hire my team) …
but that wont happen because nobody wants your sponsors to know how you piss 50 million euros up the wall and they sure as hell dont read little blogs like torrentfreak because they are worth millions ROTFLMFAO at the pig ignorance
millions is the measure of you and your sponsor’s displacement from reality. you wanna know what is going to happen next? even if i told you … you couldnt do it because of your systemic birth
if i was anti-p2p i would set up tribler and suck all the development funds out of the industry. i would pay my rent and feed my kids. then when it was all over i would look for another research funding. where is the value? if you really had something revolutionary then you would not bore us to death with these 3rd grade essays. i say it again: where is the value?
this is pitiful, pitiful, igonorance is pitiful: “it rewards users who are good sharers while punishing those who leech” give to get! omg tribler is 5 years behind. in the world of bandwidth not everyone is created equal. Bram’s tit4tat model capable of local manipulation is unassailable. look at the stats for the h33t tracker on http://www.h33t.com:3310/stats 300% more seeds than peers WITHOUT ratio. and you want to punish all the little peers who held out to seed because they believed it was right
you dont lose anything from a hit and run leecher. when he is on your network you gain from his sharing. when he is gone, nothing. you dont have any statisticians on your team? *blub*
for free: the blood-thirsty vampire of bittorrent is the Ratio Nazi and dht is evil. proven weaknesses
tribler is academic in the worse sense. a university innovations enterprise pumping cash into vaporware. sorry you missed the point. why dont you address the point? you dont know the point …
what happened to your basic education? you dont care for the fanatics and you ignore the terrorists. forget Milton Friedman, you are not even Keynes. you are fools dancing for the Lord
Ernesto, it wasnt you dude, keep up the good work
http://www.h33t.com where filesharing grew up
Wow, I dont know about that. Bit Torrent is da bomb dude.
Jiff
http://www.anonymity.cz.tc
Tribler 4.5 is out today, woo hoo@!
Obsolete? my f**king ass! way to use an emotive and incorrect title.
All the newb retards that use crappy public trackers like TPB and mininova: did you know that there are NO fake files whatsoever at public trackers?
Amd that you will download as fast as your internet can download at many private trackers – because people use seedbox’s (remote servers) and also upload as much as they download or more?
Public trackers off such a pitiful BT experience and yet we still get useless, clueless comments such as : “TPB for the win” and “TPB is the best site ever” and “TPB +Utorrent is the bestest conbo evar!.
I hate it when morons yell crap and think theyre so excellent.
Actually this is nothing like an ED2K client: it’s not slow and it doesn’t have queues of 4000 people to get through.
Still a bad idea though.
morons are trying to kill the internet. if the political methods don’t work, the only way is to play our ace in the hole and grandstand the ignorant masses
I’ve never used BitTorrent, I came here via Digg because I had the same question has this guy:
“so you find torrent files through peers, how do you find the peers in the first place?”
There’s a PDF document that describes the client here:
http://www.cs.unibo.it/~babaoglu/courses/cas/papers/pdf/tribler.pdf
The relevant part is:
“First, a TRIBLER peer automatically
uses a set of preknown
superpeers to bootstrap into the
network, immediately after installation. The peer contacts
one of the superpeers only once, upon entering the network,
in order to obtain an initial list of neighbors. Second, we define
a special overlay swarm. The overlay swarm is a swarm
with no tracker, and can be used for initial bootstrapping,
content discovery, and other information exchange”
…uh, so it still relies on connecting to known resources (I suppose some of these could be moving targets as long as at least one was still alive when you connected). I was worried they might be trying something ridiculous like scatter-gunning IP address ranges in the hope of finding listening peers.
Might I add that any torrent from TPB is not working in a special super huge country that has it´s own special (hot) walls.
That made me skip all torrents when that block came on. So in one way, that was the most efficient way to stop p2p I have ever seen, and it had a negative effect on millions of users.
This solutino could solve that problem.
What I dont get…
The files are shared from my computer to other people? – what assumes that list is up to date – and other search in my computer file list, like DC? isn’t that insecure…?
This has eXeem written all over it :-(
I doubt this is the way to go. How do you get quality control over this?
I like bittorrent just like it functions today.
Downloading from VIP accounts from piratebay suits me well.
My my, what a lot of whiners. On the one side, the “I haven’t tried it but I know it’s shit” brigade, and on the other side the “If it’s not private it’s not l337 enough” squad, both utterly missing the point.
And that point is, BitTorrent if FU*KED as a system if it even requires the existence of members-only private trackers to operate successfully. You’re therefore advocating a broken system, not realizing that its very ‘underground’ nature is an admission of its utter failure as a valid means of distributing data.
Fu*k you and your private trackers. Real men use Usenet – Quality controlled, orders of magnitude faster, and a hell of a lot safer.
Flame away.
@ 59
TPB ftw!
ahaha ur such a noob stfu nobody cares.
People say it because they do rock.. whine all you want bitch there changin the world, your just sittin on your ass whining like a little bitch..
TPB is so awesome and im so excellent.
If you want to be social, piss of to Facebook or some other networking site. There’s no provision for blocklists or peer banning and you only get access to files the longer you leave your client running. The clients settings are also very basic. Its a pretty crap client in all reality.
@OP: “it’s” = “it is”.
problem with it is, no user comments to give infomation about the torrent itself… so u know if its worth the DL or not.
A few years ago, when I was happily sharing data with other people via DC++, there was a rumor going around about a new p2p protocol.
Some described it like it was the second coming, others hated it with a passion, as though it was a plague that would soon afflict the whole DC++ network and lay waste to all that was good and holy.
Since I have allways been a curious fellow, I gave that new thingy, called bittorrent, a shot, and found it quite odd indeed.
So here I am now, about 6 years later and guess what, that ´plague` has befallen me too, and I like it that way!
Tribler clearly seems to me like regression. I need to have a shared folder again? Oh come on! I will share what I want, when I want, to the the world. What´s the point of “sharing” 50 GB of data and have a few dozen ppl leech away at 2 kb/s each? Besides, I don´t want to hear the judge say to me: “Boy, you had 50 GBs worth of music, games and movies in your shared folder!”.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Why hijacking the bt protocol to build something like Troubler? What´s the point? Boost the speed of “friends”? Pfft. If you cap your upload too much, your download will suck ass, that´s the beauty about bt. And people who DO care about ratio will share their part, period.
And if I really really wanted to share with “friends”, well, there´s always dozens upon dozens of private sites.
So as long as there are moderated torrent sites (and I guess they will NOT vanish any time soon): What do we need Tribler for again?
I have a really bad feeling about this, it’s going to make torrents even more available to the mainstream people who have a problem with understanding it as it is now… Making it into a Napster/Kazaa clone is going to bring it more and more popularity, which will in turn bring it more publicity… Which will, in turn, bring it closer and closer to more stringent laws and regulations, which will further advance the ways that people go about P2P… It’s a damn vicious cycle, isn’t it? I remember when DC++ was the big thing.
’scuse me but in which alternate universe was DC++ ever “the big thing”? Maybe it was popular at your dorm or whatever. Oh well…
What’s wrong with popularity? I found out about bittorrent from my gf at the time who in turn heard about it on the news.
Current prosperity of bittorrent is relying on big defiant balls of TPB and similar sites. What’s the point of fixing something that isn’t broken? What we need is more trackers with big balls.
i think the tribler site crashed…i was on it a hour ago but its not letting me in now…
as soon as i say it, i can get on…wow sorry
“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.”
Yeah, i’d like to see how they propose to do that. This is a terrible idea. I thought people that attend Harvard are smarter than that… hell, a bunch of internet junkies posting on a Torrent blog are smarter than that.
Socializing through P2P? Arou guys gay or what? Next thing I know, we’ll be socializing through the control panel or BIOS.
This thing is clearly bound to fail if it’s based on throttling up your friends. In other words, if you want good speed you should start flattering the guy you’re downloading from, and maybe he’ll give you some extra kb/s
Saounds like a bad idea.
“http://www.h33t.com where filesharing grew up…”
Pity the moron from there who posts here has yet to.
Real men use usenet. Yep, bring that up on your nest date (if you get any) – I’m sure she’ll love you for it.
All the noobs idiots will use this, the halfwits will still use TPB, Mininova and h33t and everyone else can use their favourite private trackers with a few less idiots to boot.
:D… Tribler FTW!!
Try tribler try!
Not far is the day
When you shall go high
Try tribler try!
What facebook, which google?
How long shall they continue their farce?
Fret not, they’d soon be on their knees
And kiss your shiny red arse!
Millions of users you shall rule over
And you will serve them, over and over
With movies galore, and music great
And when no one’s watching,
A ‘wholesome’ sizzling p*@# plate ;-)
Key word searching and voting
Moderations and NAT traversing
Cool friends, hippin’ n’ hoppin’
Feasting on real time streamin’
With all these shall you provide
People (who) would go crazy in delight
You would be the apple of everyone’s eye
Your star would fly ever so high
Far above all the seven skies
Try tribler try!
Not far is the day
When you shall go high
Try tribler try!
So what’s actually NEW about this?
well there logo looks like a pair of balls and and a pair of penises.
Think I’ll stick to the web 1.0 search engines technique.
would be nice if it had protection from throttling…
There’s a reason Mininova is the top torrent site: design. Every day it lists all the new torrents that it gets on a single page. No need to search unless you’re after something older. It’s easy to find new material and one can find stuff they might not even know about. Tribler may offer torrent support, but it’s just like iTunes and it likely to get packed with the same stuff.
Balls! Look, the first tech to get there, wins the race. VHS, crap but got there first, so it stuck until DVD. Blu-Ray/HD? DVD still flogging $2 movie for a friday, pizza’n'beer-with-the-lads night? Until BR starts selling at $2 a pop and players at $30, it Joe SicPack ain’t buying!
Sorry, but once something takes off and everyone gets used to it, people are creatures of habit, we don’t like to change too much, once we’re stuck in our ways.
Although I don’t like BitComet, it can already do this since long ago…
tried the TriblerStreaming bt deal.
it did not work.
this don’t sound good to me.
I like to find only torrents from folks I have gotten good results from. not just from anywhere.
glad to see Harvard get involed. where is their bt site? they must have one
Wasn’t emule doing it already?
Sound a lot like what WinMx was doing for a while now. Although I’m no expert.
18 references to this post
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.