BitTorrent Client Offers P2P Without Central Tracking

Shiwei writes "While BitTorrent is the most popular P2P protocol, it still relies on several centralized points for users to find the files they are looking. There have been several attempts at making BitTorrent more decentralized, and the latest Tribler 5.3 client is the first to offer the BitTorrent experience without requiring central trackers or search engines. Tribler offers some very interesting technologies; the latest version enables users to search and download files from inside the client. Plenty of other clients offer search features, including the ever-popular Torrent, but Tribler's results come from other peers rather than from a dedicated search engine. Users can search and download content without a server ever getting involved; everything is done among peers, without the need of a BitTorrent tracker or search indexer."

What

[AnonGCB]

Slashdot UTF fail. muTorrent, or utorrent, not Torrent.

Re:What

[asvravi]

He is talking about a million uTorrent.

Bittorent Without tracker...

[mrops]

...welcome back to 2005 and enjoy Gnutella

Re:What

[Anachragnome]

"A hug."

Hilarious, heart-warming and creepy, all-in-one.

Re:

[srussia]

"A hug."

Hilarious, heart-warming and creepy, all-in-one.

FWIW, the text is quite obviously a machine translation from Spanish.

Re:

[ArsenneLupin]

Is this a genuine spam, or just somebody's twisted sense of humor?

Re:

[dogmatixpsych]

That's when you know they have won - we can't tell the difference between a spammer and a /. commentator. This is the beginning of the end.

Don't ask me who "they" are.

P.S. Of course it was spam.

To clarify

[PhrostyMcByte]

The summary (and TFA) is misleading. This client isn't the first to support trackerless downloading. Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.

What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago), but it does appear they put some thought into making their feature set more user-friendly, with categorization ("Channels") and such.

Re:To clarify

[DamienRBlack]

Wouldn't this experience be a lot like the old eDonkey 2000 experience. The problem with no centralized servers is that no one pays attention to ratio and the like. In fact I don't think most eDonkey users ever thought in terms of ratios. Also, there is no place to go to request stuff and ask for new seeds. The reason I switched to torrents, (and it took me a long time), is because of the centralized tracking. Sure, the popular stuff is usually available, but try to get something obscure that you can only find online and you are probably screwed. At least that is how eDonkey always was. Now eDonkey had some servers, but my point is that I feel like the experience would be the same as sharing on the eD2k network. No comments, no tracking, no ratio enforcement, no one pulling fakes and spam. eD2k was a hazardous wasteland but of mines. How would any of this be addressed with peer-to-peer torrents?

Re:

[Dunbal]

While the ratio concept is a good one, it's totally borked by ISPs providing things like 3Mbps down and 64kbps up. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get a good ratio.

Re:

[6350']

This is blazingly untrue. Most users don't have a synchronous line, yet with only moderate effort ("stay connected after you're done" and "actually pay attention to how much you have downloaded and take it easy") these millions have no reall issue maintaining a ratio. You're Doing It Wrong.

Re:

[Chuck Chunder]

"stay connected after you're done" and "actually pay attention to how much you have downloaded and take it easy"

I think the other factor is likely to be "get onto the torrent early". If you are limited to a tiny up speed like that I don't expect many clients are going to bother you much if there are plenty of other available peers that'll serve faster.

If you are there near the start when the seed may be bottle necked your 64k will be valuable and will remain so until there's more seeds than demand.

Re:

[cyclomedia]

This

I've tried leaving certain torrents sitting there seeding and get zero leechers ever, presumably because I have bugger all bandwidth.

Re:

[Hatta]

It's probably more a lack of leechers than anything else. Private trackers reward people for seeding, so most of the stuff is overseeded. Most of them have occasional free leech periods or other programs to stimulate the credit economy, look into them. Generally it's only in the beginning that you have ratio troubles on a private tracker.

Re:

[Nikker]

You could create a shared directory on each client just like eDonkey did and hash them ... just like eDonkey did ;) Since the requests are going to your machine you could really return any results you wanted as long as it has the corresponding hash map it can send and receive.

Re:

[SilentChasm]

I would say the advantage of eDonkey2000 (or eMule now) is the lack of ratios per file. You share large numbers of files and download large numbers. What gets uploaded is what's needed and requested by others, not necessarily a specific torrent you want to get a higher ratio on.

The no comments/fake filtering/requests/reseeds can be mostly solved the same way as Bittorrent has solved it, with a link site/forum community.

The other major advantage of ed2k is that there won't be two separate swarms for the same

Re:

[kvezach]

There have been proposals [bittorrent.org] to make use of partial matches (and papers [irconan.co.uk] about how to do so effectively), but to my knowledge, nothing has come of them.

Re:

[Crayon Kid]

The problem with no centralized servers is that no one pays attention to ratio and the like.

Then they should implement the concept of "authoritative peers". Peers that have a secret key that gives them special powers over the swarm, such as kicking them out or regulating their participation.

It would also solve another problem with torrents: incremental updates. Today, if you want to do a minor alteration to one file out of 100 in a torrent, you have to publish a different torrent, tell all the peers to swit

Re:

[icebraining]

Have you tried changing the ports and forcing encryption [torrentfreak.com] (disabling legacy connections)?

Re:

[Shikaku]

I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXeem [wikipedia.org]

It failed however, due to the initial version having spyware and subsequent loss of users.

Re:

[the_other_chewey]

What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago)

Yup, the eMule/aMule network has had serverless search via the Kad Network [wikipedia.org] for years. Works pretty well.

Re:To clarify

[Nursie]

Bootstrap is the interesting issue.

You can't have a situation with no server involved, ever, unless you're distributing the software on a friend-to-friend basis. There *has* to be a root node or selection of root nodes that the software knows about when it's installed, unless they have sufficiently advanced technology that it's indistinguishable from magic. Or they use some sort of brute force search....

Sure, once a node is online and given enough other nodes stay online enough of the time, it would be possible to have a persistent network.

I suppose you could do something like search google for random torrents, join in, test the folks you connect to for being part of the decentralised network, grab network info from there etc. It still uses google as a central reference point but it would be more robust than having some sort of hard-coded 'peer tracker' server, or using any sort of brute-force port scan of the internet.

Re:

[discord5]

Bootstrap is the interesting issue.

It is indeed. The bittorrent DHT solution is based on Kademlia [sourceforge.net] (or the BEP for Bittorrent specifically [bittorrent.org]). If you google a bit you'll find a few papers and some interesting things, including attack vectors. I'm implementing a version of Kademlia at the moment to have nodes in a network find other nodes for accepting work in a distributed environment, and bootstrapping the thing is "the weakest link". You could set up multiple bootstrapping nodes, but suppose that a network failure takes out your access to the

Re:

[Nursie]

Well, the TFA says - "Users can search and download content without a server ever getting involved"

And I was trying to figure out how that might work. If it's "no servers after the first time" or "no servers after a tribler peer has been found", that's fine, but you need something that fits the description of a server at some point in that. I was just thinking aloud at methods that might not require any user action and work straight off without requiring a specific Tribler central server.

'cos you can't jus

Re:

[toQDuj]

Cloud is just the latest word for "outsourcing". Although they do not want to call it that, because in many cases, outsourcing simply does not work or is not cheaper.

Re:

[zero0ne]

Don't forget, all the hardcore private torrent sites will ban you if you enable all those extra "features" like DHT and PEX.

Ok, but.

[MrQuacker]

But how does moderation work then?

With a large public tracker like PirateBay there are mods and members who weed out and delete the malware, spam, and bad torrents that are on the tracker. Wouldn't a distributed system like this actually make it easier for "bad" content to get uploaded? Its like Limewire all over again.

The idea here seems to be that "you cant stop the signal". But I am not sure how they get around the fact that you don't have to kill the signal, just garble it.

Re:

[mysidia]

But how does moderation work then?

Throw in web of trust?

Send in $1 to get your 'reviewer' certificate signed by some trusted entity. Sort search results by number of signed positive reviews; and then number of downloads which "reviewer nodes" saw occuring.

Re:

[Dunbal]

So if you want to shut the whole thing down, you go after the "trusted entity". Sort of destroys the point of decentralizing.

Re:Ok, but.

[Chuck Chunder]

You don't need a single "trusted entitity", a web of trust [wikipedia.org] is based on your own prior experience and what others around you will vouch for.

If you have downloaded a torrent signed by someone before and been happy with it your software might be happy downloading more from them without warning. If you haven't seen anything from that person before your software might poll your peers to see if they will vouch for it and ultimately give you a choice one way or another.

Various key servers could be set up to serve trust information but would not present a critical point of failure or (for dodgy torrents) be at much legal risk because they wouldn't be serving anything remotely related to other peoples copyrighted information.

Re:

[Kjella]

Didn't email and pgp prove once and for all that WoT and convenience is pretty much direct opposites? You don't get a straight answer, you get a bunch of complicated information and choices on who to trust. Also, many people need to do it in order for it to function and most people won't so people won't think twice about downloading a torrent with no trust. Those who try will have huge problems with malware makers and MAFIAA goons trying to poison the well. Not only can they create as many fake identities a

Re:

[Dr_Barnowl]

The experience with email and PGP just proves that most people are boneheads. The only places I see PGP (well, GPG) signatures are on software development mailing lists.

"email" is the wrong metaphor. It misleads people into believing their messages are secure, because they are used to their mail being enclosed in an envelope - just like the one that basically every email program with a GUI depicts somewhere. It's more like a postcard. One that gets delivered via a network of disreputable postmen, some in th

Re:

[biryokumaru]

Well, if ten peers show up, maybe it's not so good. If ten thousand show up, maybe it's legit.

Re:

[MrQuacker]

That's a measurement of a torrents health, the seed/leech ratio, not quality. So while the 1000peer file might be done faster than the 10peer file, its a moot point if you're downloading static or malware.

Re:

[biryokumaru]

Except 10,000 people probably won't be retarded enough to just keep around garbage files that didn't work when they downloaded them.

Way to miss the point.

Re:

[Pseudonym Authority]

Except they probably will.


Also, botnets.

Re:

[MrQuacker]

If you ever used one of the free trackers you'd find out that a lot of the fake/spam/malware files posing as movies or tv shows have thousands of fake peers. This is to trick people like you that think there is strength or knowledge in numbers.

So just because a file says it has 17543 peers, it really doesnt.

Re:

[mr100percent]

Too easy to fake. Look at how many limewire spam files are supposedly with 100+ peers

Re:

[Crazy Taco]

So if a botnet gets on with 10,000 users, then everyone on the Internet will believe it's therefore a legitimate file? Or if something new comes out and two people have it, so no one else downloads it, how can it become big enough to appear "legit"? There's no good way to solve these issues, so you are pretty much guaranted that there will be a flood of malware. Not that I care. I hate piracy. But the point stands.

Re:

[moonbender]

If you're at a point where you need a botnet to make a spoofed file look legit, you're doing pretty well. Using a botnet is a lot of effort for fairly little gain. However, AFAIK there are (or were) other ways of faking the number of peers without resorting to "brute force". Still, looking at the number of people associated with a torrent is a moderately good metric of its quality, though it's obviously not the only.

Re:

[kent_eh]

Or if only 10 peers show up, it's obscure and not well seeded due to a lack of popularity...
Like many of the things I look for. (video of Zappa concerts from the '70s, old Canadian kids TV shows, etc)

Re:

[cheekyjohnson]

Common sense and an antivirus software could be used to weed out a majority of the malware. As for the spam and bad torrents, I have no idea.

Re:

[Merls the Sneaky]

Antivirus is useless if the user doesn't even know what a file extension is, let alone a friggen .exe. People will click files labelled pop trash.mp3.exe.

The thing about common sense. Common sense simply isn't that common.

Re:

[Nikker]

You could still rate at the clients machine and propagate the torrent signature to all the other clients there by distributing the ratings in almost real time on already discovered client/hosts. Meta moderations could also be propagated to blacklist. Since this is added to the torrent you can sync hashes to ensure everyone is on the same page. YMMV

Wow. p2p is turning net into a huge cloud

[unity100]

this, dns-p2p, and etc are turning the internet into a truly decentralized, uncontrollable, REAL cloud as it should have been from the start.

i, for one, am not suprised that the ones to save net freedom, are ending up being people who have been accused of piracy. after all, if it is not detrimental to the control of private interests, why villify something in mass media, right ...

Re:

[ScentCone]

people who have been accused of piracy

Not that any of them actually do ever rip off anyone's work or spread it around, of course.

This whole thread is full of comments tap-dancing (badly) around the fact that the real driver here is the ability to avoid getting busted for ripping off copyrighted works. Yes, the technology is compelling (if, as described, a huge magnet for malware and bot-net bullies running the show), and has legitimate uses. But this particular twist on the torrent landscape is driven

Re:

[Nikker]

If we were able to have higher throughput behind the ISP the bit torrent protocol would be much more efficient but that's only because of the low ISP > Client ratio. If there are 1M users on any ISP it would be quicker getting what I'm looking for from one of them rather than the actual source. Which is also why caching on large scale networks are beneficial.

Re:

[icebraining]

Why can't you do it on an application level, based on allocated IP lists? Back when we had a distinction of national and international traffic here in Portugal (international capped to 10GB, national unlimited) somebody made a eMule fork called Blowfish which had an IP based filter, and would let you download only from you isp or nationally.

The same system could be used to give priorities instead of simple blacklisting.

Excellent Work You've Invented Gnutella

[phantomcircuit]

Giant waste of time, bittorrents benefit is from the community bitching about bad torrents, you cant do that without a web of trust or a trusted third party.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So what's missing?

[Chuck Chunder]

I don't think it's a waste of time in the sense that it's a step in a potentially useful direction.

If you want to add trust capabilities to the mix there are non-centralised ways to do it such as allowing digital signatures.

Re:

[QuoteMstr]

Mods *can* be replaced by user ratings and associated karma, I believe.

And how, pray tell, do you differentiate legitimate users from malicious ones? Karma works because a trusted third party maintains it.

Still IP data available

[elashish14]

There's still the fact that IP data is available. Any user on the network will be broadcasting their activities making them vulnerable. Protecting users' anonymity is just as important as decentralizing any part of the network. In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of P2P that needs to be fixed. Not that I have any novel ideas on how that can be done....

Re:

[Asic Eng]

Maybe each client could accept requests to transfer bytes from another client. The requests would have a format like "please get me byte x for torrent y from peer z". When you download a file, then for each byte your client would randomly pick another client to make the request.

This way if you serve a file you'd have no idea who actually downloads it - you'd only get requests from random clients which are not actually downloading the file.

You can further complicate this by not making the request directly

The future.

[onefriedrice]

It's becoming ever so popular to complain about ICANN or otherwise feel that a decentralized internet is the solution to our problems. I'm not a prophet, but even I can see the future on this one. The ones who will benefit the most from a completely decentralized DNS and/or P2P system are the ones who control the biggest botnets within the network. The rest of us will be so inundated with garbage that the internet will essentially become completely useless.

That's not to say that ICANN and especially the RIAA et al. aren't problems, but I don't see this becoming a viable solution. So I'm a skeptic, for now.

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

And you make exactly the same mistake that RIAA and friends make: just because criminals will use it, does not mean that ONLY criminals will use it.

Criminals have always been quick to pounce on new technology. That's no excuse for killing the technology so that nobody else can use it. I doubt very much the picture is as gloomy as you make it out to be. And even if it is: prior restraint is not the answer.

Re:

[Pentium100]

No, centralized control of the internet is a bad thing. Also, why should the US be in control, why not $VeryReligiousMuslimCountry, China or North Korea? I'm sure they would like to shut down some sites too.

And botnets can cause problems in the current situation too. However, I still think that properly implemented decentralized DNS is a good thing. A completely decentralized P2P system that's actively in use will make torrent sites obsolete and make it harder for US companies to take down the files.

We have

Re:

[icebraining]

Criminals can abuse almost any technology, but that does not mean that everybody else should be prevented from using it:
Do you use encryption to do your banking? Do you know that terrorists use encryption too?
How about anonymous networks (tor etc)? Terrorists also use them.
A knife is useful to cut food. It is also easier to kill someone with a knife than just bare hands.
A car is useful for going long distances. It can also be used to deliver illegal drugs or run someone over.

That wasn't parent's argument - it was that it would be impossible to use due to being flooded with crap. And it does happen, just look at eDonkey networks. I stopped using it when 6 in every 10 files were fake.

Re:

[Pentium100]

Interesting, a few months ago when I used eMule to find a certain song, I managed to get the real file on the first try. Actually, other than the download speed, eMule is quite OK, especially for rare files (ones that nobody bothers creating a torrent for).

Re:

[ArsenneLupin]

cryptographic signatures

nice

[VincenzoRomano]

And once you'll get cryptography enforced and a few more TCP/IP tricks I wonder how riaa will stop p2p.

Re:

[Magada]

Outlaw crypto and those TCP/IP tricks. Make possession of software that uses these technologies prima facie evidence of conspiracy.

Re:

[thijsh]

You have been disconnected from the interwebs until further notice for suspected possession of copyright infringement technology.
Infringing technology detected on your PC (by method of our complementary rootkit) includes (but is not limited to):
- FileZilla
- Putty
- TrueCrypt
- PGP
- And last but not least: mTorrent (the evilest)

We hope you enjoy your offline existence banned from the interwebs.
Frankly, we think you got off easy and deserve much worse you terrorist pirate scum.

Regards,
MAFIAA lawyers

Re:

[Magada]

Yup. Something like that. Only it would be local police coming to arrest you and impound your computers, acting on an anonymous tip from concerned citizens in the RIAA.

Not new

[Per Wigren]

From what I can see, it's pretty much OneSwarm [washington.edu], but without the anonymity.

Sounds very remenicant of Kazzaa/limewire

[lastrogue]

Dunbal already mentioned this, but I didn't see anyone commenting on this. Isn't this just LimeWire or Kazzaa in another skin? Seems kinda like a good way to spread crap malware. Is my logic flawed?

Democracy needs P2P

[chipwich]

Thomas Jefferson said, "Information is the currency of democracy". The WikiLeaks drama is showing us how readily our own politicians will abandon core values of democracy in order to avoid embarrassment. It also clearly demonstrates that we live in a world where our personal communications can readily be disrupted at the whim of private corporations under pressure from these same politicians. The entertainment industry has tried to criminalize peer-to-peer technologies for years, but what is happening with WikiLeaks makes it more essential *now*, than ever before, that we adopt open source peer-to-peer technologies on a large scale. Perhaps the most important of these is The tor project [torproject] which permits private and anonymous communications. Democracy cannot exist if people cannot speak freely without fear of reprisal. The more TOR relays that exist around the globe, the more immune we all are to the government/corporate censorship we are witnessing. Do your part in ensuring your digital rights by running a relay and becoming part of the network.

But wasn't this problem solved before?

[Rexdude]

Before torrents, there was Kazaa, Gnutella,Limewire and eDonkey. (They still exist). All of these support searching peers from within the client without any intermediary website. I always wondered that bit torrent seems like a step backward - since it relies on websites and trackers that can be shut down, or seized and have the users traced from the logs.
So why is BT so popular as compared to the earlier services? Is it a more efficient P2P protocol? After all you still require a client to download and you

Re:

[Goaway]

Don't worry, nobody will care this time either.

People keep trying to do this. At first we had P2P clients with integrated searching. None of them ever got all that popular. Then BitTorrent is launched, and it didn't have any searching, and relied on the much more familiar and comfortable web for that. It became a huge hit. What do these people do? They think, "Wow! BitTorrent is pretty great! But wouldn't it be even better if it had search?"

Predictably, though, they fail completely, every time.

Re:Back in Time.

[pavon]

So you are saying that Napster never got very popular?

The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol, and thus worked better for large files like videos and games. It had nothing to do with people being turned off by integrated search.

Re:

[Kjella]

The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol

A lot of that wasn't really the protocol as such, it's that you actually got faster downloads for faster uploads so people turned off all their caps. Napster etc. didn't really reward uploads much, you got the files at pretty much the same speed no matter what. Proper incentives are everything.

Re:

[Raenex]

The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol

No, it became popular because Napster was sued out of existence.

Re:

[Hatta]

I disagree. Having separate trackers with their own community was a big part of BitTorrent's success. It brings people together, they actually talk about what they're sharing, and they can organize to put together big projects that just didn't happen before bittorrent. It's not exactly the lack of integrated search that did it, but the lack of search pushed people to the web which is a much better platform for collaboration and communication. If this client doesn't even let people make and read comments

Re:

[Goaway]

It was the only P2P client at the time. It was also never as popular as BitTorrent.

Re:

[jonwil]

Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down (like they did to other p2p programs in the past that were not open source like kazza)

Re:

[Anachragnome]

"Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down..."

I more concerned about Big Business getting their fingers in the pie.

From Wikipedia:
"After a dozen downloads the Tribler software can roughly estimate the download taste of the user and recommends content.[4] This feature is based on collaborative filtering, also featured on websites such as Last.fm and Amazon.com."

The problem is that collaborative filtering drives everyone in the same general direction--it is essentially distilling down o

Re:

[kainosnous]

You see this as a bad thing, and personally, I agree. However, it's probably time to face reality. In this long September, the internet has taken a new shape: a hive mentality. Gone are the days where we just grab whatever information we come across because it is unique and exciting.

The net has simply become too large for that. These days, people seek features to cut down the signal to noise ratio. This in itself isn't a bad thing, but it's based on taste, and the taste is that of the majority who only care

Re:

[Pentium100]

I think that integrated search is a good idea - now if I want to download something, I have to search on pirate bay, if I don't find it there, I go to isohunt and so on. I'd like the ability to search on all public trackers at once. As a mater of fact I'd also like to be able to search all private trackers (that I am a member of, or optionally can become a member) at once. Centralized search would be bad, but a decentralized search that looks like centralized (you only search in one place) would be great.

An

Re:

[icebraining]

Torrentz is a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of torrent search engines

www.torrentz.com

Re:

[neokushan]

Ironically, the day they invent a Bittorrent client that can suck you off will be the day they kill Bittorrent. At least for porn.

Re:

[AmonTheMetalhead]

I just use google to find where the content is, instead of visiting every torrent site until i find it....

Re:Back in Time.

[hoggoth]

No Bittorrent client will be complete until it has an email client built in. A flight simulator would be nice too.

Re:

[beav007]

What about a text editor? I hear that EMACs has one now...

Re:

[Atzanteol]

Is it 1997?

Re:

[Goaway]

Since you didn't seem to get the point, let me summarize:

Decentralized, search: All P2P clients except BitTorrent. All failed.

Centralized, no search: BitTorrent. Wildly successful.

Re:

[TheSHAD0W]

No, the protocol is splitting, with one fork preferential towards pirates and the other honoring the original aim, the legitimate publisher.

Re:Back in Time.

[Yvan256]

You mean the legitimate publisher who wants to leech my limited monthly cap for their own purposes?

I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.

Re:

[tirefire]

I'm glad Blizzard gives us the option to disable that in their games.

My sarcasm detector is out of batteries. Does WoW really require subscribers to donate their upstream bandwidth for patches? Honest question.

Re:

[Surt]

Yes, they use a torrent based distribution system for their patches. So, yes, while you are gaming, you are typically using some of your upstream bandwidth to help deliver patches to others.

Re:

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

Woah Woah Woah. Yes they offer a torrent based system by default but turning that off is as simple as clicking Options->Uncheck peer2peer downloading.

So it's by no means forced and anyone with a bandwidth cap can easily turn it off.

Re:

[Cowmonaut]

You forget, most users don't change ANY settings. Only the most "hardcore" WoW players would look that up, and out of the millions in its player base only a small percentage are "hardcore" (small enough that Blizzard has changed the game to be playable for 10 man groups instead of 60 man groups).

Re:

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yes.

In fact, some games (Lord of the Rings Online, I'm looking at you) install a content distribution service (Pando) where you basically agree to be part of their content distribution network, all the time, and not just while you are gaming. Unless you switch it off in the service panel, of course.

Re:

[biryokumaru]

You really should get an account... like PizzaAnalogyGuy or something.

Re:Another Victory

[biryokumaru]

Yes, because the only reason anyone would ever create anything is to get a paycheck.

Re:

[icebraining]

It's the end of the world as we know it... and I feel fine!

Re:Another Victory

[mcgrew]

Tell that to Cory Doctorow. [craphound.com] I've slightly edited the quote for brevity, and the emphasis is mine. If you want to read the whole text, it's in the forward to Little Brother. The link is to the entire text of the book.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of

Re:

[Magada]

Because you can't rely on google or the website being there when you need them. The Wikileaks conspiracy is a case in point. Their DNS provider, their money transfer companies and their hosting company tried to make them disappear. So far, Google is working as intended, but for how long? Also, organizations with fewer resources might wither and die under such attacks.

Re:

[mark-t]

If the website with the legitimate torrent doesn't have links to infringing content, what reason would there be for someone to try to make it disappear?

There's plenty of websites that provide non-infringing content via torrents, yet I cannot think of a single one where the necessity of a dedicated torrent search engine would be remotely necessary in order to find it.

Re:

[taucross]

Better yet, couldn't you just include the torrent hash encoded in base64, upload to a free website, let Google cache it and have them act as the indexer? It's not like they can do anything illegal.

Re:

[Per Wigren]

Yes, if you only read the headline. This client also has decentralized search.