Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down \t \t \t \t \tWhile the file-sharing ecosystem is currently filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology continue to work on their decentralized BitTorrent network. Their Tribler client doesn’t require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication. “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” the lead researcher says. \t The Tribler BitTorrent client is no newcomer to the BitTorrent scene. It has been in development for more than 5 years and has delivered many innovative features, which have mostly been ignored by the masses. 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. Tribler’s decentralized search results 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. open2Edit 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.
I like it! Still not 100% though: "The Tribler team is still looking for people want to act as [centralized servers]" They can call it whatever they want, Bootstrap Bill and the Gang of Peers. But the bottom line is they haven't found a way to avoid a centrally-hosted list of peers (not that I can think of one).
Yea I agree I dont know how they are going to work their way around that. I found this today about Pirate Bay, It sounds like they are attempting something kind of like this tribler. "Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It's Only 90 MB Soon The Pirate Bay will stop linking to .torrent files. Instead, the world's largest BitTorrent site will only list so-called magnet links. One of the advantages of the switch is that The Pirate Bay will be much more portable, and easier to copy. A new torrent listing all titles and magnet links on The Pirate Bay proves this point, as the public can download a copy that fits easily on a small USB stick – or even a few dozen floppies. Last month The Pirate Bay announced that it will stop hosting torrents in the very near future. This change is expected to go into effect before the end of the month. From then on, Pirate Bay users can only download files through magnet links. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site†is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy site. This is needed, because The Pirate Bay is currently blocked in several countries, and more are bound to follow in the months to come. Without torrents, the Pirate Bay also becomes extremely portable which makes it possible for people to download a personal backup. As we said before, such a copy would easily fit on a thumb drive. Pirate Bay user “allisfine†was intrigued by this idea and decided to find out how small a copy of the torrents site would be. “I did a complete snapshot of ALL the Pirate Bay torrents, in case somebody wants to close it or something similarly crazy,†he told TorrentFreak. Using this script, “allisfine†managed to copy the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. Comments were not copied to keep the files as small as possible, and the end result is a full copy of all magnet links on The Pirate Bay in a 90 megabytes file, 164 megabytes unzipped. A copy of The Pirate Bay There is some confusion as to whether the 1,643,194 torrents are indeed a full copy of the site, as The Pirate Bay itself lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer link on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those. With the release of the copy everyone can now download a personal backup of The Pirate Bay in a few minutes. Although searching the copy isn't as convenient as using The Pirate Bay itself, there is little doubt that someone else will soon come up with another script that solves this problem. Recent history has shown that when a site is threatened with shutdown, or censored, the Internet is very quick to come up with a workaround. And with thousands of backups of The Pirate Bay floating around, it will be very hard at this point to get rid of the famous torrent site. What's perhaps even more striking is that the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text. Something to think about."