P2P Blog

Tribler releases new version with distributed channel subscriptions

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 11:23:15 -0800

Tribler just released a new beta of its Bittorrent client with a new feature that the researchers behind the project have dubbed P2P moderation. The idea in a nutshell is that users can aggregate channels and content and distribute them through DHT. From the official announcement:

"In Tribler V5.2 every user can start their own "Channel" to publish torrents. When people like your torrents you become popular and essentially become the owner of an Internet TV channel. You can moderate this RSS-like stream of torrents. This feature is designed to stop the flow of spam in P2P bittorrent, without the requirement of any server."

Channels can be pre-populated with an existing RSS feed, or personally aggregated by manually adding torrent files. The client lists a number of popular channels and also offers the option to search for channels.

However, the search seems to be restricted to the actual channel name, which makes it impossible to find a channel by searching for the content you're looking for. Users also can't add any description, tags or artwork to their channels. Add to this the fact that I didn't even find an easy way to rename your channel, and you'll see why this is still a pretty experimental feature.

The idea itself of course isn't really new: The original eDonkey client already included the ability to publish collections of files, and Vuze users have been able to publish distributed feeds through the Distributed Database Trusted Feed plug-in and the RSS Feed Generator plug-in since 2008.

Tags: tribler, tribler.org, subscriptions, rss

Leechpack: Cloud downloading for Rapidshare, Megaupload and torrents

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:29:48 -0800

Leechpack is soft-launching a new service to remotely download files from one-click hosters and torrents sites this week. The site offers similar services as Furk.net or BTaccel.com, but adds sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload to the mix, making it possible to download files from these services without jumping through unnecessary hoops.

leechpack

Registered users of the service can simply add links to torrents or files hosted on one-click hosters, and Leechpack will automatically start to download the content to its own servers. I tested Leechpack with a number of files from different sources in recent weeks, and sometimes it takes little while until a transfer starts, but transfer speeds generally seemed to be very fast. The same goes for the actual download speeds once you transfer a file to your local hard drive, which would regularly max out my (admittedly not super-fast) DSL connection.

leechpack

One interesting feature that sets Leechpack apart from its competition is that it automatically tries to find local matches for your content. Just enter the link to a torrent or file, and Leechpack will automatically suggest files that other users of the service have downloaded before, which are immediately added to your library if you're finding what you were looking for. However, that's a big if: Leechpack currently seems to suggest a lot of files that don't really have anything in common with the file you're trying to download.

Leechpack also uses its index of locally stored content to generate lists of recently downloaded files as well as most popular downloads, and it offers its users the option to directly search this index for keywords - a function that will likely improve as more people sign on, but that could also open the service up to huge liabilities. Then again, Furk.net has offered a similar feature for quite a while now, and it's still in business.

Speaking of business: Leechpack does offer a trial membership, but the service isn't free for regular users: Users have to pay 9.99 � (about $13.50) per month, which gets them 30 GB of traffic for downloads to their own machine as well as 30 GB space on Leechpack's servers.

Tags: leechpack, remotedownloading, clouddownloading, furk.net, btaccel.com, leechpack.com

Pirating the 2010 Winter Olympics

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:08:23 -0800

NBC�s decision to restrict live streaming of the Vancouver Winter Olympics to subscribers of cable, satellite or IPTV services is making many cord cutters scramble. We�ve heard anecdotes from former cable customers flocking to gyms or stop by friends for surprise visits while figure skating and hockey games are on TV. Even current cable customers able to jump through the authentication hoops of NBC�s Olympics may be looking for alternatives. After all, NBC is only streaming some 400 hours of the games in real time and once again reserving key competitions for broadcast TV, with some of them airing while many of us are stuck at work.

Of course, there are also other, slightly less legitimate ways to watch the games online. A number of web sites have been touting for weeks that they�ll carry live streams of the Olympics, and sports fans have been looking to P2P video clients for years to bypass TV pay walls. How easy to use are these services, and how good is the video quality? I decided to find out and give different ways of pirating the Olympics a try. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: olympics, 2010winterolympics, vancouver, newteevee

Limewire finally cashes in on browser toolbars

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:02:41 -0800

Limewire announced today that it is now distributing a browser toolbar with its client. Limewire is in good company with this: Pretty much all major P2P clients and most torrent sites offer browser toolbars. However, most users aren't really too thrilled about these add-ons, and Limewire's VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz went into great lengths today on the company's blog to defend the move:

"(A)t LimeWire we have turned away countless companies that have wanted us to bundle software - that while it would have generated revenue for us, provided limited value to you. (...) We believe that we have created a new toolbar that does specifically that� it provides core value to your file-sharing/searching/downloading experience."

So what's the unique value proposition of the Limewire toolbar? Apart from being able to search the web (big deal), it also allows to pass search terms as well as media links to the Limewire client. Say you're visiting a torrent site. Limewire's toolbar will automatically recognize any torrent links on the current page and offer the option to download any of them with Limewire's client.

I'm honestly not quite sure if that's enough to get many people to use the software, but then again, I'm not the target audience. Limewire's toolbar is Windows only. Herskowitz did announce that the company will add some more features in the future without going into specifics, but he hinted that one of the features could be an audio player for media files embedded in the current page.

Useful or not, Limewire is likely to generate some nice extra revenue with the toolbar, which it realized in coperation with IAC's Ask.com. Search engines like Ask tend to pay as much as a dollar per installed toolbar, and the conversion rates are quite high - especially if you make the bundled software opt-out, meaning that users who tend to just click continue without reading anything during the installation will automatically end up with a little less real estate in their browser. And it looks like that's exactly what Limewire did:

"If you don�t want the toolbar, just deselect the checkbox and we won�t install or change any of your default browser settings."

Tags: limewire, browser, toolbar, ask.com

Court: Norwegian ISP Won�t Have To Block The Pirate Bay

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:03:55 -0800

Norway�s largest ISP prevailed in court once again this week, with the country�s High Court court ruling that Telenor won�t have to block access to The Pirate Bay�s website, according to a report from Norway�s Computerworld.

The decision comes after record labels and other rights holders had threatened Telenor with a lawsuit last spring if the ISP wouldn�t block the Bay�s site. Telenor refused, and the music rights association TONO sued, only to lose in court in November, and eventually file an appeal in December. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: norway, thepiratebay, tpb, newteevee

P2P responsible for 19 percent of global mobile data traffic

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 14:46:38 -0800

P2P is responsible for 19 percent of the traffic on global mobile data networks, according to a new report from network management vendor Allot Communications that my colleague Stacey Higginbotham is covering in depth over at Gigaom.com. Just for comparison's sake: YouTube is causing 10 percent of the traffic on those networks, and actually 32 percent of all HTTP-based streaming traffic.

Does that mean that the blame game for congested 3G networks will finally shift from P2P to, well, everyone else? Not quite. From the company's press release:

"P2P is the single largest factor leading to cell congestion which accounts for 34% of bandwidth utilization in the top 5% of cells."

In other words: Areas that see a lot of mobile data traffic also see much more mobile P2P than the rest of the world.

mobile p2p around the world

The report itself also looks at how P2P and other forms of traffic are developing all around the world, and there's one interesting tidbit in this comparison: Turns out that mobile P2P is not just the strongest in Asia (23 percent vs. 18 percent in the Americas), but that Asia is actually the only region where mobile P2P is growing, and doing so at the same pace as http streaming.

We've seen time and again that file sharing and P2P streaming are hugely popular in countries like China. It looks like that trend is increasingly migrating to mobile networks as well.

Tags: allot,, mobile, data, usage,, trends,, stats

U.K. Consumer group: For than 150 wrongfully accused of file sharing

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:03:06 -0800

The U.K.'s consumer rights group Which? (sort of like Consumer Reports in the U.S.) came out with a press release this week that puts some serious doubts on proposed plans to fight P2P piracy with Three Strikes. More than 150 consumers contacted the group in recent months because they have been wrongfully accused of P2P piracy by London-based law firm ACS Law. From the press release:

"One wrote: 'My 78 year old father yesterday received a letter from ACS law demanding �500 for a porn file he is alleged to have downloaded. He doesn�t even know what file sharing or bittorrent is so has certainly not done this himself or given anyone else permission to use his computer to do such a thing.'"

ACS Law is working with companies like Logistep to hunt down alleged file sharers and then send them letters that threaten with a lawsuit unless they pay steep fines. The practice has been frequently criticized. In fact, Torrentfreak just reported that UK Lords just called this type of copyright enforcement a scam and legal blackmail.

However, Which's findings have implications beyond the questionable tactics used by companies like ACS Law. U.K. politicians are currently debating a law that would force ISPs to disconnect alleged file sharers after a series of warnings - something that's also commonly known as Three Strikes.

However, if a single law firm representing just a small number of clients gets it wrong in so many cases - how many false positives would a concerted enforcement effort initiated by Three Strikes generate. How many people would get booted off the Internet even though they have never downloaded a single file?

(via PC Pro)

Tags: acslaw, which, uk, threestrikes

uTorrent helps Google to analyze ISP connection speeds, router set-ups

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:35:35 -0800

Bittorrent Inc. announced today that it has begin to collaborate with the Google-funded Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to test ISP connections and home networking related issues that could impact a user's connection speed. From Bittorrent's blog:

"M-Lab is supporting important research into how our Internet is actually performing and informing the debate on how this shared resource should be managed."

utorrent mountain view

At the core of this collaboration is a tool that was integrated into uTorrent ever since its 2.0 beta launch last summer: uTorrent users are now given the option to test their connection speed upon starting the application for the first time. The client then tests a user's connection and suggests various connection settings based on this test.

However, BitTorrent isn't relying on it's own server for these speed test. Instead, it is using a service supplied by M-Lab that is also aggregating the anonymized test results to get a better sense of how fast the average DSL or cable connection is, what kind of problems users are facing as part of their home set-up and related issues. All of this data is available under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means it's essentially part of the public domain, free to use by anyone for any purpose. Bittorrent's blog post elaborates:

"Given �Torrent�s substantial user-base, we are hopeful that this data will stimulate new research into the state of the Internet and support the public debate with unbiased measurement data."

Bittorrent plans to include related M-Lab tools in the future. One that could be particularly interesting is Glasnost - a tool developed to detect ISP interference with P2P file transfers.

Tags: google, m-lab, measurementlab, bittorrentinc, utorrent, isps

Transmission Bitorrent client now supports magnet links

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:15:50 -0800

The folks behind the cross-platform, open source Bittorrent client Transmission have just released version 1.80 of their application. The release features a few dozen bug fixes as well as 44 enhancements based on user requests, and one of the most notable new features is that Transmission now supports magnet links.

Magnet links are basically URLs for files that are distributed via P2P. Programs like Edonkey2000 used to have their own, proprietary linking scheme, and magnet links were meant to provide a more standardized scheme for linking to P2P resources. Some of the first programs to support magnet links were Gnutella clients like Limewire and Shareaza, but the idea of these types of links has become more popular with Bittorrent developers as well in recent months.

Magnet links got a big push when The Pirate Bay started to support them last November. The folks from TPB declared in a blog post that magnet links were a step towards a more decentralized Bittorrent environment that doesn't need any torrent files or trackers anymore.

Technically, that's true - a Bittorrent client can just use magnet links to get content from a DHT network without first querying a tracker, and one of the other features added to Transmission 1.80 is the support for such trackerless torrents. However, most magnet links featured on The Pirate Bay still list a Bittorrent tracker.

Still the feature will help to make using Bittorrent an even more seamless experience. Transmission users can now simply click on a magnet link instead of downloading a torrent file first to start a download.

Tags: transmission, transmissionbt, magnetlinks, magneturi

Does Verizon terminate accounts for using P2P? Not so fast.

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:06:36 -0800

Cnet claimed yesterday that Verizon has started to boot alleged P2P infringers off its network, three strikes-style. From the article:

"Months after Verizon Communications began issuing warnings to accused file sharers, the company has acknowledged that multiple offenses could result in a service interruption. 'We've cut some people off,' Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson told CNET."

However, the company is backtracking today, and Henson is claiming that Cnet misquoted her, according to Broadband Reports:

"'That part of the CNET story is wrong,' she says. 'I did not say 'we've cut people off'; I said we reserve the right to do so.'"

So what is it? Hard to say, even though I'd think the quick retraction proves that Verizon is scared of even the idea of being perceived as a bully ISP that throttles folks or cuts them off. The company also has a history of standing up for its customers' right to a due process, going as far as fighting the RIAA in court to keep a subscriber's information confidential.

That doesn't mean that Verizon just ignores warning letters from rights holders. The company has acknowledged to send notices to customers that are alleged of trading files. These warning letters include a passage about the possibility of terminating an account in case of repeat infringement, but Henson insisted that these notices haven't led to any account terminations.

Tags: verizon, isps, threestrikes, cnet, broadbandreports, dslreports