AfterDawn: News

BitTorrent Goes Trackerless

A "trackerless" version of BitTorrent has been included in the latest release of the software. The BitTorrent site says that it is part of their "ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap". Here's some information directly from the BitTorrent website.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your programming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot! However, thanks to BitTorrent the website owner gets almost near-broadcast economics on the web by harnessing the unused upstream bandwidth of his/her users.



In prior versions of BitTorrent, publishing was a 3 step process. You would:

1. Create a ".torrent" file -- a summary of your file which you can put on your blog or website
2. Create a "tracker" for that file on your webserver so that your downloaders can find each other
3. Create a "seed" copy of your download so that your first downloader has a place to download from

Many of you have blogs and websites, but don’t have the resources to set up a tracker. In the new version, we've created an optional 'trackerless' method of publication. Anyone with a website and an Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download!

While it is called trackerless, in practice it makes every client a lightweight tracker. A clever protocol, based on a Kademlia distributed hash table or "DHT", allows clients to efficiently store and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent.

When generating a torrent, you can choose to utilize the trackerless system or a traditional dedicated tracker. A dedicated tracker allows you to collect statistics about downloads and gives you a measure of control over the reliability of downloads. The trackerless system makes no guarantees to reliability but requires no resources of the publisher. The trackerless system is not consulted when downloading a traditionally tracked torrent.

The idea of torrents working without the need for a tracker comes as good news to many P2P users who fear legal attacks on their favourite BitTorrent trackers.

Source:
BitTorrent.com

Thanks to DMW who submitted this story to us originally using our News Submission form.

Written by: James Delahunty @ 19 May 2005 17:30

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• 9 comments

• ceja_11

  WOOT!, yaaaay.

  19.5.2005 18:07 #1

• neewbie

  Yay! w00t!

  19.5.2005 19:29 #2

• Pop_Smith

  From the article:
  While it is called trackerless...A clever protocol, based on a Kademlia distributed hash table allows clients to efficiently store and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent.
  
  This is good news as far as I am concerned.
  From what I can tell this means that it will be like eMule and have Hash links. These (for now, hopefully forever) make it almost impossible to create "fake" torrents that have killed Kazaa.
  
  This in turn will make it so us torrenters will get what we are "asking" for, a file we expect and not a corrupt piece of garbage. :)

  19.5.2005 20:30 #3

• rav0

  Good move, now I don't have to try to find a tracker to run on a remote server under apache and php. Though the bittorrent link idea kills the essence of bittorrent, even the trackerless idea, though good IMO, is pushing it to the edge of turning into a bloated, slow, spam filled piece of sh*t. Let's hope not.

  20.5.2005 04:15 #4

• Mattrage

  Hmm... let's see here. What makes BT any different from any other p2p? Ah, that's right, trackers. So if BT goes trackerless, will it wind up bogged down like ed2k and its companions?
  
  Of course it will.

  23.5.2005 07:38 #5

• suprberri

  Awesome. But now we have to look harder for files. They wont all be in one collective site.

  23.5.2005 08:17 #6

• c4iscool

  that's not true. as long as there are torrents, there will be torrent searches(I hope). I think this is a great thing for bittorrent. Now if they could do something about not listing our ip addresses!

  23.5.2005 14:09 #7

• rav0

  Still can't search BitTorrent, like other P2P. Yes I know torrent search sites exist (very cool), but you can't search the network, because there is none.

  24.5.2005 02:46 #8

• rav0

  Nooooo ... http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67596,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
  

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  26.5.2005 01:25 #9