
Tribler – Search and stream torrents - subbz
http://www.tribler.org/
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synctext
The key new feature of this release is Tor-like anonymous Bittorrent
downloading.

This is not using 'the' Tor network.

This software has build-in support for a fork of the Tor protocol. That
network is tuned for Bittorrent. It uses UDP with integrated UDP puncturing.
Full technical specification:

[https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-
Downloadin...](https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-Downloading-
and-Streaming-specifications)

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denzil_correa
It's interesting to read their Wiki page. They have a timeline for Tribler [0]

2012: Tribler Mobile live streaming from a phone camera to potentially
thousands

2011: Libswift accepted as an upcoming IETF Internet Standard

2010: Wikipedia.org uses our technology for live trial

2009: Large HD streaming trial with BBC

2008: Social network without servers and "easy" invites

2007: Our reputation system launched in the wild

2006: Tribler 1st released

2005: First Tribler code = social Bittorrent

2004: Slashdot for first time with largest Bittorrent study

They also have a 1h+ talk at the Stanford University [1] on 4th generation P2P
technology.

[0]
[https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki](https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQiLaKdzD0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQiLaKdzD0E)

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mathieuh
I thought it was frowned upon to use Tor for BitTorrent due to the increased
load reducing performance for other users.

~~~
javto
It's not using the Tor network, it is using a Tor-like protocol. And this one
is fully decentralized unlike Tor :).

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zackmorris
Netflix and other high bandwidth content delivery services should have used
Bittorrent from the very beginning, and now are hitting a lot of resistance
from ISPs because of their stubbornness to use CDNs instead.

I predict that companies will not be quick to embrace technologies like these,
because they are stuck with the legacy of the DMCA (and region coding) so the
loss of net neutrality is inevitable.

I’m hopeful though that the tech community will anticipate this and come up
with a metric for broadband that only measures p2p traffic. That way when
Comcast and others claim to provide a certain connection speed, it can be
trivially verified and consumers can steer clear of false advertising.

Also the public needs to be made aware that the primary cost of internet
traffic is still long distance, basically anything that has to travel out over
the backbone. The connection from your home to the ISP is a one-time cost. So
p2p traffic like Bittorrent actually lowers overall costs for everyone by
sending data over the backbone just once and then distributing it from the
local caches on everyone’s hard drive in the same city. Eventually that cost
will be so low as to approach free, which is why I think self-organizing
meshnets and darknets are also inevitable.

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p2pisntlocal
There are no guarantees that p2p traffic will be local. As such it does not
matter if the non-local traffic is originated from a CDN or a p2p peer. It's
still going to cost the ISP same and run into the same interconnection choke
points.

The connection from your home to the ISP is anything but a one-time cost.
Maintaining the outside plant costs money, equipment consume electricity, fees
and taxes, etc.

In fact the last mile to your home is the most expensive part of your Internet
connection. The very last part is only paid by you and the next mile is only
paid for and share by your neighbourhood. The long haul part is paid for and
shared by all the ISP customers and thus cheap, as is the IP transit needed to
connect to other networks.

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zackmorris
I think your post might be propaganda, but I will respond to each point:

 _There are no guarantees that p2p traffic will be local._

A fair point, but trivially discounted because a single download can be
propagated to everyone in a city. So when a new episode of Game of Thrones
comes out, the first person to get it forwards it to everyone else in the
swarm and the download gets exponentially faster with each peer. Bittorrent
could easily (and probably is in some implementations) tuned to favor low
latency, which would start with the nearest peers. Sure a CDN accomplishes the
same thing, but it’s a larger sunk cost than using a few spare megabytes on
people’s hard drives.

 _The connection from your home to the ISP is anything but a one-time cost._

 _In fact the last mile to your home is the most expensive part of your
Internet connection._

This has been used as an excuse to slow the rollout of broadband for a long
time. I remember when they installed the new orange fiber optic cables along
the freeway where I live back in the 90s. It must have been a monumental task.
And they are a permanent choke point, with the internet growing year after
year, so the fee to use those lines can really only go up until more are laid.
They are the reason that some ISPs limit traffic to 200 GB per month, not the
load on the router for your last mile connection.

And yes, the sunk cost of the last mile connection is also expensive, but it’s
amortized by future subscribers getting connected. But at some point, the rate
of new subscribers will fall to the point where even that is negligible. I
think we passed that point sometime in the late 2000s, about the time that my
mom got broadband in her town of 15,000.

The cost of maintaining a substation and routers for hundreds or thousands of
subscribers against their monthly subscription fees of $50-100 per month
doesn’t pass the sniff test. Most of the costs are going to be in tech support
and installation, and ISPs are notorious for taking too long to make this
stuff plug n play so I don’t have any sympathy for them there.

ISPs are punting now, because it’s cheaper than making the last push to get
everyone connected at the 100 Mb speeds the cable lines are capable of. They
don’t want to lay new backbone, and I can’t blame them there. But the internet
finds a way, and if it weren’t for the legal shenanigans of companies like HBO
shutting off people’s internet, protocols like Bittorrent would have become a
mainstream layer below HTTP years ago. So why would laws like the DMCA exist?
To spawn the CDN industry and pour billions of dollars into building data
centers that are largely unnecessary, by giving companies the legal leverage
they need to pitch it.

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bowlofpetunias
I'm surprised Tribler is still alive. Years ago it kicked up a storm of
publicity when it was published as a research project by the Delft University.

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mu_killnine
Sounds promising on paper (can't view at work) but I can't imagine this would
be very fast method of getting data.

Just my $0.02, but BT is terrific for things too large for conventional
download links. However, my experience with Tor has been that it's only
performance for bite-sized data.

At Tor's current adoption rate, BT and Tor seem somewhat mutually exclusive.

~~~
thefreeman
It is not using the actual Tor network. They developed a Fork of Tor utilizing
UDP and trading speed for some of Tor's anonymity guarantees.

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kaoD
Warning: under settings, "Tribler Profile" has a default nickname setting
matching your hostname. Not great for anonymous streaming.

My networks status is shown as OK but the anonymity test is not downloading
yet.

Getting Kubuntu fron the "Linux ISOs" channel worked, though it's labelled as
not anonymous.

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akavel
From what I see on the download page,

 _" no general anonymous downloads yet, trial-only"_ ?

[http://www.tribler.org/download.html](http://www.tribler.org/download.html)

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u124556
The nicest feature to me is the serverless search. This week several torrent
websites have been DDoSed and people doesn't know where to get their torrents
from.

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unethical_ban
Is this similar to the Anomos program that died 6 years ago?

[https://anomos.info/](https://anomos.info/)

Anomos would have required a tracker, like torrent, but had onion routing for
downloads, I believe.

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hundsim
Does anything similar exists for music?

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frandroid
Geez, VPNs are so expensive.

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probably_wrong
Just to nitpick: a VPN gives you privacy, ie, no one can know what you are
downloading without a search warrant to your VPN provider. TOR gives you
anonymity, ie, no one knows who you are, ever.

Practicality and common sense aside, if you are downloading illegal stuff and
you know it, then TOR is the right tool, not a VPN.

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baumbart
First reaction: Jeez. Not this shit again.

Second reaction: Whatever works. There are too many ideas for one problem to
find and establish "the best". This is definitely not elegant, but let's see
what it gets.

