
Duality - A Social BitTorrent Client - sukhbir
http://sukhbir.in/duality/
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beaumartinez
Nice idea. I have to say though, that with my _extreme_ browsing laziness,
clicking on those links is an incredible effort―why not make it all one page?

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sukhbir
Hi. I did that so that people could go through the link they wanted, rather
than going through a single long page. I will find a way to fix that.

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p4bl0
Single page with anchor on titles + table of content at the top. As Wikipedia
do for instance :-).

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sukhbir
I have fixed this as requested.

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pixelcort
Some BitTorrent clients can detect each other over a LAN (using
Bonjour/Zeroconf and/or Local Peer Discovery) and prioritize traffic to/from
each other locally. Thus, with a fast enough efficiency becomes less of an
issue, although for large enough files physical media transfer might still be
faster.

Of course, if your peers are on different LANs but in close physical proximity
then physical media becomes much more useful.

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sukhbir
That is correct. But to keep things simple, I didn't go into that. My main
intention was to see whether people actually feel the need for this and how it
would scale.

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joe_the_user
The idea of a "social" bittorrent client is not new in the sense that the
Tribler client defines itself as a "social application" - see:
<http://www.tribler.org/>.

I think tribler defines "social" as those who you have social ties to rather
than those who you are geographically close to. It thus leverages "socialness"
for security rather than speed.

I think the tribbler's definition is correct. In the modern era, we often
don't have social ties to those geographically close to us. Duality should
simply be called a "geo-aware" client - not a bad thing.

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sukhbir
By the word social (and now I think it can mean different things in different
context), I meant that it is based on the concept that there is content which
is common to a given 'social' group -- let's say with your friends who use
Linux, you can use it to download a 10 GB distro. The set of those friends
forms a social group that will participate in downloading the distro. You are
right about the 'geo-aware' part but then there is no geo-awareness; it's all
manual.

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18pfsmt
I'm curious if you looked at Oneswarm[1], as it's built on the azureus
platform (i.e. java) and utilizes PKI for authentication. It's not exactly
lightweight, but I have setup ~30 friends, that I know and trust, on it in one
tightly secure network.

For lightweight, on my router I have a transmission package (.opkg[2]) that
handles files not available on my small network.

[1]<http://oneswarm.org>

[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opkg>

EDIT: Running Openwrt (Backfire, 10.03) on Asus RT-N16

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DTrejo
Sukbir, you should post on forrst.com and/or find a designer buddy to help
out. This would help a lot with popularity / catching on.

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sukhbir
Hi. Given the feedback on the UI, I think my designer skills leave a lot to be
desired! Thanks for the suggestion, I will work on improving this.

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grab
Cool stuff. But, meeting with 10 other peers each time i want something
downloaded is not sexy. Also, since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing,
i might as well let someone download the whole thing and then ask from them to
give it to me.

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sukhbir
Hi. This only works for peers within close geographical proximity and I used
the word social because there are many times when you want to download
something that some of your friends also want. Note that the intention is not
to download small files, but files of very large sizes and common to the peer
group. Also, countries where high speed internet is still a luxury (like
India), this works because lots of peers are downloading the same content and
thus contributing their (limited) bandwidth to the download.

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akkartik
I got more out of this comment than the original website. You should just say
this in the first paragraph even before you refer to 'the paper'.

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sukhbir
Right, thanks for the feedback. I have updated it to better reflect the idea.

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akkartik
Yeah, that works great.

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sebkomianos
So this only helps with things that me and my friends want, it doesn't change
anything for things that only me or only one of my friends want.

Unless by friends you mean the extended circle of people that live nearby..?

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sukhbir
Yes that is correct. Geographical proximity can mean anyone who wants the same
data you want and you are in a position to exchange it physically. So it can a
friend you meet in college everyday or your neighbor even.

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sebkomianos
Even if we have never met before? A social network for torrents?

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sukhbir
If you have never met before but can exchange data physically -- why not! The
requirements of this (summarized) are: 1. Common content, 2. Ability to
exchange data physically. And if you are in a LAN, not even that.

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harryjerry
Looks cool. Let me try it out!

