The Pirate Bay Wants To Ditch BitTorrent
The Pirate Bay (TPB) isn’t happy with the fact that BitTorrent Inc. is no longer making additions to the BitTorrent source code entirely open and so TPB is hard at work on a new file sharing protocol that will address many of the shortcomings of BitTorrent.
The new protocol, which will create files with the extension .p2p, will be backward-compatible with .torrent, and yet, somehow, reportedly will be designed to limit the effectiveness of both spammers and anti-piracy organizations.
So far no real details are available and frankly those goals sound mutually exclusive — how do you simultaneously make something more transparent and harder to track?
Perhaps another reason behind the drive for a new sharing protocol is the increasing number of ISPs (here’s looking at you Comcast) blocking Bittorrent traffic, though without seeing the details behind TPB’s protocol, it’s impossible to say if it will be any harder to block or provide any solution for users who find their torrent downloads throttled.
Still, the tradition in the file sharing world is, when the suits show up, ditch it and move on.
If you’d like more details, there’s a wiki page up with an outline of TPB’s proposal and some user suggestions in the edits. Notable suggestions include:
- Employ Onion Routing (only unless the data being transferred is not recognisable, otherwise use a layer system similar to I2P, plausible deniability only goes so far these days.)
- Don’t use ‘a layer system similar to I2P’, just use I2P itself. It’s perfect for filesharing, it just needs more users.
- Include a “robust mode” which sacrifices performance for stability and guaranteed connectivity, overcoming Sandvine and other forms of intentional connection degradation by ISPs.
The other downside to The Pirate Bay’s protocol is that it seems unlikely to be adopted for legitimate uses. While it’s possible, somehow we don’t see Canonical adopting .p2p as a means of Ubuntu distribution. But then again TPB has never been shy about what it stands for and what its user are primarily interested in, TPB has never tried to hide behind the whole “BitTorrent has legitimate uses” defense. Its name does have “pirate” in it afterall.
[via Torrent Freak]
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