Looking for news of new bittorrent feature implementations

[jivan28]

Hi all,

Newbie to the forum but kinda oldish to torrenting. Still for a long time haven't read what new features are coming in bittorrent. Does anybody of a good site where one can come to know of new bittorent features .

The last two big features I came to know were DHT and Peer Exchange (PEX) . AFAIK both these features are there in bitcomet and both these features have made things (swarm) better rather than worse especially with the public nature of torrents happening.

The mainline (bittorrent.com) is supposedely a bit fishy as it has some RIAA/MPAA people behind it.

The other interesting part was having decentralized hashed trackers such as :-

http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce

While I do get mails such as of torrentfreak which is more into the social and law side of torrent distribution, dunno of any good technical site which tells of what new features are being thought about to make torrents and in turn the swarms more robust, more sustaining, more speed, more privacy more everything.

Looking forward for info.

[kluelos]

There really isn't one. The bittorrent community is an anarchy, and there's very little agreement on anything. Most of the development happens for individual clients, and the others usually don't agree to implement it, whether for good reasons or bad. Even Bram Cohen found it impossible to introduce meaningful changes into the protocol and gave up.

Bittorrent as a whole hasn't added anything significant or generally accepted since DHT and PEX. There is greater realization that DHT can replace trackers altogether, especially since The Pirate Bay went trackerless a couple of years ago and relies solely on these.

BitComet has added the ability to also obtain a download via the EDonkey network, but no one else has followed suit. utorrent tried to introduce their own proprietary protocol extension, but bungled the process and wasn't able to prove any benefits from it. Years ago BitComet introduced a solution for the file boundary vs. piece boundary problem, but no other clients implemented it, and some people derided it as spam.

There's very little likelihood that the community will become cohesive enough to change the protocol significantly, and no one has enough leadership to induce a majority to follow. There's also a great deal of ill-will from past events that prevents this from happening.

[jivan28]

<snipped>

Years ago BitComet introduced a solution for the file boundary vs. piece boundary problem, but no other clients implemented it, and some people derided it as spam.

Wow, nice info. Can you point me to some documentation or link which explains the file boundary vs piece boundary problem ?

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Hi, you might enjoy reading this press release we sent to TorrentFreak about 6months ago...

http://www.bitcomet.com/doc/news/torrentfreak-interview-bitcomet.pdf

As mentioned, we were looking for ways of making it possible to download files included in a torrent from non-bittorrent sources. because of the way bittorrent works, the files are all broken into equal size pieces of data and some of these pieces would often contain parts of two or more files, so making any type of mixture of protocols very difficult.

BitComet introduced an "align file boundary" option where a padding file was added at the end of each file to assure no two files would be dependent on the same bittorrent piece.

This technology was very well conceived, but naturally a novice user would look at the final result and see a bunch of "padding files" and not understand why they were there and what their purpose was. Some went as far as to call them malicious (totally absurd), and some users were advocating disabling their download when starting a torrent (also absurd, since they will be downloaded regardless of being selected).

[jivan28]

Hi, you might enjoy reading this press release we sent to TorrentFreak about 6months ago...

http://www.bitcomet.com/doc/news/torrentfreak-interview-bitcomet.pdf

As mentioned, we were looking for ways of making it possible to download files included in a torrent from non-bittorrent sources. because of the way bittorrent works, the files are all broken into equal size pieces of data and some of these pieces would often contain parts of two or more files, so making any type of mixture of protocols very difficult.

BitComet introduced an "align file boundary" option where a padding file was added at the end of each file to assure no two files would be dependent on the same bittorrent piece.

This technology was very well conceived, but naturally a novice user would look at the final result and see a bunch of "padding files" and not understand why they were there and what their purpose was. Some went as far as to call them malicious (totally absurd), and some users were advocating disabling their download when starting a torrent (also absurd, since they will be downloaded regardless of being selected).

While I would be going through that pdf file, it would have helped to give the torrentfreak webpage link as well (in case they published it).

Perhaps I might have a little idea of what bitcomet does. For instance I have seen when I download few popular softwares like the latest bitcomet releases, Firefox 5 and few others, there are number of mirrors which pop up. Although the bandwidth at my end is not able to take full use of it I can see how it can be a winner as time goes on and we have faster bandwidth.

And what is ok for software, is also good for content (I guess). It is a good step in making the Internet the largest archival and distribution place (one of the features of lazyweb/Internets I feel) .

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Yes, Torrentfreak did do an article based on our press release which you can read here... http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-a-bittorrent-client-stuck-behind-a-language-barrier-110218/

However since you only inquired about advancing technologies, I gave you the press release because it covered our recent implementation of new technologies.

Regarding your last post. I don't fully understand everything you said (probably languages issues).

[jivan28]

Yes, Torrentfreak did do an article based on our press release which you can read here... http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-a-bittorrent-client-stuck-behind-a-language-barrier-110218/

However since you only inquired about advancing technologies, I gave you the press release because it covered our recent implementation of new technologies.

Regarding your last post. I don't fully understand everything you said (probably languages issues).

Hi there,

Thank you for the link. I guess by language barriers you mean you are not a native English speaker. Well, the same holds for me as I'm from India myself but still English is good as I don't know any Chinese.

One thing though that I was not ok with calling bitcomet 'a free software product' . 'A free software product' in many connotations means its open-sourced and the source-code is available in some GPL or some free software license which I don't think is the case. Perhaps you meant freeware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware

Please let me know if I understood it wrong.

For my previous post at the end, what I was thinking is the same as what is given in the press-release, the Long-Term Seeding and the ability to download pieces of a file from non-bittorrent sources as well.

The only additional observation I made was that it was helping in making Internet do what it was designed for, a distributed archival storage mechanism (meaning having multiple copies of the same file in many places). This is the original vision what the DoD (Department of Defence) of America wanted to know, although it was a military vision and not for civil uses that we do.

Thank you for the press-release and the link to the webpage as well.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

English is my native language. It is obvious that it is not yours, which is what my comment meant. I didn't mean this as any form of insult, only to state that the meaning of some of your message/s are unclear (at best), and completely confusing (at worse).

As for the term "Free Software", I must disagree with you. BitComet is Freeware, Free Software, and is NOT Open-Source. This is actually a good thing, but the point is that the fact that our software is Free has nothing to do with our decision to keep the source code closed.

Some people have labeled BitComet as "Advertisement supported", and although we do ask users (optionally) to use our homepage to help fund development costs, our software is not directly funded by any type mandatory advertisements whatsoever. We do (as most publishers do) promote our own products, such as our Free media player (MPCstar) and our Free browser (CometBird), as well as some of our Free online games, but BitComet is free from advertisements and has been so for dozens of versions.

Now, I'll try to explain my lack of understanding regarding your comment/question....

The only additional observation I made was that it was helping in making Internet do what it was designed for (how does anything your doing or talking about have anything to do with making the "Internet do what it was designed for"), a distributed archival storage mechanism (meaning having multiple copies of the same file in many places). (We don't control any type of distributed archival storage, we only help to locate such resources when possible) This is the original vision what the DoD (Department of Defence) of America wanted to know, although it was a military vision and not for civil uses that we do. (This makes no sense to me at all)

First of all, the sentence "This is the original vision what the DoD wanted to know" If your correctly using the words "what" and "know" (which I don't believe you are), then what exactly is it that the DoD wants to know? and what does this have to do with anything we are talking about?

Perhaps you meant to say... "This is the original vision that the DoD wanted to implement"

In any case, we are an international forum and we try our best to understand what users are posting even if their understanding of English isn't perfect, or the dialect of English they speak is much different then ours (English spoken in India is different, just as it is in China.

In some cases we have had members post comments translated by computer that were so poor that they made no sense at all, and in this case there is nothing we can do to help members. Some have even been offended and insulted us for caring more about their language skills then the facts being discussed, but if we cannot understand what someone is saying, then we cannot help them... no matter how hard we might try.

I'll also add that your English isn't bad, most of what you say can easily be understood, but some of the meaning of your post still eludes me.

I hope I have made myself clear, and let me know if there is anything remaining that we haven't covered. If so, perhaps if you use different words to express yourself, we could better understand their meaning.

TuuS