Category Archives: BitTorrent Next

OneSwarm: The Privacy Aware BitTorrent Client

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Developed at the University of Washington, OneSwarm is a BitTorrent client that allows users to share files “anonymously” or with a specific group of friends. These features give users more control over their privacy, while maintaining a decent download speed. The client operates from within an Internet browser and is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Image is Loading....Those who’ve been reading our blog for long enough may remember how the MPAA and RIAA accused a printer at the University of Washington of copyright infringement a few years ago.

With their research, the researchers pointed out that gathering evidence on BitTorrent downloaders is full of pitfalls.

Perhaps not coincidentally the same research group is also behind the “privacy preserving” BitTorrent client OneSwarm, currently developed by Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek, two PhD students at the University of Washington.

Unlike other regular BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm allows users to share files only with a selected group of friends. While regular and public BitTorrent downloads are also supported, the privacy settings allow users to obscure the source of a transfer by sending it through multiple intermediaries.

“Virtually everyone on the Internet is a content producer, but today we only have one model for sharing: sign over the rights to your work to a website, with the hope that it will respect your privacy,” researcher Michael Piatek told us commenting on the importance of privacy on BitTorrent.

“OneSwarm is an attempt to provide an alternative. Our view is that private data sharing is an essential service in free and open societies,” he added. How the various privacy settings work is explained in detail in the video below, posted by the OneSwarm team.

Although OneSwarm has been in development for a while, the researchers have made its source available on GitHub in an update this week. Binaries and the source code are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.

We tested OneSwarm, and although the browser interface is something you have to get used to, the download speeds are more than reasonable. This is also confirmed in one of the academic papers published by the OneSwarm team (pdf). In a performance comparison they found that it outperformed other “private” sharing options such as Freenet and BitTorrent over Tor.

Users have to be aware though, that while using the ‘public’ mode transfers are not anonymized.

That said, an Open Source effort to allow more privacy controls for BitTorrent users is something that can only be encouraged. The next step many BitTorrent users are looking forward to is the arrival of a fully anonymized BitTorrent client with decent speeds.

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Where Are uTorrent’s Comments and Ratings Stored?

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Last week uTorrent rolled out the first Beta version of their 3.0 release. Among other things, uTorrent 3.0 allows users to rate and comment on the torrents they’re downloading. It’s a feature that many people have requested, but for the more privacy conscious user, it also begs the question where these comments and ratings are stored.

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With their roll-out of uTorrent 3.0 last week, BitTorrent Inc. introduced a bunch of new features. Users can now stream video files while they’re downloading, and they can also add comments and ratings to torrents.

Interestingly enough, these comments and ratings also work on torrent files that are shared on private trackers. Among some of the more privacy concious BitTorrent users this raised a few questions. Most importantly, where is this data stored and what information is attached to it?

To answer the above we got in touch with the uTorrent engineering team to find out how these comments and ratings are handled by the client.

Right away we were assured that none of the data is stored on a central server, and that the data can never be traced back to its source. Instead, the comments you see appearing in your client are sent as an extra piece of data, similar to how other files are shared with peers.

“µTorrent 3.0 adds an extension message for distributing comments within the swarm. All clients that support this extension message store all comments they have seen, per torrent,” the uTorrent engineering team informed us.

“When peer A joins a swarm, it will send a request for comments to peers that support this message, say peer B. If peer A already has some comments, it passes along a bloom-filter representing the set of all those comments. When peer B responds, it will not send comments that are already present in the bloom filter. This prevents duplicate comments.”

 

uTorrent Comments

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So basically, all comments and ratings associated with a particular file are shared among members of that swarm. If another peer has a comment that you don’t have already, it will send it to you, and vice versa. The messages are sent through the tracker and don’t rely on DHT, this means that they work on private torrent files as well.

The requests for comments are sent every 20 minutes by uTorrent, and this is how they are shared among peers. In the beginning when there is a relatively low percentage of users supporting the extension the comments and ratings will propagate slowly, but when uTorrent 3.0 becomes the stable release these issues will be gone.

The uTorrent engineer team further explained that comments are stored in the resume file for a torrent, which helps keeping comments alive across sessions. But other than on the computers of uTorrent users, the comments are never shared outside the swarm on a central server.

Although it’s good to know that uTorrent’s commenting and rating system is fully decentralized, it also introduces a new feature that may be less welcome. When comments and ratings become a new standard to check the quality of files in the future, there is no doubt that these features will be exploited by spammers to make fake torrents appear more legitimate.

Time will tell whether the ‘costs’ will outfit the benefits, and whether the unmoderated system will be able to handle the potential influx of trolls and spammers. In the meantime it’s a simple affair to paste a hash value into Google – or append it to the URL on sites like Torrentz – in order to double check.

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BitTorrent Exclusive TV-Series Writes History

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To most people in the entertainment industry BitTorrent is seen as a tool to download video and music without the consent of copyright owners, but there are also many artists who see it as a vital part of their business. The BitTorrent-only TV-series Pioneer One is one of the most progressive projects in this regard, and today the producers have released the third episode, with the fourth being scheduled for a release in the coming weeks.

It’s almost a year ago when we first wrote about the idea of two young filmmakers who had a plan to make a TV-show to be released on BitTorrent only, completely funded by the public.

In the months that followed this idea slowly transformed into something real. Within a few days the makers secured enough money to shoot a pilot, and with the help of many volunteers it was released to the public during June last year.

The pilot was released on the VODO platform, which guaranteed maximum exposure through partners like The Pirate Bay and FrostWire, but getting people to download it was the easiest part of the puzzle. There were still five episodes to go to finish the first season.

Luckily, many people liked what they saw and decided to donate money to keep the project going. An additional $20,000 was raised in two weeks and the counter topped the $30,000 mark early September – enough money to shoot more episodes.

As was hoped, the project was kept alive by fans of the show and the second episode was released late last year.

Today, Pioneer One reached another milestone as episode 3 of the show was just released. The fourth is currently scheduled for a release next month. Pioneer One writer Josh Bernhard is convinced that despite the unusual release format the show’s fan base is growing.

“The release of episode 2 demonstrated that the audience was still there, with more people discovering the show for the first time. I think each new episode is going to build our momentum, and people are going to become more invested as we reveal more pieces of the story,” Bernhard told us.

Pioneer One Episode 3

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And it’s not just BitTorrent users following the project, there has been plenty of recognition from other filmmakers and traditional TV people too. The peer-funded episode won an award for ‘Best Drama Pilot’ at the New York Television Festival, which was quite a morale booster for the makers and an indication that they are on the right track.

“I think the idea of BitTorrent as a viable means of distributing content is really starting to break through,” Bernhard said. “BitTorrent has something of a stigma, especially for people in the entertainment industry. When you say BitTorrent, I think a lot of people hear ‘piracy’ and stop listening. But between Pioneer One, Zenith and other projects adopting the same model, it’s going to become too big to dismiss.”

Although the Pioneer One crew have left their mark on history already, there is one major downside to the BitTorrent model. Shooting a TV-show is a costly exercise, and since the main budget also comes from peers, the crew has to raise money after every release so they can finish the first season. Thus far this has worked out, but an extra push is needed to fund the remaining episodes.

“We’re starting production of the last two episodes of our first season in May, financed with whatever money we raise between now and then. Our main focus is finishing out the season of 6 episodes, which I think will be a huge achievement. Naysayers said it couldn’t be done, that we were foolish for even trying. But we’re closer than ever and we’re determined to finish this chapter of Pioneer One, come hell or high water,” Bernhard said.

The third episode of Pioneer One can be downloaded on VODO, and don’t forget to chip in if you support the project.

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