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Old 12-20-2004, 06:39 AM   #13 (permalink)
bendsley
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Location: texas
torrentbits.org has been closed as well, but may be opened under another domain name. try http://www.cyphersworld.com/

Bit torrent websites are doomed. The trackers they offer make them nice, fat targets for the MPAA/RIAA and they're potential single pionts of failure due to hardware and/or bandwidth issues. Can P2P survive? Only if it evolves.

Some Background:
Here's a quick n' dirty BitTorrent operational description. The bittorrent file download and distribution concepts take some understanding. You'll find terms like "seeds" and "trackers" with lengthy descriptions but to simplify things, all you need to understand here is that a single seed file (complete file) is needed to start the process. Once enough users connect and start downloading the file, additional users can begin to get pieces of the file from eachother. Bits of the file that one user has already downloaded become available to other users. The tracker receives information from all downloaders and gives them random lists of peers (other downloaders) to draw from. In essence, you could download a complete file from other downloaders and never once get any data directly from the original seed file. This means that the original seed file source location never gets swamped. Even better, the more people downloading that file actually increases your download speed since you'll have more sources to draw from.

The problem:
All the info you need to have your bittorrent application connect to a tracker and start downloading is stored in a tiny text file with a ".torrent" extension. The problem is, where do you get these .torrent files? There are a few websites that have created elaborate systems to offer the .torrent files but to display how many seeds and users are currently connected to that "torrent". Today, one of the largest of these sites, suprnova.org receives so much traffic that it has become a bottleneck in the system. Even worse, the dependancy on a website to get torrents has become a single point of failure.

The Solution:
What's needed is a program that decentralizes the way we find and distribute torrent and tracker data. The idea is to remove the single point of failure by having each person running the application share torrent and tracker data with eachother in almost the same way file data from a torrent download is shared with all users.

Suprnova.org's vision of the future is called eXeem. It's an application that promises to change the face of p2p file distribution by encorporating bittorrent technology in a way that solves the problems listed above. The beta version of eXeem is running at version .15 and is only accessible to 5,000 beta testers. There is currently no date set for a public release.
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