whats happening in the peersphere
Download MP3 audio of interview here.
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Michael Stapelberg, head developer of the DustFS project. You can listen to a recording of this interview here. DustFS is an encrypted, distributed file system based on the BitTorrent protocol. DustFS’s major features are full encryption, authentication using certificates and usage of BitTorrent [...]
I just released version 0.51 of our high-performance, BSD-licensed C implementation of BitTorrent, Unworkable. This release contains very minor code changes which fix some important bugs in the mapping of torrent pieces to on-disk mmap()’d regions. In particular, this can fix some edge-cases in the downloading of large, multi-file torrents.
Direct download link to [...]
Download MP3 audio of interview, part one.
Download MP3 audio of interview, part two.
Last week I had the chance to interview Jeremy Blackburn, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. Jeremy’s research interests are in the energy efficiency of computer networks. I spoke to Jeremy concerning his work to improve the power management of [...]
Better late than never
After more than six months of working on our data-mining and statistical analysis software, I’ve finally had some free time to work on our high-performance cross-platform BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable. My interest in Unworkable was greatly renewed by the fact that Michael Stapelberg is using it as a basis for his distributed [...]
Peer-to-peer technology has many extremely useful applications. Fundamentally P2P is about increasing network resilience and decreasing bandwidth costs. Privacy, anonymity and security are all secondary to these essential principles. While BitTorrent has been an extremely successful P2P protocol for certain types of P2P applications, such as patch distribution for Blizzard’s World [...]
I gave a talk at Google/bayPIGgies last week. I was very pleasantly surprised by the turnout - and most of all by the excellent questions asked by the audience. The interest from people at the talk crossed many domains - people were generally curious about many aspects, from security to technical scalability concerns [...]
I am talking here about the case where you start a download with no existing data, in other words, from scratch. Torrents are divided into units called pieces. The torrent meta data contains the SHA-1 checksums for each piece, so that we can hash each piece once we have downloaded it, for verification purposes. Pieces [...]
Downloads in BitTorrent take place according to a number of strategies, which map to stages. Initiating a torrent download has one strategy, normal operation has another strategy, and finally pulling down the last remaining pieces has yet another strategy.
The End Game is the name for the final download strategy - there is a tendency for [...]
One of the more interesting extensions to the BitTorrent protocol has been the introduction of a distributed hash table implementation. As mentioned in my previous article on the basics of the BitTorrent protocol, traditionally BitTorrent relies upon a centralized “tracker” application - which runs over standard HTTP - in order to facilitate contacting peers and [...]