@David Schwartz Go find some christian republican blog to comment please, thanks, this is not the place for you, this site isn't even american you know? It's a scary socialist-europe site, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

With other networks, it was possible to fool downloaders with fake content. BitTorrent is a bit more resistant to that, with its integrated hash digests of every single chunk of every download, allowing fake substitutions to be spotted quickly and rejected.

All this “churn” business can achieve is to delay the download, not stop it completely. If the technique starts achieving any results at all, developers of client software will simply come up with techniques to detect such attempts at sabotage and switch to the more reliable peers.

Yes, it’s an arms race. But given the built-in robustness of the protocol to begin with, I think the advantage is to the network, not to those trying to block it.

So the downfall of Bittorrent is that it might be hard to use it to break the law? That's like saying that the only problem with smart guns is that criminals can't steal them from cops and then use them to shoot innocent people.

If I'm reading this right, what is the significance of the structure itself here? Super-seeders sound like a vulnerable point in the network only if you see the network as a purely technical apparatus. However, it isn't a purely technical phenomenon, it's remarkably social. I think a big problem with this research is that it was done on public networks, and those aren't typical of file-sharing right now. In the closed networks, super-seeders are figures of authority that give structure to a social network. They're often administrators, they set ratio rules, make standards, and set the tone for sharing practices. Though public BT networks are often larger, they're less organized and won't tell you a damn thing about how people use the tools; they'll just tell you how the tools can work.

Then there's also the issue of dated research here. A great deal of public file-sharing has left BT for hosting on sites like rapidshare, or megaupload. The bandwidth that they have is sufficient for moderately large files, but again, the organization of is done largely in specific communities and isn't easily quantified.

What about peer exchange, did they even consider than? This article did not go into depth about the problems with using DHT has the sole source of peers so I cannot comment completely.

But with peer exchange, from my understanding you would only have to find one peer (A) in a swarm with DHT.
Then peer A can give you the IP of B, C and D and those three peers can give you the IP of thier peers etc until you have the enough peers.

I think the comment about the limited amount of sources at the top might be talking about release groups and their private servers? These servers are not part of the bittorrent network and so should not be considered.

In that case you would be considering the stability of the filtering of content down from these groups to the public.

Read about it.

before hosting server jargon, this is the difference/demarit .... ".torrent" file Vs "ed2k://" URL findable even in google cache. one is file while other is hyperlink.

Does it really matter? According to all the new laws created by the big companies and implemented by their political 'employees' we'll soon all be guilty, regardless if you do anything like file sharing, such details do not matter, point is that you are a bad slave and must learn a lesson just for illegally thinking you are in a democratic society alone already.

But if the "Copyright Holders" knowingly, willingly and significantly assist the distribution of their own "Intellectual Property" it can be seen by both the dark side and the light side (up to you to decide which is which). On their next lawsuit would it not be sufficient for the defendants to request copies of all communications with Hosting service X as part of discovery? If they manage to distance themselves so well that there is no paper trail to link them at least the defence could question why they went to the trouble of establishing the identity of the disabled grandmother who may have downloaded 3 songs when with a simple whois lookup they could identify the hosting service responsible for feeding potentially millions of songs.

I don't see how you can be found guilty of taking something that was being given away.

Oh and by the way I was going to say that you EXACERBATE the situation and EXASPERATE your readership but I see there is an obsolete usage of exasperate which means to make more grievous so I'll say nothing...

"They discovered the the [sic] vast majority of the material on BitTorrent started with a relatively small number of individuals."

I've been wondering about "super-seeders" for a while. Obviously they have: a) access to large libraries of material, b) high bandwidth, c) plenty of time on their hands even if largely automated, d) some compelling reason.

Those suggest the following in various degrees:
1) True nuts obsessed with media (doesn't even have to be pornography!).
2) Sysadmins on big Linux / Unix systems with little to actually do...
3) Deliberate seeding by industry for purposes of providing substance to claims of piracy.

I lean toward #3 as most likely, though true nuts surely exist. But for industry there's direct financial return *now* through increased sales of otherwise obscure material, indirect but real, it's advertising; PLUS it's an investment to obtain future power in locked-down content and internet control, unquestionably a goal of media industries.