Torrentocracy = RSS + Bit Torrent + Your TV 172
lerhaupt writes "I've started a project called Torrentocracy which is the combination of RSS, Bit Torrent and your Television. It's written as a plugin for MythTV (the homebrew Linux PVR project). This means you can not only easily find out about new torrents from various enclosure enabled blogs, but you can also start the torrent download process with the click of your TV remote control. Are RSS aggregators which support torrent downloads the next greatest thing since web browsers? What is the significance of hooking this directly to your TV? Here's a screenshot."
A good advancement, but not a totally new trick (Score:5, Informative)
Caught on google (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Easily Tracked? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:i love the idea of torrents but ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:i love the idea of torrents but ... (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't make any sense. Torrents are completely reliable -- they already have block and file level hashing and automatic re-downloading of blocks in case of transmission errors, etc. The only time you won't get a complete torrent is if there are no complete copies of the file being served. Adding error correcting codes (e.g. PAR files) would make the total file larger, and only recover from incomplete torrents that are _almost_ complete (i.e. would have been complete if the PAR file hadn't made it 15% larger). Just make sure that anything you're downloading has a couple of seeds before starting the download.
Freecache! (Score:2, Informative)
Only now it's too late, ofcourse..
Re:http torrent (Score:3, Informative)
Completely anonymous too. Albeit slow as a snail on valium.
An increase of users is supposed to equal an increase in speed. Unconfirmed.
Re:i love the idea of torrents but ... (Score:5, Informative)
What this has to do with PAR2s are obvious: the entire effective functionality of PAR2s is already integrated into BT, automatically. It's not something that users can turn on or off, it's an integral part of the protocol.
The cause of your problem is likely that your torrent ran out of seeds before you finished downloading. Look at the "distributed copies" number your client gives you. That represents how many effective copies there are of a torrent. (Say client A has the first 50% of a torrent, and client B has the second 50%. Those are the only two peers. That's 1.0 distributed copies, since even though neither peer has a full copy, the two of them together do.) If the number is below zero, you will never be able to download the entire torrent unless a seed pops in.
As BT clients advance, this is becoming rarer. There's a "super-seeding" option of some clients which helps get out sparsely-seeded torrents as fast as possible by refusing to send the same chunk more than once.
If this is a problem for you - trying to get poorly-seeded torrents - you might want to try out Azureus. It preferentially grabs complete files inside a torrent first, and you can tell it which files to try for.
Re:Appropriateness of torrents for this, and legal (Score:5, Informative)
If you think about it, if torrents were purely sequential they would be very slow since if say 10 people started torrenting from 1 seed they would all be fighting over the same blocks and couldn't help each other.
Nucleus RSS/Bittorrent Aggregator (Score:2, Informative)
Already been done. (Score:2, Informative)
Python application, all platforms, searches RSS feeds and downloads the torrent.
Re:Easily Tracked? (Score:3, Informative)
Let's take these one at a time.
As with any web site, Google knows the IP addresses of anyone using the site. So they can know who searches for pr0n or mp3's, etc. But they can't know whether you actually went to the site they provided an URL to, and performed a download, as that's between your web browser and the file server.
KaZaA knows the IP addresses of the computers you're connected to. But it's hard to know who's doing what on the entire network, because it's so large and fairly well distributed. Of course, if a musician searches for their copyrighted song, they can see the IP's of everyone who broadcasts it, so running KaZaA isn't too clever. At least the odds of any _one_ search finding you is small.
Each BitTorrent torrent is perfectly centrally coordinated. So if I see an illegal file being served using BitTorrent, and I want to know who's downloading or serving it, I can easily know the IP's of everyone downloading or serving the file.
All I have to do is:
1) Download the torrent file from the web site. Of course, I know the web site's address, DNS records, etc. One down.
2) Run TorrentSpy (or a good BT client) to see the tracker for the file. This I know the IP address of the guy running the tracker that coordinates the downloads. Two down.
3) I run a BT client and open the Torrent file. This initiates a connection to the tracker, which then tells me the IP addresses of all of the other people uploading the file, as well as their download status and all sorts of other interesting things. Three through 2,500 down.
And if I get bored, I can write a program to watch the popular BT web sites for my copyrighted material.
"BitTorrent is still better for piracy because the men in black need to know if your torrent is illicit in order to know if they should log your ip. The are millions of torrents out there. they cant track them all."
It's not hard to watch the popular BT web sites for a list of artist and album names. BTSearch makes it even easier. Putting RSS on Trackers makes it trivially easy. So yes, if people had to watch all those sites, it'd be a lot of work. Computers, however, are pretty good at automating repetitive tasks.
So yes, I suppose that you can't quite assume that "TheBeatlesCompleteCollection.torrent" contains copyrighted material. But you can capture all of the IP's and start a download, then after you verify that the torrent file does contain copyrighted music, issue Cease & Desist letters to everyone.
Isn't networking fun?