Tribler: Still not a thing?

[Stuum]

This is a continuation of a discussion here.

The last post was:

No, it's the story, the point Peter Sunde was making and the topic of this thread. It's an unrealized potential next-generation file sharing system that is not yet good enough and which is going nowhere because nobody is interested.

Tribler has been around for 7-8 years and it's still not realistically usable, and the design elements it has developed have still not been adopted by anyone.

Hopefully the fall of KAT will get it (and other such projects) some more attention and perhaps a developer or two (or a competitor or two).

The fall of KAT will not help whatever is afflicting Tribler. Here's my 2c.

I think Tribler is the future. Why do I think that? Because it offers anonymity. It offers  a  *real* solution to end the wac-a-mole nonsense that we have relied on for so long. The copyright nazis have mole detectors and automatic takedown weapons while the moles sit in their holes and hope they don't get shot. With an onion routing torrent solution (Tribler being the only one at present because Tor is being elitist) we should all be knocking down the doors to work on it and use it. So why isn't anyone? Why aren't I since I am a programmer?

Well. For me. The one thing I'm really interested in is the anonymity......and it doesn't work. I keep waiting for it to work, but it still doesn't.  "But Stuum. You're a programmer. Why don't you help them", I hear you say. Because I'm not a cryptographer and I'm not an expert in anonymizing networks. There's too much at stake to leave it up to domain dabblers so I'm waiting for them to fix it. And waiting, and waiting and waiting.  It's what it was designed for and was the original goal of the research which spawned the software. Instead, the unimportant stuff is being worked on. A video player (don't care). Streaming torrents (don't care). Fancy new Bootstrap website (don't care). It needs to be protocol first. Interface later.

That's the fundamental issue for me. The crappy UX and usability is trivial since I can write my own . I would probably even port what they do have into something other than Python. Maybe even looking to plug it into libtorrent. But not until they do what they started out to do nearly a decade ago. Sort the protocol out and they can get application developers on board to give it to the masses, tidy up the interface and hone the performance. Until that disclaimer is removed from the website and they say "yes anonymity works", I'll stick with uTorrent 2.2.1, thanks very much, and work on my other side-projects.

[hypno-potamous]

A few years ago I tried it, but there really was not any content to get, except Blakes 7...which I enjoyed.

[TheRealNapster]

I really enjoy these types of conversations. Though most articles I read regarding Peter's call for more innovation mostly suggested the use of IPFS. Having read that, I decided to take a look at the current IPFS implementation and I must say that it needs quite a bit of work. It really reminds me of the DAT project. Obviously the existence of any site that utilizes the existing web approach has a shelf life because the DNS and domain registry layers can be exploited. For me, this really isn't about piracy, but about an open internet that isn't riddled with censorship, government overreach and really gets back to the information sharing age.

One of the issues that IPFS needs to address after they get their product working normally is content location. Right now everything is accessed by hash and there's no real convenient way to index the network, so procedures would have to be thought about there as far as operating a distributed search engine.

I'm eager to help however I can. I'd love to hear more ideas.

[Sid]

The fall of KAT will not help whatever is afflicting Tribler.

Agreed, because there are other current generation sites such as TPB for people to switch to. Although I can't bring myself to actually wish for it the truth is that we would all end up better off if the MAFIAA took out another couple of big sites in the next month. Of course they're not stupid, so even if they could I suspect that they wouldn't.

I think Tribler is the future.

I don't think it is but I agree that it could be. Of all the contenders it's the closest to being mass-market ready.

So why isn't anyone?

That has always confused me--it's open source, and the ideas they have developed are good solid starts. Were I a developer who fancied becoming the next Ludde I'd grab it and run.

It's what it was designed for and was the original goal of the research which spawned the software. Instead, the unimportant stuff is being worked on. A video player (don't care). Streaming torrents (don't care). Fancy new Bootstrap website (don't care). It needs to be protocol first. Interface later.

That's why it needs competition. It's an academic project at present, merely a test bed, they don't care about getting it "production ready". They're not trying to create a client that people can actually use. [Of course they wouldn't respond to competition but a "real" developer would--they would finish what needs finishing because they would be chasing real users.]

[Stuum]

I really enjoy these types of conversations. Though most articles I read regarding Peter's call for more innovation mostly suggested the use of IPFS. Having read that, I decided to take a look at the current IPFS implementation and I must say that it needs quite a bit of work. It really reminds me of the DAT project.  Obviously the existence of any site that utilizes the existing web approach has a shelf life because the DNS and domain registry layers can be exploited.  For me, this really isn't about piracy, but about an open internet that isn't riddled with censorship, government overreach and really gets back to the information sharing age.

One of the issues that IPFS needs to address after they get their product working normally is content location. Right now everything is accessed by hash and there's no real convenient way to index the network, so procedures would have to be thought about there as far as operating a distributed search engine.

I'm eager to help however I can. I'd love to hear more ideas.

I'm with you on the "greater goal" of censorship and privacy but IPFS is just a distributed file system like Hadoop or Tahoe, isn't it? I perhaps see it'd be nice to drag and drop the files like Skydrive or Onebox but does it actually solve any of the problems? You've already said that it doesn't solve the indexing of files as a searchable database-the role our vulnerable websites provide Are users IP addresses protected from the copyright trolls like Tor/Tribler? 

If we don't solve the issues of users getting harassed and finding content without a website that can be targeted, I don't see that any fancy storage back end or transport is all that useful over the existing torrenting. It's like drooling over an SSD instead of a mechanical drive when you can't even boot into your operating system. That's why I see Tribler as the best of what's on offer if, and only if, they resolve the anonymity.

[TheRealNapster]

I'm with you on the "greater goal" of censorship and privacy but IPFS is just a distributed file system like Hadoop or Tahoe, isn't it? I perhaps see it'd be nice to drag and drop the files like Skydrive or Onebox but does it actually solve any of the problems? You've already said that it doesn't solve the indexing of files as a searchable database-the role our vulnerable websites provide Are users IP addresses protected from the copyright trolls like Tor/Tribler? 

If we don't solve the issues of users getting harassed and finding content without a website that can be targeted, I don't see that any fancy storage back end or transport is all that useful over the existing torrenting. It's like drooling over an SSD instead of a mechanical drive when you can't even boot into your operating system. That's why I see Tribler as the best of what's on offer if, and only if, they resolve the anonymity.

Correct, I think we're completely in agreement. I don't think that IPFS addresses the core concerns that we've raised about the "distributed" systems currently in place. According to the TorrentFreak article about Peter's thoughts, it mentioned IPFS which somewhat surprised me.  I agree that Tribler is the closest thing to where we need to be. The user experience could be made a bit better as it is a bit heavy. Right now I'm able to run my transfers on Tribler through 1-2 nodes. If I can deal with 30kb/s down or so, I guess its not that bad.  Their IRC channel is pretty small at this point, yet their github repo gets quite a bit of activity, so I'm surprised that there isn't more engagement in its development.  Perhaps, as alluded to above, people are afraid to participate in its development for various reasons.

[Stuum]

Correct, I think we're completely in agreement. I don't think that IPFS addresses the core concerns that we've raised about the "distributed" systems currently in place. According to the TorrentFreak article about Peter's thoughts, it mentioned IPFS which somewhat surprised me.  I agree that Tribler is the closest thing to where we need to be. The user experience could be made a bit better as it is a bit heavy. Right now I'm able to run my transfers on Tribler through 1-2 nodes. If I can deal with 30kb/s down or so, I guess its not that bad.  Their IRC channel is pretty small at this point, yet their github repo gets quite a bit of activity, so I'm surprised that there isn't more engagement in its development.  Perhaps, as alluded to above, people are afraid to participate in its development for various reasons.

Evaluation of a libutp-based Tor Datagram Implementation is an interesting read. I know I get slated for saying Tor is fine   but it really is   from a requirements point of view. When I talk about the Tribler routing scheme I really see it as re-inventing the wheel because Tor does offer everything we need for anonymity and it actually works   Tribler does have the Torrent searching overlay which Tor could learn from for discovery of it's hidden services, though. I'm of the opinion that the Tor and Torrent communities are really just looking at different sides of the same coin and saying "my coin is different". It's not and both are poorer for it because resource and skills are being split to find the same solutions to the same problems.

[Stuum]

Deleted.