The Pirate Bay file sharing protocol
p2pnet news | P2P:- Bram Cohen set the pace with BitTorrent, which went from being a free and independent application to a hard-core Hollywood favourite.
But now another entertainment cartel favourite, The Pirate Bay, is picking the pace up substantially with the introduction of a new file sharing protocol which, according to Torrentfreak over in The Netherlands, will be tagged, appropriately, .p2p.
Says Torrentfreak’s Ernesto:
The guys from The Pirate Bay are always working on interesting side-projects, but there is one in particular that’s so significant, it might be the future of filesharing. For a while now, they’ve been working on a brand new protocol – which may come to replace BitTorrent in the near future.
Why a new protocol? Well, the current BitTorrent protocol is developed and maintained by BitTorrent Inc.
This company, founded by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, recently decided to close the source of some newer additions to the protocol.
According to The Pirate Bay, this gives them too much power and influence.
Another reason for a new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.
The protocol will most likely use the .p2p file extension compared to the .torrent extension BitTorrent uses right now. The good thing is that the .p2p files will be backwards compatible which should ensure a smooth transition from .torrent to .p2p files.
It’ll be interesting to see whether other BitTorrent sites will support the new protocol. Erik from Mininova, the most popular BitTorrent site at the moment, told us they will absolutely support the new protocol. We at TorrentFreak are of course a bit concerned about these new developments since we owe our name to BitTorrent, but we wish The Pirate Bay crew the best
The new protocol is still in the development phase, but the initial release is planned for sometime early next year. More features and information about the new protocol, which is still nameless at this point, can be found at the protocol design page.
Definitely stay tuned.
Also See:
Torrentfreak – The Pirate Bay Sees a Future Without BitTorrent, October 30, 2007
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October 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
this is extremely interesting. it would be great to have some kind of built-in blocklist at the server, constantly updated, and with (obviously) some kind of redundancy against malicious attacks.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Snake oil lol. apply daily and it is proven to stop p2p lawsuits.
This will be huge a new p2p protocol which hopefully will make traffic indistinguishable from regular traffic and be set up in such a way that no user knows what file has been requested by another or what file they are giving.(will make suing far harder)
October 30th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
to comment 3,
where did you read all that? or did i just miss it?
October 30th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
i mean, i really hope that is all true, but im trying not to get my hopes up
October 30th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
i download lot and riaa person is scaring me with lawsuit that is happening. what do i do?
November 1st, 2007 at 8:24 pm
What we really need to see is a P2P protocol that sends out packets that appear to be HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, or similar packets, albeit on non-standard ports (especially a common practice with SSH-propagating viruses in the wild), and mask the real content in those streams via some form of randomly constructed asymmetric crypto such as that which PGP/GPG uses.
If a P2P app simulated SSH and used the same crypto as SSH, it would be indistinguishable from SSH traffic at the individual packet level. Hell, we see this stuff used for secure FTP transactions all the time.
The real P2P “killer app” will be one that exactly mimics an existing protocol that network managers can’t afford to throttle, block, RST attack, prioritize, QoS manage, or otherwise non-neutrally handle. When P2P traffic is indistinguishable from HTTPS or SSH traffic, the anti-P2P crowd are pretty much screwed, because even if one did want to eliminate P2P, the best that could be accomplished is to intentionally throttle per-user connection bandwidth, because any attempt to kill the P2P could cause legitimate traffic to fail.
Why isn’t this being done already? Why aren’t we tunneling P2P traffic over another protocol to hide it from malicious P2P haters, instead of running it in the wild with a big orange sign on each packet that says “EFFING TORRENT PACKET, COMCAST PLZ RST ME!!” ???
November 10th, 2007 at 9:02 am
God, I so hope that this works out.
September 4th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I agree with Angry what a kick in the nutz if they could make a protocol that mimics SSH and likewise packets
but in any case i hope something will appear soon