LittleShoot: ‘first true BitTorrent browser plugin’
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Whatever else you want to say about LimeWire which is, like the P2P community, under renewed attack by the entertainment cartels, ex-staffers continue to make significant contributions to the well-being of the Net.
FrostWire, whose missions is to “Find talented unsigned and indie artists and labels who want to share their music online under a Creative Commons license, or some other form of free distribution,” is based on source code released by LimeWire LLC.
And MuWire is a new, free, open-source LimeWire fork created specifically to help people share music.
Now, “LittleShoot 0.99 is here!” – says ex-LimeWire guy Adam Fisk (right).
“Whew, we’ve been busy,” he says, going on, “This version makes LittleShoot the first true BitTorrent browser plugin ever made and strengthens our hold as the easiest, most powerful P2P file sharing application on the planet.”
Just download it and go. No account necessary.
Unrestrained greed and total contempt
“What got me online in the first place was sharing,” I wrote in June last year. What else could peer-to-peer (or people to people) mean?
Then, “I’ve been getting a little jaundiced, lately, writing about the unrestrained greed and total contempt for their customers which are the hallmarks the entertainment cartels and the likes of Facebook, MySpace and the other social engineering networks,” I said, going on »»»
You can’t have sharing without trust but in the corporate lexicon, where users are concerned, it’s spelled ‘trussed’.
Like in ‘turkey’.
But it doesn’t matter how much the suits try to nail down the Net and everyone in it, it won’t work. There are too many smart people out there who believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
Among those of true, untrammelled vision is Adam Fisk, one of the people who made LimeWire what it is — or, rather, what it used to be before it ran afoul of the corporate entertainment cartels.
When LittleShoot first launched, he and I agreed we’d figure out a way to somehow incorporate LittleShoot into p2pnet, and that’s still the plan.
Now, “This is the last major release before LittleShoot 1.0 — publishing here we come!” he says.
And, “LittleShoot only shares the files you download,” he told p2pnet, emphasising »»»
All other files on your computer are completely inaccessible to the outside world because we use secure hash-based HTTP requests, secure digital signatures, and localhost filters.
That means no outside computer can access any sensitive data on your computer, ever.
What does LittleShoot 0.99 have?
- A new, separate downloads tab
- BitTorrent search
- File linking on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc
- Configuration options for your download directory, shutdown, etc
- On-demand startup — LittleShoot only runs when you need it.
As I said in 2008, “it’s radical — revolutionary and evolutionary, offering a more flexible and efficient way of distributing digital media online, in the process forcing a fundamental change on the way things are going to work in the World of Peer-to-Peer.
“And the corporations don’t have to be afraid of it because it’s built around the concept of independence: new music from new people who understand P2P openess is the way for this era: new films, new everything, not lies and lawsuits, not the cookie-cutter copyrighted ‘product’ that’s causing so much online grief to so many people, users and artists alike.”
It’s a browser plugin just like Flash, so LittleShoot runs on any web site that adds it.
Click on a BitTorrent link, for example, and LittleShoot is the “handler” for that link, starting your download in the browser. When you close the window, LittleShoot stays running and downloading your files until you tell it not to, using the system tray control on Windows, or the status item control on OSX. You can always check in on your downloads in the LittleShoot.
“You can also use LittleShoot to search for the files you want, whether on YouTube, IsoHunt, LimeWire, or Flickr,” says Adam.
Check it out, and definitely stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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April 27th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
That sounds really good.
(I hope the codebase is GPL’ed, so the RIAA can’t kill it.)
April 27th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
until it allows me to open a torrent file its useless to try this
all the sites listed are public ones and no offense BUT no thanks…..
limewire? they mean the place where you get most virus per capita, and mpaa spying? ALSO NO.
sorry for spam BUT i need to test this, it may be that this part of the tech
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LittleShoot makes a REST request to our servers to get every source for that file currently online on the network. The sources are URIs. These could be SIP URIs, HTTP URIs, and eventually BitTorrent URIs, allowing a single file download to take place over SIP-negotiated sockets, straight HTTP, and eventually BitTorrent.
actually would by pass the traffic shaping of BCE
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April 27th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
@United Hackers Association You’re talking about opening a torrent file from disk? It’s trivial to add that, but we’re trying to make the whole process of using BitTorrent a little more sane — i.e. why would you ever want to download a file and then manually open it every time, especially when that file is basically a link. It’s like downloading a .url file every time you want to go to a web site, and then manually opening that URL using “Open File…” from your browser. I can understand for testing, but for general use? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.
What public sites are you referring to? Twitter and Facebook and all that? LittleShoot’s not forcing you to post anywhere, but it allows you to if you like.
As far as LimeWire goes, you can disable it whenever you want with a check box.
All the Best,
-Adam Fisk
Founder
LittleShoot
April 27th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Fisk:
Dunno, but maybe UH wants to check out what trackers the torrent file is linking to?
(I’m usually not too concerned about that mysefl, since at least a portion of torrent downloads seem to be using DHT for “local peer discovery” independent of the trackers (Pardon, despite my strong views on copyright law etc. I’m not as high-tech as I probably could be.)
But there is something to be said for knowing what trackers the torrent “wants”, seeing as the RIAA has been known to impose corrupt “dummy” versions to introduce bad data into people’s downloads. (I think Mediadefender was doing that, but I’m not sure offhand.)
So yeah, looking at the torrent file might be useful so you know where the link is “pointing”, if that makes any sense.
Or maybe I’m misreading UH’s concerns, I dunno.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:24 am
K, so it sounds pretty good on the surface, but what is your “central server” storing, my file?? or my location??
I’m not interested in putting my location out to be seen by any dick that comes along with a “reason” to be
looking at your logs! And is anyone out there already using this thing?? Whats your take on it??
April 28th, 2009 at 7:53 am
interesting, converting SIP.. will it just ‘open’? Will it be open sourced? Building on an existing structure, ie torrent, would go a long way in ‘market adoption’.
I am impressed the author posted here. So far, it sounds worth testing.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
@Henry…
I don’t see anything wrong with your interpretation at all.
These days, it’s not just helpful to know what trackers are being called when a torrent opens… it’s imperative!
Personally, I always open the torrent file and check out its properties before letting it call on the swarm.
When I do this, I can remove any unwanted trackers from the tracker list (if necessary), or add others I trust that I know will also be tracking the torrent.
There are definitely some trackers that only exist to ping and record the activity of a torrent swarm, and not contribute to the transfer. Others might direct downloaders to bogus files or data chunks – though, most modern torrent clients check hashcodes now, rendering that exploit moot. Now we have some with the purpose of corrupting the data stream in order to cause those hashfails (making your torrent client have to toss a bad block and replace it). This can bog the downloads to a point that some leachers will give up on the torrent, or blame and remove the wrong tracker from their trusted list.
I’m sure it would make no difference if the torrent client was internal (eg. uTorrent, Vuze, etc.), or web-based (HTTP), as far as how you set up and manage the trackers, but perhaps that was the basis for the original question from UH. I certainly wouldn’t use a client that wouldn’t let me control these things.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
http://compnetworking.about.com/b/2005/06/22/avalanche-improving-p2p-file-swarming-through-network-coding.htm
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/153/1007153/new-wave-of-secret-file-sharing-breaks-over-web
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/13222/page2/
http://www.betanews.com/article/OneSwarm-network-improves-filesharing-control-anonymity/1235464379
I call the 6 year sue ‘em all campaign a win, personally. I have been harping on the mac underground for a century to improve security on how we do things. Looks like the MAFIAA is going to make proxy bouncing and encrypted everything, mainstream, awesome.
stw
April 30th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
@Henry and @Devil’s Advocate All interesting points. We don’t currently provide the option to manually edit the torrent file, but a couple of users have asked for similar flexibility, so we’ll likely just add it. Backing up for a second, though, LittleShoot is ultimately trying to make P2P the standard way of distributing any large file on the web literally anywhere, i.e. from a pure engineering perspective it’s crazy that every video file on the Internet isn’t distributed using P2P. With that in mind, LittleShoot’s not a tool designed to evade copyright enforcement. We see LittleShoot as ultimately very different from existing P2P programs in that regard, and you’ll see this more fleshed out in the months ahead. That said, our users’ privacy is of utmost concern, and if giving users the ability to manually edit and inspect torrent files furthers that, we’ll certainly add it.
While LittleShoot supports BitTorrent, we’ll ultimately be moving as much as possible onto the VoIP-based protocol stack (SIP, STUN, ICE, etc) that will give users and publishers extreme flexibility in this regard, with URIs for all file sources available in readable JSON (that’s compressed on the wire), with any site ultimately able to use our REST APIs for all sorts of integration. That stack is also just much more robust from an engineering perspective than BitTorrent in terms of almost every facet of distributing big files using P2P (presence detection, NAT/firewall traversal, search, etc etc).
Thanks for the valuable feedback — we’ll do our best to add torrent inspection and editing ASAP. I don’t know what version it will be added to, but here’s the issue if you want to track it:
http://dev.littleshoot.org:8081/browse/LS-403
-Adam Fisk
Founder
LittleShoot
April 30th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@surfer LittleShoot is all open source under the GPL. Here’s a link to more info:
http://www.littleshoot.org/code
April 30th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I’m currently preparing a talk for the upcoming P2P Media Summit in Santa Monica on Monday, and I’ll post a followup to this discussion and the P2P Media Summit conversation next week.
If you’d like to add any comments on our user forum to make sure we incorporate your suggestions, you can go here: http://groups.google.com/group/littleshooters/
Responding to what you guys want is our top priority. Thanks again for the valuable feedback everyone.
-Adam Fisk
Founder
LittleShoot