Comments on: LittleShoot: ‘first true BitTorrent browser plugin’

By: Adam Fisk

Adam Fisk — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:05:45 +0000

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

By: Adam Fisk

Adam Fisk — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:09:39 +0000

@surfer LittleShoot is all open source under the GPL. Here’s a link to more info:

http://www.littleshoot.org/code

By: Adam Fisk

Adam Fisk — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:08:29 +0000

@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

By: surfer

surfer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:00:20 +0000

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

By: Devil's Advocate

Devil's Advocate — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:49:05 +0000

@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.

By: surfer

surfer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:53:44 +0000

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.

By: NO1UNO

NO1UNO — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:24:47 +0000

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??

By: Henry Emrich

Henry Emrich — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:59:54 +0000

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.

By: Adam Fisk

Adam Fisk — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:08:15 +0000

@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

By: United Hackers Association

United Hackers Association — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:43:13 +0000

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

=============

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

=============

By: Henry Emrich

Henry Emrich — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:02:56 +0000

That sounds really good.
(I hope the codebase is GPL’ed, so the RIAA can’t kill it.)