{"id":2846,"date":"2016-07-29T23:33:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-30T06:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=2846"},"modified":"2024-01-30T10:57:56","modified_gmt":"2024-01-30T18:57:56","slug":"bittorrent-fifteen-years-old-file-sharing-technology-developed-today-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/bittorrent-fifteen-years-old-file-sharing-technology-developed-today-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"BitTorrent is fifteen years old. What would a file sharing technology developed today look like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

BitTorrent was developed in 2001: today\u2019s file-sharing technology predates the launch of Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. In those fifteen years, surveillance and repression technologies have advanced massively. If we designed file sharing today to keep up with these developments, sharing technology would be an uncensorable, untrackable, and unidentifiable peer-to-peer mesh network between mobile devices.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ten years ago, activists argued that file sharing was unstoppable and would adapt to any threat using mobile transmissions. However, this innovation hasn\u2019t taken place, maybe out of a lack of urgency. Let\u2019s examine how such a technology could work.<\/p>\n

A little history<\/strong><\/p>\n

When music sharing became file sharing with the advent of the first home computers, files were physically carried on cassette tapes and floppy disks to the recipient. This was the early 1980s, and this form of sharing has been nicknamed the AdidasLAN<\/strong> in retrospect, joking about the fact that files were carried by Adidas sneakers.<\/p>\n

The first major development came with BBSes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when an error-correcting and signal-quality-sensitive file transfer protocol appeared intended to transfer files over phone lines. It was known as ZModem<\/strong>, and you could call it an early poor man\u2019s version of TCP (as in the TCP\/IP suite of Internet protocols; this was not yet the Internet). This protocol was used to transfer a lot of correspondence and discussions (and other files) on an amateur network known as FidoNet that predated the mainstream Internet rollout.<\/p>\n

Fast forwarding to 1999, and Napster<\/strong> appeared, with one centralized server and centralized client databases (where everybody could see everybody\u2019s full collection). It was shut down by the copyright industry in a move that was the first in a long string of mistakes.<\/p>\n

A few months later, a competitor named DirectConnect<\/strong> appeared, which quickly got many protocol-compatible clones. Thus, the servers had decentralized to many different servers \u2013 but the clients still served their full database, which presented a legal weakness, and a file was transferred between one source and one destination at a time, which presented an efficiency weakness.<\/p>\n

In response to this in turn, BitTorrent<\/strong> was developed and released in the summer of 2001. It decentralized the client databases and the transmission, so nobody could see the full shared catalog of another peer. And\u2026 well, the innovation basically ends at that point.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take that again: when BitTorrent was developed, not only did Facebook and Twitter not exist, but the world didn\u2019t have modern mobile phones or the very concept of apps on mobile phones.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want an idea of just how old BitTorrent is, consider the fact that it was released in the same summer as Windows XP (July 2 and August 26, respectively).<\/p>\n

There has been basically no innovation at all in the file sharing field after BitTorrent, and that\u2019s a problem on many fronts. The development that has happened has mostly been in the convenience field \u2013 like the ability to subscribe to certain TV shows using RSS.<\/p>\n

The one major security add-on is VPNs, and although they are tremendously useful in anonymizing and the best we\u2019ve got today, they are but one security layer on top of an old technology.<\/p>\n

Convenience or security?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s always a case to be made for user convenience if you want adoption of software. Popcorn Time,<\/em> for example, can be argued to be the most recent big innovation in file sharing \u2013 but it adds convenience only, and not one piece of security. If we\u2019re updating the security to account for the latest fifteen years, convenience may be nice, but it\u2019s not our main focus.<\/p>\n

The founders, operators, and spokespeople for The Pirate Bay have long argued that it\u2019s a weakness of the ecosystem that they\u2019re a centralized chokepoint. It\u2019s easy to see they\u2019re right in this. In the latest installment, Peter Sunde argues<\/a> that IPFS or ZeroNet would provide significant innovation \u2013 but much of this just builds another interceptable layer on top of legacy BitTorrent instead of doing what BitTorrent did: reinventing ground-up to meet a clear and present threat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to understand that developing a technology to protect dissidents in repressive regimes, and a technology to enable the nonprofit sharing of culture and knowledge, are one and the same thing \u2014 even up to where repressive regimes and the copyright industry use the same surveillance\/repression vendors.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Therefore, in this thought experiment, we\u2019re focusing on developing a technology to enable the free and safe<\/em> information sharing for dissidents in repressive regimes; a tool to safeguard human rights. As a bonus, we\u2019re also getting a general information-wants-to-be-free technology. (This is a common factor of the copyright industry, that they fight against basic human rights in order to enforce their monopoly. For example, the copyright industry recently complained<\/a> that TOR and bitcoin \u2013 two tools used to help dissidents in repressive regimes safeguard human rights \u2013 indeed \u201cget in the way\u201d of copyright monopoly enforcement.)<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019re focusing on making information anonymous and untraceable, you\u2019re doing the bulk of your transmission off the traceable Internet. You\u2019re using the fact that there are many clusters forming daily (if not hourly) of random sets of mobile devices (Androids and iPhones) that happen to come into physical proximity of each other \u2013 at subway stations, in buses, in parks. You use the fact that these can hold massive data amounts today, and that they can contact each other and transfer tons of data anonymously and untraceably in such spontaneous clusters, using low-energy long-range Bluetooth 4 as the most obvious transmission candidate. Thus, we have huge set of constantly shifting mesh networks (a supermesh) where nodes come and go, and carry data from one mesh to the next.<\/p>\n

When using a network like this, you would choose to publish a document or subscribe to a certain flow (maybe a series of documents from a dissident), and a peer somewhere \u2013 at a safe distance from you, many hops away \u2013 could choose to act as a gateway to the Internet, thereby making the endpoints truly anonymous and untraceable, not to mention uncensorable.<\/p>\n

As a funny observation, such a transmission technology would build more on the original AdidasLAN than it builds on BitTorrent, as the successful transmission of data depends on nodes being in physical motion through the day.<\/p>\n

Of course, as mentioned, such a technology could also be used to tell the mesh network to subscribe to episodes of a certain TV show, where those episodes would practically appear everywhere at once in a city with just a few gateway feeds into the supermesh in that particular city. That\u2019s a byproduct of developing human rights software, as observed earlier.<\/p>\n

Privacy remains your own responsibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BitTorrent was developed in 2001: today\u2019s file-sharing technology predates the launch of Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. In those fifteen years, surveillance and repression technologies have advanced massively. If we designed file sharing today to keep up with these developments, sharing technology would be an uncensorable, untrackable, and unidentifiable peer-to-peer mesh network between mobile devices. … Continue reading “BitTorrent is fifteen years old. What would a file sharing technology developed today look like?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[250,1],"tags":[35,218,33,1195],"class_list":["post-2846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-news","tag-bittorrent-2","tag-decentralization","tag-file-sharing","tag-torrenting"],"yoast_head":"\nBitTorrent is fifteen years old. What would a file sharing technology developed today look like?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BitTorrent was developed in 2001: today's file-sharing technology predates the launch of Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. 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