In my previous post I discussed Exeem. Exeem is (or actually will be for it hasn’t been launched, just announced) a p2p network for sharing, rating and commenting torrents.
What is a torrent? A torrent is a small file which is used for thebittorent p2p file redistribution system to identify a certain file, or files you can download. You first need the torrent for a file/folder before you can download it.
The major problem with this is that it is impossible to use a bittorent client itself to search for the downloads you want, therefore a lot of sites have been created over time which contain huge searchable collections of torrents. One of these sites was suprnova.org, which has recently been terminated due to legal issues.
As I elaborated in my previous post Exeem probably will suck. So someone will need to do stuff right by making an alternative.
What issues would have need to be solved to create such a p2p torrent sharing network?
- No centralized client list, most p2p networks were terminated because they had a centralised tracker to which a client connected to receive the file list and all the users available for a certain file. Instead of a centralised server every single client should tell other clients who else is in the network and what files are there. When giving every client a buildin list of IP’s it can update these by querying these for better IP’s. By rating an IP by uptime and connection bandwidth a big changing group of frequently online users could provide the other IP’s and port search queries for the rest.
- Searching, how to handle a search query? At this moment our client is connected to a few big clients who are frequently online in their neighbourhood, lets call them super nodes for now. When we send them a search query they would look in their cache whether they got the result and if not they look in their own torrents to see whether one of those matched the query and if it doesn’t they’ll just forward it to another a-bit-smaller supernode. The problem with this method is that one query could travel a huge amount of nodes and when you are connected with a good bandwidth you are doing nothing more than passing through queries to other nodes. To solve this the query feedback (when they found a result) should contain the source along with the estamated amount of different search queries the node which had the result can provide. By doing this a shortcut can be formed by one client if it finds a node which either has a lot of files searchable or which has an enourmous cache and offcourse along with that is online often and has a neat bandwidth
- Rating Alongside every torrent you download or expose for upload there would be a meta data file containing a description, rating and comments on the torrent itself. The problem with this system is that descriptions and ratings can change and it is very hard to keep every instance of a torrent on the whole network synchronized. It is possible to send a message through the network to the original node from which you received the file with the new comment message, or you could search for the torrent again by unique id and message the nodes found to have the torrent too. All these methods still include a lot of passing through messages.
- Privacy
- Client side ‘hacking’, When everyone would use the default client which automaticly selects super nodes and lets people pass through queries everything will work fine. The big problem is that it is very possible that people would start using illegal client applications which would just leech from the network. To incorpirate methods to get rid of leechers would work when most people are still using the default client, but when people massivly start using illegal clients the network won’t block itself anymore but would certainly get rid off itself for everyone is leeching. This is the major problem that could happen to this p2p network which heavily relies on the fact that everyone should help others whether they like it or not by proxying, caching and passing through various queries to maintain privacy and decentralization.
I’d be rather interested in how exeem will address these issues. I guess they would just outrule client site hacking by incorperating various encrypting tricks in their protocol.