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Tribler, the decentralized, EU-funded torrent client comes of age
Tribler, if you're used to uTorrent, doesn't look like anything special -- but a brief glance reveals a 'Search' bar at the top of the program, which lets you search the swarm for torrents, rather than having to hit an external index like The Pirate Bay. It is this functionality -- this disassociation from any external source -- that makes Tribler the first truly decentralized BitTorrent client. Honestly, I don't understand the actual technology at play here. I'm not sure how a bunch of Tribler clients can discover each other without a central server, but who am I to argue with TorrentFreak?
Even without the decentralization, Tribler has some neat features. It's the first client with real 'spam control': users can up- and down-vote 'channels' of torrents, making sure the useless crud sinks to the bottom. The Download Squad favorite VLC is also included in the Tribler package, meaning you can watch or listen to torrents as they download. Check the Tribler wiki for more info.
Of course, Tribler is open source and free to download. It's even cross-platform, with Windows, Mac and Linux clients available.
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsCliffDec 9th 2010 9:19AM
Tax-funded eh? That is very interesting, considering everyone if after all the torrent sites. I hope that doesn't mean that they have some sort of build in tracking system, lol. But it sounds very feature-rich, I'll have to give it a try!
SachmoDec 9th 2010 11:46AM
From looking at section 3.2 of the paper (http://www.tribler.org/trac/raw-attachment/wiki/File/CPE-Tribler-final.pdf), Tribler seems keep a local cache of the files available on the network as part of a “Megacache.” The searches are done locally. This information about available files is spread to already connected nodes through a gossip/epidemic protocol they created called Buddycast (section 5).
Basically, Tribler keeps track of the files you know of (downloaded or were previously told about) and tells your Tribler social network friends and other random Tribler peers you've either seeded to our downloaded from. They in turn tell you about what they know.
That's all from a quick 5 minute read, so I could have missed something.
Sebastian AnthonyDec 9th 2010 12:45PM
@Sachmo Wow, that sounds very cool :) Thanks for the info!
Captain_HairyDec 9th 2010 8:43PM
There are a few problems with this add-on, notably that its detection of what is a pop-up and what isn't is sometimes slightly off. I've had a number of false positives, most notably recently being the scroller in the Amazon UK Black Friday deal browser. The left and right buttons would not work for me, until I disabled the add-on. The icon could do with displaying a tooltip or notification of some kind when a mouse click causes the pop-up, as many times I've spent a few minutes wondering where my log-in box or whatever has gone, before I remember to allow the pop-up, as the blinking indicator is very subtle.
Captain_HairyDec 9th 2010 8:47PM
@Captain_Hairy Apologies, I think LastPass just did a bad. Remind me to never use AutoLogin again.