Closing up parts of the BitTorrent protocol may have been a necessary business decision by Bram Cohen and company, but it’s motivated the people behind The Pirate Bay to start working on a new protocol to replace torrents.
TorrentFreak frets that they would have to change their name should a new P2P protocol emerge, and supplant the torrents we all know and love.
Love may be too strong a word. Tolerate, especially when it comes to finding those last rare bits of files that take hours or longer to locate, describes it better.
Closing off some of BitTorrent’s inner workings made The Pirate Bay fear that the open protocol has become too closed, and too subject to one firm’s control. They want to develop a new protocol that does away with problems that exist today, TorrentFreak said:
Another reason for a new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.
We have a suggestion for the protocol developers. The rare bit problem stinks, more than spammers, more than people who upload fake files. As horrifying as the P2P crowd will find the suggestion, Microsoft has reportedly figured out a way around this problem with their Avalanche project:
Avalanche’s improvement begins at the server where the file is first placed. Pieces of the file get encoded with an algorithm. The effect of that encoding allows each piece to know about the other pieces. Once a user collects enough encoded pieces, the file can be recreated.
No more rare bits frustrating file sharing. That would be a real improvement over BitTorrent.
