BitTorrent ditches Tonto

Just recently, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol pulled a new feature out of the saddlebags: Trackerless Torrents. This feature removes some of the hindrances to hosting content, which will hopefully allow its use among a larger segment of the internet population.

For those that don't know, much of what makes Bittorrent great for downloading large files is all in the tracker. In a distributed downloading scheme like BitTorrent, everybody is sharing bits and pieces of a file (or group of files) with one-another in the hope that, at the end of the day, they will have the entire thing. Traditionally, the tracker, which resides on *one* person's server (usually the person that first decided to share), keeps track of everybody who is sharing and lets them find each other in that large ocean we call the internet.

Of course, the problem with this is that everytime you want to serve a file, you have to set up a tracker for it. I don't know how hard this (I've never done it, which I guess is kind've my point), but it's one more step between you and serving up rich, steamy content to anyone that wants it.

Enter the Trackerless Torrent... or rather, because the tracker is the real meat and potatoes, it's a bit of a misnomer to say that the new torrents are "trackerless." It's more accurate to call it a decentralized or distributed tracker. Now instead of just having one tracker, everybody participating is hosting their own mini-tracker. Why is this good? If a centralized tracker goes down, nobody can find each other. With a distributed one, as long as there are people sharing, they can find one another and continue downloading.

Now here's the rub, before this trackerless thing, you had to find the tracker (by getting the *.torrent file), but once you had that, you were golden. But now that everybody's a tracker, how do you find them in the first place?

The folks that made the Azureus BitTorrent client do this through a distributed (there's that word again) database --actually, they seem to have originally designed the distributed torrent and then Bram added it to the official protocol--and eXeem did it before them, but they aren't Open Source and allegedly bundle spyware... Anyways, this database lives on each person's computer and works by keeping track, on a personal level, of everyone you 'know' and then asking each of them who they know, and so on (like the Kevin Bacon game). Of course, there is still the problem of meeting that first person, so there are servers for that (it's called bootstrapping). But that's all the servers have to do: know people (or rather their computers). These servers don't actually need to know who they are or what they are doing... like downloading Grateful Dead concerts on the sly.

Azureus also implemented magnet links, which means that instead of having to download a torrent file to get connected, you can just click on a link (it's an ugly one though) to the database entry. This is great for say, embedding torrent links in a forum or comment, or scrawling them in public restrooms.

All of this adds up to enhanced ease of use. Now with the new distributed tracker there is even less keeping you from sharing with the masses. Right, Kemo Sabe?