Duality - A Social BitTorrent Client | Hacker News Reader

Duality - A Social BitTorrent Client

sukhbir.in

19 pointssukhbir24 comments

Nice idea. I have to say though, that with my extreme browsing laziness, clicking on those links is an incredible effort―why not make it all one page?

Hi. I did that so that people could go through the link they wanted, rather than going through a single long page. I will find a way to fix that.

Single page with anchor on titles + table of content at the top. As Wikipedia do for instance :-).

I have fixed this as requested.

Some BitTorrent clients can detect each other over a LAN (using Bonjour/Zeroconf and/or Local Peer Discovery) and prioritize traffic to/from each other locally. Thus, with a fast enough efficiency becomes less of an issue, although for large enough files physical media transfer might still be faster.

Of course, if your peers are on different LANs but in close physical proximity then physical media becomes much more useful.

That is correct. But to keep things simple, I didn't go into that. My main intention was to see whether people actually feel the need for this and how it would scale.

The idea of a "social" bittorrent client is not new in the sense that the Tribler client defines itself as a "social application" - see: http://www.tribler.org/.

I think tribler defines "social" as those who you have social ties to rather than those who you are geographically close to. It thus leverages "socialness" for security rather than speed.

I think the tribbler's definition is correct. In the modern era, we often don't have social ties to those geographically close to us. Duality should simply be called a "geo-aware" client - not a bad thing.

By the word social (and now I think it can mean different things in different context), I meant that it is based on the concept that there is content which is common to a given 'social' group -- let's say with your friends who use Linux, you can use it to download a 10 GB distro. The set of those friends forms a social group that will participate in downloading the distro. You are right about the 'geo-aware' part but then there is no geo-awareness; it's all manual.

I'm curious if you looked at Oneswarm[1], as it's built on the azureus platform (i.e. java) and utilizes PKI for authentication. It's not exactly lightweight, but I have setup ~30 friends, that I know and trust, on it in one tightly secure network.

For lightweight, on my router I have a transmission package (.opkg[2]) that handles files not available on my small network.

[1]http://oneswarm.org

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opkg

EDIT: Running Openwrt (Backfire, 10.03) on Asus RT-N16

Sukbir, you should post on forrst.com and/or find a designer buddy to help out. This would help a lot with popularity / catching on.

Hi. Given the feedback on the UI, I think my designer skills leave a lot to be desired! Thanks for the suggestion, I will work on improving this.

Cool stuff. But, meeting with 10 other peers each time i want something downloaded is not sexy. Also, since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing, i might as well let someone download the whole thing and then ask from them to give it to me.

Hi. This only works for peers within close geographical proximity and I used the word social because there are many times when you want to download something that some of your friends also want. Note that the intention is not to download small files, but files of very large sizes and common to the peer group. Also, countries where high speed internet is still a luxury (like India), this works because lots of peers are downloading the same content and thus contributing their (limited) bandwidth to the download.

I got more out of this comment than the original website. You should just say this in the first paragraph even before you refer to 'the paper'.

The 'Idea' page mentions this clearly. The third line in fact.

Between a reader and that 'third line' lie 5 lines, a click, and 8 more lines. Put the punchline first, it'll keep the reader reading longer.

It's a good idea; I just want more people to get it before they hit the back button.

Right, thanks for the feedback. I have updated it to better reflect the idea.

Yeah, that works great.

> since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing

What? Most of the things I torrent these days, I torrent specifically because I can download faster than any FTP/HTTP site will ever let me download.

So this only helps with things that me and my friends want, it doesn't change anything for things that only me or only one of my friends want.

Unless by friends you mean the extended circle of people that live nearby..?

Yes that is correct. Geographical proximity can mean anyone who wants the same data you want and you are in a position to exchange it physically. So it can a friend you meet in college everyday or your neighbor even.

Even if we have never met before? A social network for torrents?

If you have never met before but can exchange data physically -- why not! The requirements of this (summarized) are: 1. Common content, 2. Ability to exchange data physically. And if you are in a LAN, not even that.

Looks cool. Let me try it out!

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