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The BitTorrent (BT) is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol that was developed approximately 20 years ago, is becoming increasingly popular, and has been widely accepted. The BT-based mass deployment system can be used to improve performance and scalability that cannot be achieved by the unicasting, broadcasting, and multicasting protocols. However, when the BT-based system is applied in massive deployments, a major issue related to insufficient temporary storage space to store the whole system image before deploying needs to be resolved. Such problems arose because the system is deployed to the disk space, meaning that it cannot be used for temporary storage. Therefore, a novel BT-based solution that can remove the limitations caused by the insufficient temporary storage issue is proposed. The BT-based mass deployment system was designed by using the file system blocks transferring (FSBT) mechanism. The receiver of the FSBT mechanism can obtain the blocks of the file system from other peers. Then, those blocks will be written directly to raw disks or partitions. The sender of the FSBT mechanism can read the blocks of file systems directly from raw disks or partitions. Then, the blocks can be sent to other peers. This approach solves the insufficient temporary storage issue. The novel BT-based mass deployment system was tested and verified for the configuration consisting of at most 32 personal computers (PCs). To demonstrate the achievable performance of the novel BT-based system, comparisons were made between the novel program and the traditional multicast solutions, as well as other solutions for mass deployment. The proposed BT solution can be much faster than the multicast solution when deploying 11 machines or more. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility and superior performance of the proposed system. Furthermore, performance comparisons of the proposed BT-based mass deployment system versus other solutions demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solution. In the future, the BT parameters can be further optimized, and the simultaneous read and write features can be implemented to improve the deployment performance. In addition, the BT-based mass deployment system can serve as the basis for the development of other mass deployment systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We partner with a major multinational telecommunications provider to analyze the effect of subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services on digital piracy. For a period of 45 consecutive days, a group of randomly selected households who used BitTorrent in the past were gifted with a bundle of TV channels with movies and TV shows that could be streamed as in SVoD. We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment. Our findings are heterogeneous across households and are mediated by the fit between the preferences of households in our sample for movies and the content available as part of the gifted channels. Households with preferences aligned with the gifted content reduced their probability of using BitTorrent during the experiment by 18% and decreased their amount of upload traffic by 45%. We also show using simulation that the size of the SVoD catalog and licensing window restrictions limit significantly the ability of content providers to match SVoD offerings to the preferences of BitTorrent users. Finally, we estimate that households in our sample are willing to pay at most $3.25 USD per month to access a SVoD catalog as large as Netflix's in the United States. Together, our results show that, as a stand-alone strategy, using legal SVoD to curtail piracy will require, at the minimum, offering content much earlier and at much lower prices than those currently offered in the marketplace, changes that are likely to reduce industry revenue and that may damage overall incentives to produce new content while, at the same time, curbing only a small share of piracy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2875. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IEEE 802.11s introduces MAC-layer extensions to enable vendor-independent and inter-operable WLAN mesh networks. Featuring automatic device interconnection and routing, 802.11s networks provide a higher scalability, flexibility, and robustness compared to common centralized WLAN infrastructures. As logical Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks exhibit many of the characteristics of physical WLAN mesh networks on the application layer, it is obvious to consider solutions where both technologies interact to leverage robust distributed wireless applications, such as collaborative data distribution and synchronization in future smart cities. Envisioned scenarios include the administration and update deployment to specific device groups or the distributed caching and delivery of on-demand multi-media content to selected end points within a city-area wireless mesh network. Nevertheless, common P2P protocols, such as BitTorrent (BT), do not consider the structure of the physical underlay as they were primarily designed to be used over wired communication networks, such as large parts of the Internet. Hence, the default BT peer selection mechanism does not adapt to the network topology and varying medium utilization in wireless multi-hop networks. We present MeNTor , a set of optimizations to enable underlay-aware BT peer selection in WLAN mesh networks. It relies on cross-layer integration of default 802.11s information, only requiring minor extension of the BT application layer without introducing any MAC-layer modifications or traffic overhead. Our solution was evaluated in a 25-node real-world mesh test bed, using 10 different seed/leecher placements and comparing 18 parameter combination variants of MeNTor . Results show that average download times can be reduced by 30–40%, depending on the seed/leecher placement and parameter combination variant. Finally, we recommend the variant that performed best across all scenarios as prospective default configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a brief primer on copyright and FRCP 20 as well as P2P file-sharing and its evolution with the BitTorrent Protocol including the earlier case law that deals with swarm joinders and road leading up to the D.C. Circuit's decision; and mentions arguments against swarm joinders.

As researchers use computational methods to study complex social behaviors at scale, the validity of this computational social science depends on the integrity of the data. On July 2, 2015, Jason Baumgartner published a dataset advertised to include “every publicly available Reddit comment” which was quickly shared on Bittorrent and the Internet Archive. This data quickly became the basis of many academic papers on topics including machine learning, social behavior, politics, breaking news, and hate speech. We have discovered substantial gaps and limitations in this dataset which may contribute to bias in the findings of that research. In this paper, we document the dataset, substantial missing observations in the dataset, and the risks to research validity from those gaps. In summary, we identify strong risks to research that considers user histories or network analysis, moderate risks to research that compares counts of participation, and lesser risk to machine learning research that avoids making representative claims about behavior and participation on Reddit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with BitTorrent and then Bitcoin, decentralized technologies have been on the rise over the last 15+ years, gaining significant momentum in the last 2+ years with the advent of platform ecosystems such as the Blockchain platform Ethereum. New projects have evolved from decentralized games to marketplaces to open funding models to decentralized autonomous organizations. The hype around cryptocurrency and the valuation of innovative projects drove the market cap of cryptocurrencies to over a trillion dollars at one point in 2017. These high valued technologies are now enabling something new: globally scaled and decentralized business models. Despite their valuation and the hype, these new business ecosystems are frail. This is not only because the underlying technology is rapidly evolving, but also because competitive markets see a profit opportunity in exponential cryptocurrency returns. This extracts value from these ecosystems, which could lead to their collapse, if unchecked. In this paper, we explore novel ways for decentralized economies to protect themselves from, and coexist with, competitive markets at a global scale utilizing decentralized technologies such as Blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two fundamental and persistent problems that still confront BitTorrent are unfairness and free riding. This paper proposes O-Torrent, a P2P content distribution mechanism that is derived in principal from BitTorrent. O-Torrent deploys the concept of unidirectional transfers among groups of peers who are arranged in rings. Each peer in O-Torrent can construct one ring and admit peers to it. A peer who constructs a ring becomes its father and hence its administrator. O-Torrent is fair, each peer must upload and participate in the sharing process in order to download. It implements an effective Serve/Request incentive mechanism which enhances the robustness of the mechanism. Furthermore, our results suggest that O-Torrent performs more effectively in punishing free riding behavior and provides better performance than BitTorrent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In BitTorrent network, the bitmap is used to indicate the state of data blocks of file owned by a peer. Before the downloading of the file starts, the file provider first sends its corresponding bitmap to the requester to show which data blocks it owns. This provides the possibility for hiding the identity information in the bitmap and exchanging the identity information secretly. In this paper, we propose a bitmap-based steganographic handshake approach and implement a prototype system based on the BitTorrent network. In our prototype system, the network can operate normally. More importantly, hidden peers successfully exchange their identity information and accurately identify the other hidden peers without being detected by the regular peers. © 2017 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, a great part of Internet content is not reachable from search engines. Studying the nature of these contents from a cyber security perspective is of high interest, as they could be part of many malware distribution processes, child pornography or copyrighted material exchange, botnet command and control messages, and so on. Although the research community has put a lot of effort into this challenge, most of the existing works are focused on contents that are hidden in websites. However, there are other relevant services that are used to keep and transmit hidden resources, such as P2P protocols. In the present work, we suggest the concept of Deep Torrent to refer to those torrents available in BitTorrent that cannot be found by means of public websites or search engines. We present an implementation of a complete system to crawl the Deep Torrent and evaluate its existence and size. We describe a basic experiment crawling the Deep Torrent for 39 days, in which an initial estimation of its size is 67 percent of the total number of resources shared in the BitTorrent network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BitTorrent in efficiency content distribution is a major concern efficiency among the researchers of this field with respect to streaming video on demand (VoD) production. BitTorrent is not appropriate for real-time applications; therefore, in order to apply it in VoD it should go through the necessary changes. Most of the available studies have greatly focused on changes in methods regarding chunk and peer selections method regarding BitTorrent, which proposed methods have improved the quality of VoD to a certain degree, while, the effect of chunk size on quality of video has been of less concern among them. Noting the fact that the buffer is used on VoD, the specified time for filling the buffer would allow for appropriate management of the chunk's length. The Bit error rate and the time overhead of the operating algorithm parameters, somehow effect the chunk size. Because of bit error rate, the probability of correctly received chunks with great length is much less, that is, offering shorter pieces, while these pieces would lead to formation of more pieces in a buffer. The results indicate that a specific amount of time is required for obtaining the buffer's content, and it must be dividable into more chunks. Running algorithms for each chunk generate a greater overhead which would result in of the QoS reduction. This overhead would make the bigger pieces perform better. As for the opposite impacts of these two parameters on the chunk size, in this article the optimal length of the chunks is found by considering both the effective characteristic. This optimal length is an established balance between the correctly received chunks' rate and the greater rate of the buffer context obtained in a specified time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of copyright infringement has always been one of the most difficult issues to solve in our society. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of copyright infringement occurring through the medium of internet. Software, such as BitTorrent, have routed the ways for infringers to download copyrighted content through them without the fear of being caught. Courts of nations, such as the United States and the European Union, have no unified laws for determining whether providers of such software are liable for secondary copyright infringement. While the providers of the BitTorrent software claim it is a simple file sharing medium, authors around the world have criticized it as "a technology responsible for doing more harm than good." Lawmakers, therefore, have started considering the legitimacy of the BitTorrent software and the continuing role of its providers in contributing to the mass copyright anarchy. This article intends to propose a theory that clarifies the liability of the providers of the BitTorrent software for copyright infringement. This article argues that the providers of BitTorrent software should be made liable for infringing copyrights of people under certain specific The problem of copyright infringement has always been one of the most difficult issues to solve in our society. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of copyright infringement occurring through the medium of internet. Software, such as BitTorrent, have routed the ways for infringers to download copyrighted content through them without the fear of being caught. Courts of nations, such as the United States and the European Union, have no unified laws for determining whether providers of such software are liable for secondary copyright infringement. While the providers of the BitTorrent software claim it is a simple file sharing medium, authors around the world have criticized it as "a technology responsible for doing more harm than good." Lawmakers, therefore, have started considering the legitimacy of the BitTorrent software and the continuing role of its providers in contributing to the mass copyright anarchy. This article intends to propose a theory that clarifies the liability of the providers of the BitTorrent software for copyright infringement. This article argues that the providers of BitTorrent software should be made liable for infringing copyrights of people under certain specific [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many distributed applications, such as BitTorrent, need to know the distance between each pair of network hosts in order to optimize their performance. For small-scale systems, explicit measurements can be carried out to collect the distance information. For large-scale applications, this approach does not work due to the tremendous amount of measurements that have to be completed. To tackle the scalability problem, network coordinate system (NCS) was proposed to solve the scalability problem by using partial measurements to predict the unknown distances. However, the existing NCS schemes suffer seriously from either low prediction precision or unsatisfactory convergence speed. In this paper, we present a novel distributed network coordinate system (DISCS) that utilizes a limited set of distance measurements to achieve high-precision distance prediction at a fast convergence speed. Technically, DISCS employs the innovative robust nonnegative matrix completion method to improve the prediction accuracy. Through extensive experiments based on various publicly-available data sets, we found that DISCS outperforms the state-of-the-art NCS schemes in terms of prediction precision and convergence speed, which clearly shows the high usability of DISCS in real-life Internet applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the loosely coupled property of cloud computing environments, no node has complete knowledge of the system. For this reason, detecting a Sybil attack in cloud computing environments is a non-trivial task. In such a dynamic system, the use of algorithms based on tree or ring structures for collecting the global state of the system has unfortunate downsides, that is, the structure should be re-constructed in the presence of node joining and leaving. In this paper, we propose an unstructured Sybil attack detection algorithm in cloud computing environments. Our proposed algorithm uses one-to-one communication primitives rather than broadcast primitives and, therefore, the message complexity can be reduced. In our algorithmic design, attacker nodes forging multiple identities are effectively detected by normal nodes with the fail-stop signature scheme. We show that, regardless of the number of attacker nodes, our Sybil attack detection algorithm is able to reach consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an exact mathematical programming model and algorithm of the max-min fairness bandwidth allocation problem in multi-swarm peer-to-peer content sharing community. The proposed iterative method involves solution of LP and MILP problems of large scale. Based on real-world data traces, numerical experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm is computationally faster than an earlier developed one for larger problem sizes, and it provides better numerical stability. Moreover, even if its execution is stopped after some initial steps it still grants feasible solution with good approximation to max-min fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing can be generally regarded as the technology enabler for Internet of Things (IoT). To ensure the most effective collection of evidence from cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure, it is vital for forensic practitioners to possess a contemporary understanding of the artefacts from different cloud services and applications. In this paper, we seek to determine the data remnants from the use of the newer BitTorrent Sync applications (version 2.x). Findings from our research using mobile and computer devices running Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, iOS, and Android devices suggested that artefacts relating to the installation, uninstallation, log-in, log-off, and file synchronisation could be recovered, which are potential sources of IoT forensics. We also extend the cloud forensics framework of Martini and Choo to provide a forensically sound investigation methodology for the newer BitTorrent Sync applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary cloud is a new paradigm of cloud computing. It provides an alternative selection along with some well-provisioned clouds. However, for the uncertain time span that participants share their computing resources in voluntary cloud, there are some challenging issues, i.e., fluctuation, under-capacity and low-benefit. In this paper, an architecture is first proposed based on Bittorrent protocol. In this architecture, resources could be reserved or requested from Reserved Instance Marketplace and could be accessed with a lower price in a short circle. Actually, these resources could replenish the inadequate resource pool and relieve the fluctuation and under-capacity issue in voluntary cloud. Then, the fault rate of each node is used to evaluate the uncertainty of its sharing time. By leveraging a linear prediction model, it is enabled by a distribution function which is used for evaluating the computing capacity of the system. Moreover, the cost optimization problem is investigated and a computational method is presented to solve the low-benefit issue in voluntary cloud. At last, the system performance is validated by two sets of simulations. And the experimental results show the effectiveness of our computational method for resource reservation optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the BitTorrent (BT) has been one of the most efficient mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) non-realtime content distribution. Many approaches for streaming videos over BT have been proposed by modifying the piece selection policy to cope with the real time requirement. Most of them provide the continuity of video playback at the cost of the variety of pieces on P2P streaming networks. In this paper, we propose the novel urgency-aware BT streaming mechanism, called UR-Aware, which intends to enhance the video streaming efficiency over BT on P2P networks by balancing playback continuity and distribution of piece rareness. There are two sets for piece downloading, called Uset and Rset. The Uset contains the most urgent pieces of video playback, while the Rset contains the rarest pieces. Downloading bandwidth of a peer is dynamically allocated to the two sets based on the number of consecutive pieces beyond these playback position in Uset. Furthermore, to implicitly preserve the continuity of pieces for future playback, consecutive k pieces are grouped as a section which would be selected to insert into Rset based on its rareness. The experimental results show that the UR-Aware has the best performance among other BT streaming approaches in terms of video download time, piece late rate, and network throughput. In addition, the accumulated standard deviation of UR-Aware is closest to that of the native BT among those approaches, which also confirms the superiority of UR-Aware on video streaming over BT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fairness is one of the most important challenges that should be considered as a priority when designing a P2P file-sharing network. An unfair P2P network may attract free-riders, frustrate the majority of users, and consequently shorten the longevity of files. When BitTorrent protocol was first introduced, by suggesting new algorithms like tit-fortat or rarest-first and combining them with methods like choking and unchoking, it pushed fairness one step forward. However, BitTorrent did not bring a plenary solution and has its own shortcomings. For instance, neither this protocol nor other P2P protocols that we are aware of precisely indicate how seeders should be treated in their networks. Most of the time they dictate that seeders upload as much as possible. With this approach, seeders can easily be abused by free-riders. It gets even worse when we realize that for lack of a good infrastructure a lawful user may become a free-rider unknowingly. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem by suggesting a novel and universal method that can be implemented in current P2P networks. We show that by separating nodes into two groups of seeders and leechers and then implementing a simple pattern for seeders, we can improve fairness in P2P networks. Even though our algorithm is universal and not limited to a specific protocol, by implementing it on BitTorrent we show how it can be used in practice and how effective it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the users of a BitTorrent community participate in multiple swarms, usually simultaneously as uploader and downloader. Thus the inter-swarm aspect of the bandwidth resource allocation has high relevance in the algorithm design of deployed BitTorrent clients. This inter-swarm connections among the users of a BitTorrent community can be represented by a flow network of special structure. Using this representation it has been demonstrated that de facto solutions to the resource allocation in BitTorrent communities are suboptimal. In this paper we investigate this conclusion in more details using graph measures and optimization techniques. We find that BitTorrent communities are sensitive for removal of highly contributing users, that the inter-swarm connectivity can lead to different performance results, and that torrent selection mechanisms can hardly improve the average download performance of users. Regarding the theoretical optimum of the discussed problem we show that it does not necessary comply with the BitTorrent protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BitTorrent client application is a popular utility for sharing large files over the Internet. Sometimes, this powerful utility is used to commit cybercrimes, like sharing of illegal material or illegal sharing of legal material. In order to help forensics investigators to fight against these cybercrimes, we carried out an investigation of the artifacts left by the BitTorrent client. We proposed a methodology to locate the artifacts that indicate the BitTorrent client activity performed. Additionally, we designed and implemented a tool that searches for the evidence left by the BitTorrent client application in a local computer running Windows. The tool looks for the four files holding the evidence. The files are as follows: *.torrent, dht.dat, resume.dat, and settings.dat. The tool decodes the files, extracts important information for the forensic investigator and converts it into XML format. The results are combined into a single result file. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the consequences of the decision of the Federal Court of Australia in the case 'Dallas Buyers Club LLC v iiNet Ltd.' that revived the prospect of legal claims against the users of BitTorrent, a communications protocol of peer-to-peer online file sharing.

Scholars of rhetoric and writing have long recognized the mediated nature of rhetorical action. From Plato’s early indictments of writing as enemy of memoria to Burke’s recognition of instrumental causes to recent analyses of digital mediation, the study of meaning-making refuses one-to-one, transparent theories of communication, instead recognizing that there is more to rhetorical action than humans. This article follows the trail of Haas, Swarts, and others arguing that analyses of mediation uncover much about human motives, digital communities, and rhetorical action. I argue that technologies often function as rhetorical genres, providing what Miller characterizes as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” that occur in uniquely digital spaces. Working from sites of participatory archival creation and curation, I argue that invisible rhetorical genres operating at macroscopic levels of scale are central to shaping individual and communal activity in sites of distributed social production. To support this claim, I investigate two applications—a content management system called Gazelle and a bittorrent tracker called Ocelot—to demonstrate how largely invisible server-side software shapes rhetorical action, circumscribes individual agency, and cultivates community identity in sites of participatory archival curation. By articulating content management systems and other macroscopic software as rhetorical genres, I hope to extend nascent investigations into the medial capacities of digital tools that shape our collective digital experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform comprises three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint ‘swarms’ of followers, based on the BitTorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users. By leveraging existing and proven technologies, twister provides a new microblogging platform offering security, scalability and privacy features. A built-in mechanism provides incentive for entities that contribute processing time to run the user registration network, rewarding such entities with the privilege of sending a single unsolicited (‘promoted’) message to the entire network. The number of unsolicited messages per day is defined in order to not upset users. Security and scalability assumptions have been confirmed in a real-world deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BitTorrent splits the files that are shared on a P2P network into fragments and then spreads these by giving the highest priority to the rarest fragment. We propose a mathematical model that takes into account several factors such as the peer distance, communication delays, and file fragment availability in a future period also by using a neural network module designed to model the behaviour of the peers. The ensemble comprising the proposed mathematical model and a neural network provides a solution for choosing the file fragments that have to be spread first, in order to ensure their continuous availability, taking into account that some peers will disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User interactions are indispensable for any online network to thrive, especially for BitTorrent-like and Web real-time communication-based distributed online networks that rely on users' collective contributions instead of the help of central servers. User interactions provide fine-grained information for many applications, such as security enhancement and cooperation promotion. To date, several schemes for estimating user interaction strength in centralized online networks have been proposed. In contrast, we present design, deployment, and analysis of UISE for user interaction strength estimation in distributed online networks. Among the strong points of UISE is that it captures both direct and indirect user interactions, and that it scales with only partial information dissemination. We apply UISE to devise the first distributed scheme for online time estimation and we implement it into Tribler, a distributed online network for media and social applications like file sharing, streaming, and voting. We demonstrate the accuracy and the scalability of UISE with different information dissemination protocols and user behaviors using simulations, emulations, and a real-world deployment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hajek and Zhu (Stoch Syst 1(2):246-273, ) recently showed that the BitTorrent protocol can become unstable when peers depart immediately after downloading all pieces of a file. In light of this result, Zhou et al. () propose bundling swarms together, allowing peers to exchange pieces across different swarms, and claim that such 'universal swarms' can increase BitTorrent's stability region. In this work, we formally characterize the stability region of universal swarms and show that they indeed exhibit excellent properties. In particular, bundling allows a single seeder with limited upload capacity to serve an arbitrary number of disjoint swarms if the arrival rate of peers in each swarm is lower than the seeder upload capacity. Our result also shows that the stability region is insensitive to peers' upload capacity, piece selection policies and number of swarms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidences show that besides their incredible performance, private BitTorrent communities which employ credit-based contribution incentives can also confront with system seize-up. Although the sustainability of these communities can be established in a wide range of system parameters, it is still not fully understood under what initial conditions can this be assured. In this paper, with the usage of extensive simulation results, we investigate the effects of the file size and the impact of initial credit amount distribution in order to deduce further conditions of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an argument in favor of forming coalitions of peers in a data swarming system consisting of peers with heterogeneous upload capacities. In this paper, a coalition refers to a set of peers that explicitly cooperate with other peers inside the coalition via choking, piece selection, and capacity allocation strategies. Furthermore, each peer in a coalition exchanges data with peers outside its coalition via distinct choking, piece selection, and capacity allocation strategies. We first propose a simple Random Choking strategy for peers inside a coalition and develop an analytical model for studying its performance. Our model accurately predicts a coalition's performance and shows that the proposed strategy helps a coalition achieve near-optimal performance. Furthermore, our model can be easily adapted to model a BitTorrent-like swarm. We show that our Random Choking strategy significantly outperforms Tit-for-Tat and Unchoke-All strategies proposed in prior work. We also introduce a simple piece selection strategy, which significantly improves data availability within a coalition as compared to Rarest-First strategy employed in BitTorrent systems. Using cooperative game theory, we prove the existence of stable coalitions when peer population is fixed and each peer has complete information of other peers' actions and payoffs. When peers are allowed to freely join or leave coalitions, we propose a Cooperation-Aware Better Response strategy that achieves convergence of the dynamic coalition formation process. Finally, using extensive simulations, we demonstrate that forming coalitions results in significant improvements in the overall performance of a data swarm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Our publication of the BitTorious portal [1] demonstrated the ability to create a privatized distributed data warehouse of sufficient magnitude for real-world bioinformatics studies using minimal changes to the standard BitTorrent tracker protocol. In this second phase, we release a new server-side specification to accept anonymous philantropic storage donations by the general public, wherein a small portion of each user's local disk may be used for archival of scientific data. We have implementated the server-side announcement and control portions of this BitTorrent extension into v3.0.0 of the BitTorious portal, upon which compatible clients may be built. Results: Automated test cases for the BitTorious Volunteer extensions have been added to the portal's v3.0.0 release, supporting validation of the "peer affinity" concept and announcement protocol introduced by this specification. Additionally, a separate reference implementation of affinity calculation has been provided in C++ for informaticians wishing to integrate into libtorrent-based projects. Conclusions: The BitTorrent "affinity" extensions as provided in the BitTorious portal reference implementation allow data publishers to crowdsource the extreme storage prerequisites for research in "big data" fields. With sufficient awareness and adoption of BitTorious Volunteer-based clients by the general public, the BitTorious portal may be able to provide peta-scale storage resources to the scientific community at relatively insignificant financial cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing cooperation and protecting individuals from selfish and malicious behavior are key goals in open multiagent systems. Incomplete information regarding potential interaction partners can undermine typical cooperation mechanisms such as trust and reputation, particularly in lightweight systems designed for individuals with significant resource constraints. In this article, we (i) propose extending a low-cost reputation mechanism to use gossiping to mitigate against the effect of incomplete information, (ii) define four simple aggregation strategies for incorporating gossiped information, and (iii) evaluate our model on a variety of synthetic and real-world topologies and under a range of configurations. We show that (i) gossiping can significantly reduce the potentially detrimental influence of incomplete information and the underlying network structure on lightweight reputation mechanisms, (ii) basing decisions on the most recently received gossip results in up to a 25% reduction in selfishness, and (iii) gossiping is particularly effective at aiding agents with little or no interaction history, such as when first entering a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by application in BitTorrent-like Peer-to-Peer resource sharing system, we introduce the maximization and minimization semi-latticized fuzzy relation geometric programming problems with max-min composition in this paper. The objective function in the proposed problem in nonlinear and the feasible domain is non-convex. The maximization problem is converted into a fuzzy relation monomial geometric programming and then solved. However, this approach is not effective for the minimization one. The linear programming method is applied to deal with the minimization problem. A step-to-step algorithm is develop to carried out the linear programming method and tow illustrative examples are provided at last. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BitTorrent is nowadays the most common protocol to distribute contents through peer-to-peer networks. Because of its relevance, it is important to study and understand its behaviour and impact from several points of view, including those related to communication efficiency and security risks. In this paper, we analyse BitTorrent network focusing on the behaviour of shared resources. For that, we develop a monitoring methodology that allows to extract the time evolution of a sample of 1/256 of all the resources shared in the network. As a main difference with previous approaches, our methodology allows to monitor distributed hash table-based BitTorrent networks, that is, without considering trackers. We discuss the data obtained from a monitoring process carried out during 3 months, and as a result, we analyse the information of more than 70 000 resources. This analysis is based on four features: geographic dispersion, popularity, sharing duration and availability. Finally, we show the potential of our methodology by outlining an example application that consists of a detection system intended to identify anomalous behaviours in the sharing of BitTorrent resources. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-level linear programming problem subject to addition-min fuzzy relation inequalities is introduced to characterize a kind of optimization models in BitTorrent-like Peer-to-Peer file sharing systems. Based on some theorems, which contribute to the resolution of the proposed problem, we develop a novel algorithm to find the unique optimal solution. A practical application example is presented to illustrate the feasibility and efficiency of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, BitTorrent communities are rapidly evolving into private torrent sites (PT). PT sites have employed several incentive rules to improve the performance and availability of the system. Many studies have been dedicated for measuring and modeling the PT systems in order to better understand the new rules and their impact on the users' behavior in order to improve the usability of the system. These studies have been performed on different PT sites that differ in their implementation of the system and in their system's user incentive rules. Therefore, current measurement findings cannot reflect accurate results and, more importantly, the current conclusions may be biased. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of previous measurement studies on PT sites, while emphasizing the incentive rules employed and the interplay between these rules and corresponding objective factors. We evaluate the behavior regulation policies of the front-end website and the tracker and examine the semantics of provided data. Using this information we have designed a new crawling methodology and conducted a large-scale measurement study across four representative PT sites over a year. Interestingly, we find that most reported measurements have neither considered design goals, nor thought through the incentive policies and their interplay. This lack of awareness in turn may lead to inaccurate conclusions of system properties. For example, the Seeder to Leecher Ratio (SLR), which is reported in most of the available measurements, is routinely at least 16-45 % less than the real SLR because the sites ignored the 'partial seeders' in their calculation. This study aims to offer fundamental insights into designing an accurate methodology when conducting measurement studies on PT sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a novel BitTorrent (BT) technology, Private Tracker (PT), has received extensive attention from both academia and industry. Due to its huge amount of traffic volumes and users, it is essential to understand PT's characteristics regarding system management. In this paper, by studying the data crawled from a number of well-known PT sites, we performed an in-depth measurement and analysis of the PT system, in terms of resources and users' behavior characteristics. The analysis of the activity and age distributions of torrents indicates that the sequence of torrent activities followed a power-law distribution while the sequence of torrent's age followed a linear distribution. It was also found that the resources redundancy between any two PTs was larger than 60 %, which led to a substantial waste of storage space and power energy due to the lack of sharing mechanism among PT sites. Measurements on the users' behavior show that every PT site had a number of users with stable levels who contributed to the survivability and popularity of the site. Finally, based on the results, several drawbacks of PT system were identified, which are crucial for efficacious system management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the history, benefits and significance of using data caps as a mechanism to create artificial scarcity for selling blocks of data to consumers and content providers violating the network neutrality principles. Topics discussed include recovery of sunk costs for reinvestment, abuse of network capacity, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) suit against Comcast for manipulation of peer-to-peer (P2P) software such as BitTorrent.

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. in 2005, Internet users around the globe who engaged in copyright infringement had already turned to newer, alternative forms of peer-to-peer filesharing. One recent development is the "seedbox," a virtual private server rentable for use to download and upload ("seed") files through the BitTorrent protocol. Because BitTorrent is widely used for both non-infringing and infringing purposes, the operators of seedboxes and other rentable BitTorrent-capable virtual private servers face the possibility of direct and secondary liability as did the defendants in Grokster and more recent cases like UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Shelter Capital Partners LLC and Viacom Intern., Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. This Issue Brief examines whether the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) may shield virtual private server providers with customers running BitTorrent clients from potential liability for copyright infringement. It argues that general virtual private server providers are likely to find refuge in the safe harbor provisions as long as they conscientiously comply with the DMCA. In contrast, virtual private server providers specifically targeting BitTorrent users ("seedbox providers") are much less likely to receive DMCA safe harbor protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private BitTorrent community is becoming increasingly popular, and generates a huge amount of Internet traffic. In this paper, we present a thorough measurement study on a famous private BitTorrent community, CHDBits. We find that the content of torrents published in this community are highly available, although many torrents may have been released for a very long time, and we also obtain that users in most torrents could download at a high rate. By studying user profiles, we show that many users have participated in multiple torrents, thereby generating a great amount of upload and download traffic. The user profiles also reveal that almost all users maintain a high share ratio, and are willing to contribute to content distribution by spending more time in seeding than in leeching (downloading). Our study suggests that the bandwidths of a user have a significant impact on their behavior. Low bandwidth users are more likely to participate in the torrents with a smaller content size or a higher popularity; compared with low bandwidth users, high bandwidth users tend to participate in more torrents, but spend much less time in seeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BitTorrent swarms rely on reciprocative chunk exchanges among autonomously participating peers. It has been shown that BitTorrent native tit-for-tat mechanism cannot effectively discourage the peer strategic misbehavior such as free-riding and fake chunk attack. This paper proposes a hierarchical chunk cipher scheme based only on bits circular shifting manipulation. As such, encrypted chunks preserve a fraction of information entropy of original chunks that can be observed by the receiving peers directly, which is used for assuring authenticity of the encrypted chunks. Our hierarchical bits shifting scheme allows more flexibility on the fraction of information entropy exposed directly by the encrypted chunks, when compared to the single layer bits shifting scheme. Further, exact mathematical results between the hierarchical scheme and the single layer scheme are derived and analyzed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing copyright protected content without the copyright holder's permission is illegal in many countries. Regardless, the number of illegal file sharing using BitTorrent continues to grow and most of file sharers and downloader are unconcerned legal action to transfer copywrite-protected files. However, it is difficult to gather enough probative evidence to prosecute illegal file sharers in criminal court and/or sued for damages in civil court. Further, there is a lack of research on investigation techniques to reveal illegal BitTorrent sharers. This is because the role of the server in BitTorrent networks has been changed compared to servers in conventional P2P networks. As a result, it is difficult to apply previous investigation processes for investigation of conventional P2P networks to the investigation of suspected illegal file sharing using BitTorrent. This paper proposes a methodology for the investigation of illegal file sharers using BitTorrent networks through the use of a P2P digital investigation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Centralized silos of genomic data are architecturally easier to initially design, develop and deploy than distributed models. However, as interoperability pains in EHR/EMR, HIE and other collaboration-centric life sciences domains have taught us, the core challenge of networking genomics systems is not in the construction of individual silos, but the interoperability of those deployments in a manner embracing the heterogeneous needs, terms and infrastructure of collaborating parties. This article demonstrates the adaptation of BitTorrent to private collaboration networks in an authenticated, authorized and encrypted manner while retaining the same characteristics of standard BitTorrent. Results The BitTorious portal was sucessfully used to manage many concurrent domestic Bittorrent clients across the United States: exchanging genomics data payloads in excess of 500GiB using the uTorrent client software on Linux, OSX and Windows platforms. Individual nodes were sporadically interrupted to verify the resilience of the system to outages of a single client node as well as recovery of nodes resuming operation on intermittent Internet connections. Conclusions The authorization-based extension of Bittorrent and accompanying BitTorious reference tracker and user management web portal provide a free, standards-based, general purpose and extensible data distribution system for large 'omics collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what the author refers to as a deficiency in the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure regarding the BitTorrent computer network protocol and copyright trolls which are law firms, attorneys, and other organizations that acquire the copyrights of particular works such as films and then file lawsuits against copyright infringing Internet users. Legal settlements and extortion are examined, along with the legal aspects of peer-to-peer technology and file transfers.

Private BitTorrent community, known as 'BitTorrent Darknet' or 'Private Tracker (PT)', has received much attention in the research literature recently. Different from public BitTorrent community, PT can only be accessed by its registered members, and it can provide ultra-high downloading speed due to its effective Sharing Ratio Enforcement (SRE) incentive mechanism which stimulates members to contribute content as much as possible. Although the downloading performance in PTs with high Seeder-to-Leecher Ratio (SLR) is much better than in public BitTorrent communities, our measurements show that SRE mechanism can induce 'Poor Downloading Motivation' problem for members who want to increase their sharing ratios to survive and thrive in PT. This problem may discourage PT members' enthusiasm from contributing to community. To improve sustainability of PTs, we adopt the Predator-prey model to analyze high SLR phenomenon, study the optimal stable SLR range to PTs. Moreover, we develop a queuing model to simulate the seeding/leeching process in a single torrent in PT, and try to maximize the swarming performance with minimum seeding peers. This solution can help PT achieve the optimal SLR range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we model the number of seeders during the initial stage of a file sharing process on BitTorrent networks. The initial stage is crucial for successfully identifying the initial seeder, who provided the source of the files on the Internet. Most existing BT models focus on different parameters in the steady state, which occurs at a later stage of a file sharing process. None of them are able to characterize the initial stage. In this study, we propose the first model on capturing the characteristics on the growth of the number of seeders during the initial stage on a BT network. Also, we derive a lower bound for the appearing time of the second seeder and the length of the stationary period. Our model suggests that the number of seeders remain stationary during the starting period of a file sharing process. When it enters the rapid-rising period, it increases more speedily as an increasing number of seeders are available for supplying the rarest pieces. The observed demarcation of the stationary period and the rapid-rising period is significant in identifying the initial seeder on a BT network. If the investigative work can be commenced within the stationary period, the chance of identifying the initial seeder is much higher. On the other hand, if the file distribution has entered the rapid-rising period, one can no longer determine which of the existing seeders is, indeed, the initial seeder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast-growing traffic of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, most notably BitTorrent, is putting unprecedented pressure to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To address this challenge, a number of P2P traffic management schemes have been proposed in recent years, among which caching and redirection are two representatives. Both of them have shown their success in theory and in practice. Yet, their implementations are largely independent, making the overall effectiveness sub-optimal. In this paper, we for the first time examine the joint implementation of these two promising solutions under a coherent framework, Tod-Cache (Traffic Orientated Distributed Caching). We show that the combination of caching and redirection can dramatically reduce the P2P traffic traversing across ISPs. Under this framework, we formulate the optimal caching and redirection problem, and show its complexity. We then present a highly adaptive and scalable heuristic algorithm which achieves close-to-optimal performance with much lower computational complexity. We extensively evaluate our framework under diverse network and end-system configurations. Our simulation results show that, under the same configuration, it can achieve at least 85 % of performance of the traditional cache with at most 1/10 of the device number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]