Heads up from Joi Ito on trackerless BitTorrent

I wrote here on Get Real in January about "BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: What? So What?" when there was a burst of excitement about eXeem, which promised a distrubuted version of the 'trackers' that looked after the bookkeeping of who held which file fragments.

Version 4.1.0Beta of BitTorrent now offers to simplify the publication of BitTorrents 'for the rest of us', claiming

Anyone with a website and an Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download!

While it is called trackerless, in practice it makes every client a lightweight tracker. A clever protocol, based on a Kademlia distributed hash table or "DHT", allows clients to efficiently store and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent.

When generating a torrent, you can choose to utilize the trackerless system or a traditional dedicated tracker. A dedicated tracker allows you to collect statistics about downloads and gives you a measure of control over the reliability of downloads. The trackerless system makes no guarantees to reliability but requires no resources of the publisher.

[tags: bittorrent, p2p, file.sharing]