Tribler: 4th generation peer-to-peer technology

Johan Pouwelse
Delft University of Technology

We aim for a more virtuous society by transforming media and money. Our ideology-driven methodology is replacing speculation, volatility and greed with cooperation, stability and rewarding of goodness. Our first goal is creating a smartphone-based infrastructure which is capable of withstanding all known government attacks on media freedom and privacy. Second, based on this self-organizing infrastructure we are designing our bank-of-bits, aiming to alter the essence of capitalism (rich get richer) by abolishing compound interest rates and facilitation safe zero-cost money transfers plus lending.

During this talk the first prototype will be unveiled of our attack-resilient QMedia app for microblogging. QMedia goal for future versions is news dissemination from a single smartphone to an audience of millions in the form of microblogging, enriched with pictures and streaming video which is guarded against all known forms of government censorship such as cyberspace sabotage, digital eavesdropping, infiltration, fraud, Internet kill switches and especially lawyer-based attacks. We hope new Open Source developers will join our Internet-deployed project and help realize our QMedia goal for the end of 2012: building next-generation anonymity technology, founded on social networking, traffic hiding and a global reputation system.

For over a decade Delft University of Technology has been measuring and building P2P systems, aided by millions of Euros in research funding from the European Union and Dutch government. We are continuously improving our own attack-resilient sharing software called Tribler. With one million downloads, Tribler provides us with vital behavioral feedback of novel algorithms. Tribler is not dependent and completely decoupled from unreliable servers such as DNS servers, web servers, swarm trackers and access portals. Using fully self-organising P2P technology we aim to create an overlay which is unbreakable: the only way to take it down is to take the Internet down.

We dream of transforming media and money with five innovations we have developed within Tribler:

1. The Libswift P2P engine,
2. Dispersy elastic database,
3. Bartercast reputation system,
4. bandwidth-as-a-currency resource based cybercurrency, and
5. the Skynet V0.1 self-organizing and self-learning Artificial Intelligence engine (joined work University of Szeged) with a very limited form of self-awareness.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Dr. ir. J.A. Pouwelse is an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, specialized in Peer-to-Peer file sharing. He leads the P2P research team of a dozen people which created the Tribler P2P system. The Tribler group is the largest experimental research group in the field of P2P and responsible for several world-first innovations. With over one million downloads Tribler serves as a living laboratory and proving ground for next-generation P2P technology. Dr. Pouwelse is scientific director of P2P-Next and technical leader of QLective, EU projects with a combined research budget of 26 million Euro. Previously Dr. Pouwelse delivered a statement for the FTC in Washington, was a visiting scientist at MIT, and spent several summers at Harvard to study mechanisms for cooperation.

Contact information:

Johan Pouwelse
Delft University of Technology