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Researchers Showcase Decentralized AI-Powered Torrent Search EngineErnesto Van der Sar, 25 Apr 11:49 AM Twenty-five years ago, peer-to-peer file-sha

Researchers Showcase Decentralized AI-Powered Torrent Search Engine Ernesto Van der Sar, 25 Apr 11:49 AM Twenty-five years ago, peer-to-peer file-sharing took the Internet by storm. The ability to search for and share content with complete strangers was nothing short of a revolution. In the years that followed, media consumption swiftly moved online. This usually involved content shared without permission, but pirate pioneers ultimately paved the way for new business models. The original 'pirate' ethos has long since gone. There are still plenty of unauthorized sites and services, but few today concern themselves with decentralization and similar technical advances; centralized streaming is the new king with money as the main motivator. AI Meets BitTorrent There are areas where innovation and technological progress still lead today, mostly centered around artificial intelligence. Every month, numerous new tools and services appear online, as developers embrace what many see as unlimited potential. How these developments will shape the future is unknown, but they have many rightsholders spooked. Interestingly, an 'old' research group, that was already active during BitTorrent's heyday, is now using AI to amplify its technology. Researchers from the Tribler research group at Delft University of Technology have been working on their Tribler torrent client for nearly two decades. They decentralized search, removing the need for torrent sites, and implemented 'anonymity' by adding an onion routing layer to file transfers. Many millions of euros have been spent on the Tribler research project over the years. Its main goal is to advance decentralized technology, not to benefit corporations, but to empower the public at large. "Our entire research portfolio is driven by idealism. We aim to remove power from companies, governments, and AI in order to shift all this power to self-sovereign citizens," the Tribler team explains. Decentralized AI-powered Search While not every technological advancement has been broadly embraced, yet, Tribler has just released a new paper and a proof of concept which they see as a turning point for decentralized AI implementations; one that has a direct BitTorrent link. The scientific paper proposes a new framework titled "De-DSI", which stands for Decentralised Differentiable Search Index. Without going into technical details, this essentially combines decentralized large language models (LLMs), which can be stored by peers, with decentralized search. This means that people can use decentralized AI-powered search to find content in a pool of information that's stored across peers. For example, one can ask "find a magnet link for the Pirate Bay documentary," which should return a magnet link for TPB-AFK, without mentioning it by name. This entire process relies on information shared by users. There are no central servers involved at all, making it impossible for outsiders to control. Endless Possibilities, Limited Use While this sounds exciting, the current demo version is not yet built into the Tribler client. Associate Professor Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the university's Tribler Lab, explains that it's just a proof of concept with a very limited dataset and AI capabilities. "For this demo, we trained an end-to-end generative Transformer on a small dataset that comprises YouTube URLs, magnet links, and Bitcoin wallet addresses. Those identifiers are each annotated with a title and represent links to movie trailers, CC-licensed music, and BTC addresses of independent artists," Pouwelse says. We tried some basic searches with mixed results. That makes sense since there's only limited content, but it can find magnet links and videos without directly naming the title. That said, it's certainly not yet as powerful as other AI tools. In essence, De-DSI operates by sharing the workload of training large language models on lists of document identifiers. Every peer in the network specializes in a subset of data, which other peers in the network can retrieve to come up with the best search result. A Global Human Brain to Fight Torrent Spam and Censors The proof of concept shows that the technology is sound. However, it will take some time before it's integrated into the Tribler torrent client. The current goal is to have an experimental decentralized-AI version of Tribler ready at the end of the year. While the researchers see this as a technological breakthrough, it doesn't mean that things will improve for users right away. AI-powered search will be slower to start with and, if people know what they're searching for, it offers little benefit. Through trial and error, the researchers ultimately hope to improve things though, with a "global brain" for humanity as the ultimate goal. Most torrent users are not looking for that, at the moment, but Pouwelse says that they could also use decentralized machine learning to fight spam, offer personal recommendations, and to optimize torrent metadata. These are concrete and usable use cases. The main drive of the researchers is to make technology work for the public at large, without the need for large corporations or a central government to control it. "The battle royale for Internet control is heating up," Pouwelse says, in a Pirate Bay-esque fashion. "Driven by our idealism we will iteratively take away their power and give it back to citizens. We started 18 years ago and will take decades more. We should not give up on fixing The Internet, just because it is hard." The very limited De-DSI proof of concept and all related code is available on Huggingface. All technological details are available in the associated paper. The latest Tribler version, which is fully decentralized without AI, can be found on the official project page. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. Vietnam Admits Manga Piracy Problem as New BestBuyIPTV Details Emerge Andy Maxwell, 24 Apr 09:09 PM The joint press release issued Monday by the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was unusual right from the start. Published early on Monday, even the timing was a break from the norm, but the content was even more surprising. Following criminal referrals by the Premier League and ACE, an operator of BestBuyIPTV – a platform that has appeared on the USTR's Notorious Markets report for the past five years – had been convicted at the People's Court of Hanoi. For a country where criminal referrals have traditionally disappeared into the ether, that could be a very big deal. Sentencing Details Are Somewhat Puzzling The press release clearly identifies Le Hai Nam as "the operator" of BestBuyIPTV. He entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay the equivalent of $4,000. Whether that was a straightforward fine or something else isn't clear, but more than $24,000 in illegal profits were identified, confiscated, and then seized by the state, while $12,000 in restitution was paid according to the indictment. Having learned more about the case and its challenges since Monday, the conviction seems to represent a minor miracle in itself. In isolation, however, there's an irreconcilable gap between the scale of the infringing and the punishment handed down. For reasons that aren't addressed, the court suspended the entire sentence, i.e no prison time at all. Assuming the restitution was split 50/50, that's $6,000 each for the Premier League and ACE, while $24,000 – the bulk of funds – simply evaporated into the public purse. It's a baffling situation, but clearly the conviction is the main prize here; it could be priceless. Legal Process Took Four Years Information made available to TorrentFreak suggests that the Premier League filed a complaint with authorities in June or July 2020, requesting an investigation and criminal prosecution of not one, but two Vietnamese nationals, one of which was Le Hai Nam. The other, whose name we'll refrain from revealing here, was considered the operator of BestBuyIPTV while Nam appears to have controlled the restreaming side of the business. Communications with customers show involvement in both reselling and direct sales, however. Estimates of how much BestBuyIPTV was making overall were not made available to us, but a third party estimate provides some basis to throw some figures into the air to compare with the $14,000 paid in restitution. In common with similar services who use subscriber numbers as part of their marketing, BestBuyIPTV's homepage boasted 900,000 subscribers, between 10,000 and 12,000 resellers, and around 2,000 restreaming affiliates. If we assume these figures are highly inflated and then broadly avoid counting revenues twice, a conservative estimate would run to a seven-figure sum, and quite possibly eight. The other remarkable aspect to this case can be viewed from two different directions. Either there was a complete lack of awareness on the security front, or maybe none of those involved actually cared. Given the technical skills on display concerning the service itself, the former seems to be out of the question. That leaves the latter, and probably one of the easier identifications for the Premier League in recent years. Of course, that's just a small part of the puzzle; gathering evidence to support convictions is painstaking work and more may be needed to bring this particular battle to an end. Official Admits Manga Piracy Problem As regularly reported over the past few years, Vietnam is home to some of the world's largest pirate sites. In the United States, with site-blocking legislation back on the political agenda, the spotlight is on FMovies, one of the world's leading movie and TV show streaming sites. For some time, however, copyright holders in Japan have been reporting several other Vietnam-based or Vietnam-operated platforms responsible for staggering levels of piracy. They specialize in Japanese comics, known as manga, and local cartoons, better known as anime. After recently renewing an anti-piracy partnership with Hollywood, publishers and anti-piracy group CODA are independently working flat out to solve what at times has looked like an unsolvable problem. However, unusual comments published in local media may suggest some light on the horizon. Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Pham Hoang Hai is the director of the Radio, Television and Electronic Information Testing Center, which operates within the Department of Broadcasting and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications. In comments published recently in local media, Hai said that around 100 websites are known to offer football matches illegally in Vietnam, together responsible for around 1.5 billion views in the 2022/2023 season. He also commented on sites dealing in other content, around 200 generating around 120 million views. And then something else, which as far as we know is the first public comment that acknowledges the scale of manga piracy traceable to Vietnam. "Recently, we discovered a number of websites with servers located abroad that violate comic book copyrights," Hai said. "There have been a number of Japanese organizations working with the Ministry of Information and Communications, reporting comic book violations. Wars in cyberspace have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to copyright owners." In isolation, that may not sound like a particularly important comment and with no context, a suspended sentence and measly restitution could easily be dismissed on the same grounds. Only time will tell whether these seeds will grow into something more substantial but in Vietnam, where signs of progress are extremely rare, any achievement in the right direction holds significant value. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. Are you looking for a VPN service? 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