May 31st, 2005
Is Rodi BitTorrent's Replacement?
Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It’s released under the General Public License (GNU). The client can be accessed here.
Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C’s IP address, not A’s. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C.
Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.
The person behind Rodi (the name means pomegranate in Greek) identifies himself only as LaryTet, an Israeli male living in Tel Aviv. He is publicizing his creation because he wants some help, both financial and technical, in making the user interface something that anyone can use.
Here is how he explained his situation to me:
Any help is greatly appreciated.
I am struggling to find beta testers. So far methlabs.org helped me here and there, but they are open source too, live from donations and have their own projects. Independent technical evaluation of the project would be nice too. I am not a network guru. I spent last 10 years in telecom.
If you decide to run "real-life" test you will need to arrange that. Contact me or post on methlabs.org or Planet Peer - guys there will help. Online docs are a mess of functional requirements/software requirements/design. Not everything you will find there is implemented and not everything is implemented as designed. In some places I used shortcuts to bring proof-of-concept fast. There is long thread on p2pforums.
Despite all these advances, LaryTet does not believe p2p technologies will stay ahead of the Copyright Police. "It depends on how tolerant ISPs are going to be to the ‘parasitic’ traffic," he told Integrity P2P. "Traffic analyzers can be very effective. Enforcement of this or that policy is technologically possible today and getting cheaper and easier every minute." When ISPs are content owners — as with AOL — there is a huge financial incentive to control IP access centrally. " I guess that Rodi will not survive 10 years, but I hope that some ideas from Rodi will," he concludes.
Personally I agree with LaryTet’s analysis. Faith in technology to trump the financial interests of the copyright industries is misplaced. I would much prefer a copyright compromise implemented through law, but right now a major political earthquake would be required for that to occur.
Meanwhile, the Copyright Wars continue, and Rodi is just the next weapon.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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