With all the bad rap the self-proclaimed “heir to Bittorrent” eXeem has been getting the past couple of months, I guess it was only a matter of time before the P2P community produced its own contender. Anatomic P2P is an interesting little project because it’s so classically open-source: bits and pieces of technology are borrowed from other successul projects and welded together Frankenstein-style into a whole new application.
At its core, Anatomic is a lot like eXeem in that it attempts to decentralize tracking, thereby returning the responsibilities (and liabilities) of filesharing to the actual users. But where eXeem had the kooky strategy of turning every user into a tracker (which even to a non-programmer would sound like overkill), Anatomic takes a slightly more sane approach: it has a SuperTracker entity that caches the IPs of all other (regular) trackers, similar to the way the Gnutella2 network works. So when a bit-torrent client tries to download a file, it doesn’t have to know who or where the trackers are.
In a way, it seems like the whole system is just adding a degree of complexity to a scheme that has worked very well in the past. However, current legal issues have forced Bittorrent to evolve beyond “what works” into “what is legal.” In the words of the developer: “The trackers and supertrackers know little about the files they are sharing [...] In the eyes of a tracker it is only tracking a hash and this is less incriminating. The tracker/supertracker cannot control what it tracks so it therefore has the same status as a router on the internet (in theory).”
Read the rest of the interview here. (via the P2P weblog)