People on TPB are promoting Tribler as a new decentralized, non-takedownable, open source file sharing network. I haven't tried this myself yet, but here's a link to the main site: http://www.tribler.org/trac. I'm downloading the source now to try it out.
The thing is, TPB is not only a collection of torrents. If it was just that, it is already mirrored several times on bitsnoop, isohunt, torrentz.eu and other places.
What is interesting about PirateBay are the comments, the description and (why not) their name and status.
I wish they'd split the "search" and "discovery" and the "download" and (rather novel) "play immediately" concerns. I'd prefer to keep using uTorrent for downloads, and there's not point in Tribler spending their efforts re-solving a problem that's been solved very well.
Also, there's a certain irony in the Tribler download not being available on BitTorrent - to the extend they had to take the site offline a few weeks ago due to excessive download traffic.
I don't think Tribler will solve all the problems and creates more issues for those less technically oriented. Until someone comes up with a novel bootstrap method that is truely decentralized and robust there will always be a single point of failure for peer networks.
"...and creates more issues for those less technically oriented."
I haven't used it much since I want a native client for my platform, but from what I've seen it's almost like an "App Store" with search-functionality and a one-click procedure to download. What makes you think it's harder to use than normal bittorrent-clients and sites?
I am technically oriented, but I was very aware of how easy it was: download, start (simple install, no config), wait five minutes, search, click download. Done.
What issues are not solved and what new issues are created?
"Our technology increases your tracability. Every Tribler software installation has a unique identifier based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography."
"We are constantly monitoring the Tribler P2P network using spider software. This will allow us to detect inefficiencies in our P2P software. However, it will also show us the occurence of illegal activities."
It doesn't have a clear date marking, but it refers to Feb 2006 as being in the future. But while that is worrying, how is it worse than being tracked by your IP? If you are mobile sure, but that's hardly a common use case for, erhm, scenarios where you worry about traceability?
Unless one goes through the 'installation process' anew each time one runs the software (this is of course all taking them at their word; I haven't actually analyzed the Tribler source myself), one can then be continuously tracked even when one's IP changes (not only during instances of travelling or being 'mobile', but of course in cases of users having dynamic IPs as well). The fact that one can thus be tracked across multiple IPs is precisely what makes this a cause for concern.
Add to that the statement that the entire Tribler network is 'constantly monitored' (cf. some organizations doubtlessly monitoring some torrent trackers, but it being improbable that every single torrent tracker is monitored), and one once again has a gross escalation of privacy erosion that surpasses the extent of mere IP-based tracking.
The Tribler bootstrap servers are not single points of failure. To bootstrap you just need to know the address of a single non-NATed peer. If the Tribler servers went down anyone else could setup their own and publicise the addresses. The overlay itself would survive.
