QBittorrent Support For BitTorrent 2.0 Is Looking Good

BitTorrent 2.0, defined in BEP52 all the way back in January 2008, is a big upgrade to the existing BitTorrent protocol. It uses SHA-256 instead of the now very insecure SHA-1 hash algorithm, it has a much more efficient directory structure in the .torrent files and the pieces of files within a torrent are represented by merkle hash trees. One potentially fun advantage of the new .torrent file format is that individual files within a .torrent get their own hash. That could be used to participate in two or more public swarms if two or more torrents happen to contain the same file(s). There is no code for such a cross-leaching feature as of today, but is in theory quite possible. BitTorrent clients have been very slow to implement the new BitTorrent 2.0 protocol. libtorrent-rasterbar 2.0, released in October 2020, was the first widely used BitTorrent library to full support it and all its features. The popular qBittorrent client, available for macOS newer than High Sierra, Windows 7+ and Linux, is built on the libtorrent-rasterbar library. The latest stable v4.3.3 release from January 2021 uses libtorrent-rasterbar 1.2.

Android Leftovers

• Android Auto split-screen support begins rolling out - 9to5Google

• Report: The JioBook could be Reliance Jio's first budget Android laptop

• Is MyJio Android App Violating Google’s Ad Policies?

• Top 10 Best Camera Android Apps – 2021

• Vivo Y70 review: a low-cost Android phone that won't let you down | T3

• Carbon 1 Mk II is an an all-carbon fiber composite chassis Android smartphone - NotebookCheck.net News

• Chrome may soon enter desktop mode automatically on some Android tablets | Laptop Mag

• India’s largest telco is working on a cheap Android laptop

• Huawei's dishonesty continues as it argues that people who call HarmonyOS an Android skin have no idea about software, despite admitting that its OS runs on AOSP - NotebookCheck.net News

NVIDIA 470 Linux Driver

• NVIDIA 470 Linux Driver Series To Be "Even More Wayland-Friendly"

  The next major NVIDIA driver series, the 470 release series, is slated to be "even more Wayland-friendly" but what all that encompasses remains to be seen. NVIDIA engineers already had confirmed that the DMA-BUF passing support will be in place for this major driver series. The NVIDIA DMA-BUF passing support is long overdue and should improve their Wayland compositor support will be part of the R470 driver series. This goes along nicely with NVIDIA working on proper XWayland support.

• NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver 455.50.10 rolls out for Linux

  Need the absolute latest special fixes? The developer-focused NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver 455.50.10 has rolled out and it includes quite a few fixes - including some just for Linux.