Slashdot Mirror

You mean BitTorrent?

skye

Not necessarily. Consider etree, for instance. Etree specializes in trading live music from trade-friendly bands such as the Grateful Dead and its sucessors, Phish, etc. However, etree trades involve lossless formats such as FLAC or Shorten, which take far more bandwidth than MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.

FTP and Web servers serving these files tend to be overloaded, so a peer-to-peer solution such as BitTorrent can be very handy for such trading.

Can I FTP the second season of west wing yet? No? Okay then

You can get many TV shows you might have missed by using BitTorrent .

This site has a list of links to various sites which contain TV shows available through BitTorrent.

A West Wing episode is available here (The West Wing - s04e16 - California 47th [ftv].mpg.torrent) (but you need to have installed BitTorrent prior to clicking on that link).

I don't follow West Wing so I don't know whether that's from second season, and your comment is accurate -- that's the only one available from that site. One other is The.West.Wing.S04E14.Inauguration.Day.Part.I .

Enjoy!

I don't know why, but no one has bothered to suggest something more cutting edge, like Bit Torrent.

animatrixlgfinal_dl_mov.torrent

Since the main site seems to have been hit hard by this slashdotting, try getting it from this BitTorrent site; Please leave your download window open as long as possible after finishing the download to help out others getting the file.

BitTorrent is a peer to peer file swarmer. You can get the client from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html; it is Free, open, and does not contain ad/spyware; versions exist for *ix, win32, OS X, etc.

Anime. Unlicensed episodes which are not illegal to distribute because there are no licensees outside of Asia. At 150-200 megs per episode, you'd be able to fit quite a few series into 150GB.

An excellent source for unlicensed anime epsiodes, subtitled in English, is AnimeSuki, where they're downloadable via BitTorrent - you know, the P2P App with Brains. Downloads are usually quite snappy.

As an added advantage to collecting unlicensed anime, it's usually quite fun to watch. The downside is that once a series becomes licensed, you have to stop sharing it. Right now, there are several good series being released. I recommend Naruto, Mahoromatic and Wolf's Rain.

Sorry, I forgot to include a link to the software.

The first page you linked doesn't link to the Windows client - it links to completedir which is for serving up files only (although the dfirections it gives give the impression that it's linking to the client - if you are or know the maintainer of that page, you may want to change it/let them know).

You can get the Windows clients from here.

Since Slashdot had to link to the FTP, maybe this will help lighten the stress on the mirrors : http://tacos.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/BT_BSD5.0/ has BitTorrent files for the i386 release ISOs.

BitTorrent is a peer to peer fileswarmer. It's Free and Open Source, and comes in flavors for *ix, win32, and MacOS X. Clients are avaiable @ http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ ...

Once you have finished the download, please keep the window open as long as possible so that others can get the file as well. Thanks !

The download might be a little slow at the beginning, but as more and more people hop on, it should get really fast. Just give it a couple of minutes.

Yeah, it's called BitTorrent. If only this sort of thing would be built into browsers like Mozilla standard, there would no longer be a reason to have the /. effect.

There are ways to protect P2P networks from sabotage. One utility, BitTorrent, uses a cryptographic-quality checksum on file fragments to eliminate non-authentic pieces. Once one downloads a valid ".torrent" definition file, and BitTorrent reports the download as having succeeded, one is guaranteed that file is complete and non-corrupt.

You can get more information at http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/.

Hi there ...

Since even the mirrors are swamped : Go fetch BitTorrent from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html (there are packages for Linux, Mac OS and Win32 avaiable, right next to the Python source), then click on this link :

http://a.wirebrain.de/exeter/exeter.torrent

BitTorrent is a peer to peer file swarming application. You upload the file you're downloading. This way, the more people there are, the faster you can get the episode. A couple of friends and me are seeding it.

If your download starts out slow, please wait a couple of minutes. It should pick up, especially once you start uploading.

The P2P program BitTorrent has survived slashdots before, this one should be no match :)

Someone should setup a tracker, and make a torrent of the files. I will, if no one beats me to it, which I rather hope. Downloading from slow mirrors at 5KB/s here.

The Web was designed to work well with caching, particularly at organizational firewalls and peering points. It scales really well, and if you work inside a big company, or use a medium-sized ISP that has one, the first time somebody retrieves a given page, it's there for the next N users, and the bigger N is, the more chance that the first person got the page before Slashdot killed it. I've generally had much better success reading slashdotted sites from work, where I catch a cached version at the proxy, than from home. It requires a bit of computing horsepower at the firewall or gateway, but that's surprisingly cheap, and if bandwidth still costs you money, it can cut down significantly on costs when lots of people look at the same static content. It's obviously less useful for dynamic content, unless there's an easy way to tell if the dynamic content is the same for multiple viewers, but most web sites have content that's mostly static most of the time.

Akamai built a model that sells caching to content providers rather than viewers, which was technically interesting, and similar things have been done by their competitors such as AT&T, Digital Island, and Speedera, but if you're not doing a high-volume commercial site, and didn't expect to be slashdotted, it's the wrong model. Google's caching is fine, if Google catches it before Slashdot does and Slashdot actually points to it, but that's pretty rare. BitTorrent does a nice job of P2P caching and distribution of large files (its target application is things like CDs and big software distributions, and you'll find it used by some of the ETree Jam Band Music Download people - Bram's tested it for respectably-sized numbers of simultaneous downloaders (I think a few hundred, which is pretty big for CDs.)

If you look up "cache" in Google, the first entry you get is for Squid, which is also the first entry you get if you look up "squid".

If I publish something on a web site, it's because I want people to see it. If that means that alot of people want to see it, oh well. Such is the price of potential success...

But what I find more interesting is that technology has existed for some time that could all but eliminate the problem.

The Internet is comprised of logical peers. Why are we using a purely client/server model for web sites?

Once a packet has been downloaded, it's then available to be served to other systems. All you really need is a method of co-ordinating it all.

Bit torrent has tremendous potential - imagine serving hundreds of copies of a gigabyte file per day, with decent transfer rates - over a 128k DSL line.

It's possible! (and no, I didn't write it, or even know who the guy is)

When the porn hosters discover this one out, it just might become a standard!

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

If you had clicked through a few of the links you would have come across BitTorrent which is currently running a widescale distribution of the latest RedHat release ISO images using a decentralized swarming distribution network.

For a limited picture of what future decentralized peer networks can accomplish you need only use your imagination.

This is still relatively new technology with a lot of room for growth and extensible uses.

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU IN A HURRY... A- R- T- I- C- L-
E-. -- S-
U- M- M-
A- R-
Y-

One thing Cringley hints at is a coming boom in popularity and capability of truly decentralized peer networks. It is the fully and highly decentralized network architectures that the Microsoft group credits most with resilience against any kind of legal, technological or political attacks.

We are starting to see some of these technologies emerge, awaiting integration into flexible infrastructure that allows fast, easy and efficient distribution of data, content or otherwise, between peers on a local and global scale.

The end result will be a combination of a number of technologies seamlessly interoperating like:

- distributed hash tables

- decentralized search

- swarming distribution

- wireless networks ... and many others.

It is nice to see the word get out: You cannot control the flow of digitial information in decentralized peer networks!

4of12's suggestion would let the rootservers run a server that's only accessible from known (and presumably important) addresses, such as the DNS servers for the big ISPs. That would take care of the most important uses of DNS, since most people get their DNS queries answered by their ISP's servers, either from cache or from recursive queries. Letting the big ISPs do zone transfers from a protected net would preserve that. (Without zone transfers, an obvious attack is for the zombies to look for bogus000001.com, bogus000002.com, etc.)

Beyond that, DNS queries and zone transfers aren't the only way to send the information around. DNS A-record data compresses well (Unfortunately, DNSSEC data doesn't, and it's much bulkier.) And everybody wants the same data, so multicasting can be an efficient way to transmit it (using your favorite reliable-multicast application.) A back-of-the-envelope guess is that the dot-com namespace would compress to somewhere between 100-300MB, which would take 10-30kbps to transmit it in a day - and most of it has a TTL that's much longer, so you could handle it efficiently with incremental updates. Another alternative to multicast would be a peer-to-peer app that's designed for handling big files, like BitTorrent. (BitTorrent's designed more for static content rather than dynamic, so you'd need some file naming scheme for fetching today's version.)

P2P most certainly DOES have legitimate applications... Ever hear of Bit Torrent?

Essentially, the idea is this: When you are downloading a file, when you receive a packet of data, you now have that packet of data, and there's no reason you can't immediately share that packet of data.

So, people downloading something from a Bit-Torrent capable site are themselves distributing the content... as it is being downloaded!

The end result is that a huge number of clients can download content (iso images, etc) from a site without increasing the total bandwidth usage of the site by much at all.

Check it out - it's pretty amazing!

Two comments and the link (and possibly an intercontinental internet pipe) has been slashdotted!

The question of a cache should not be met with a vague grumbling about "content owner permission" rights.

Stop being so damned irresponsible! Cache the complete first page of any linked articles!

Hell, this could even be done without slashdot footing the bill for the extra bandwidth. Before posting an article:

(1) compress the first page of every article link to a single file.
(2) share that through a peer-to-peer system such as bittorrent.

It would work. Everyone would win - slashdot readers and linked sites. AND it would be a Genuinely Good Use(tm) for the peer to peer tech.

----

Tech notes:

Internet Explorer can save complete pages as a single .MHT compressed file - there must be something else equivalant that works with all other browsers - hell, even make it a standard zip file with the .slash extention and associate that extension with a script or batch file that uncompresses and views when clicked on.

Bittorrent: It's seriously underappreciated, and - the part I love - it ONLY shares the CURRENT FILE that you're downloading. As soon as you close the "file download" box when your download is done, you drop out of the peer to peer network that was made specifically for that file. It is neat.

1. What do you think the legal (or appropriate) uses of MP3 technology should be?
ok this is gonna be long. EAsy distribution of music fcor promotional purposes. CUstom cd's with your favorite songs(from cd's you legally own). Hooking your computer into your stereo for parties(not ever having to change cd's is nice). I can provide some more example but I'm pretty sure the slashdot crowd can provide more examples.
2. We all know the RIAA complains about the illegitimate uses of P2P technology. Since its most prevalent usage is (by the RIAA's definition) illegal use, what are some applications of the technology that the P2P crowd can use to swing the tide in its favor?
distribution of opensource/opendomain works. combating the slasdhot effect with things like bittorrent
3. The DMCA is frequently seen as a flawed piece of legislation which is easily abused and so broadly worded that such abuse is unpreventable. Despite this, what positive or useful elements can be taken from the DMCA and used to formulate a new law that would do what the media companies want without infringing on consumers' rights?
THose two goals are mutually exclusive
4. An argument frequently levied at the RIAA and MPAA is that they are more than content to label the large majority of consumers as thieves and pirates. What can the RIAA and MPAA do to change this? How can these organizations polish this image up?
NOt treat legitimate customers like thieves and criminals(some may be but not all of them are)
5. With laws such as the DMCA and possible future legislation such as the CBDTPA, many consumers feel that their freedoms to enjoy the entertainment they purchase are being slowly eroded away by content companies. What rights (other than the right to listen or view) do you feel that consumers should have with media they purchase?
THe right to time shift. TO change between medias. TO play their media on the devices that they choose. THe ability to enjoy media that they purchase without being tracked by anyone. TO not be assumed to be criminal.

That's explained in the protocol document.

BitTorrent has real, working leech resistance, with no fancy certs at all. It just uses tit-for-tat.

While it may make you feel authoritative to simply dismiss the technical problems of decentralized trust, that doesn't make them go away - Noone has to date gotten a decentralized cert system to work, period, and I predict noone will within the next decade.

Just to show you there's no hard feelings, I have e-mailed you a copy of this great new game I have called Grand Theft Auto 3.

This eventually lead to spammers sending viruses--and several groups, Owners Protection, Anti-Spam, etc. where created to blacklist spammers those users. A guy I worked with registered a new Audiogalaxy account every couple months in order to map user ID numbers (which where numerically sequential) into a ballpark figure of the date in which the user registered, and you had to be an Audiogalaxy member for a few months to get into certain groups. This was all to prevent spammers sending unsoliciated music to the entire group, but all-in-all the "group" philosophy of Audiogalaxy was one-of-a-kind. It was wonderful.

(Michael--the owner of AG--was working on limiting which members could send files to the groups, but he never got around to it before the demise from the RIAA. Of course, AG group's analogy in this case--mailing lists--,which I'm sure you are aware, can have sending restricted to certain users, thus avoiding spam. Spam is now irrelevant, I only mention it as a footnote in Audiogalaxy history.)

Not only could you join groups to have the owners share their favorite albums (often, sometimes compilations) with you, you could join so-called "free-send" groups where anyone could send anyone any file. That was kinda neat, if you had a nice song you could send it to the group and see what others thunk, especially if you're the one that recorded it. I learned about plenty of independent musicians this way.

And the perhaps most important thing that came out of Audiogalaxy's groups is: you got 0-day. Before The Eminem Show came out, I vividly remember hundreds, even thousands of fellow fans joining, eagarly waiting for the album to come out. When it dropped, members of our sending group got it first. I left my satellite on 24/7, and it starting downloaded immediately within hours of its release. I was amazed. Audiogalaxy has beaten IRC. No other P2P technology has shined so well in this regard, in fact, P2P is often now looked upon as a place to get old stuff, not 0-day.

That's not to say there is no room for improvements. On the contrary, there are plenty of improvements which could be made on the old SMTP protocol. Audiogalaxy, being peer-to-peer, was smart enough to download from other peers once they picked up the file, alleviating uploading from the original sender. This meant someone with connections but a 56K modem could leak The Eminem Show to an AG group, and it would be sent to a couple people. Those people would then be sharing it for others. Eventually, the entire group had it! And this is what was intended; if you didn't want the CD you didn't join that group. (Joining and leaving groups was easy).

Didn't mean to write a book there, but I hope I proved my point. Push technology is kick-ass. Forget your silly pull FTP and HTTP! Its good, but I want to subscribe to a warez mailing list, and get warez when it comes out. I have a fast enough connection, I laugh at all those sysadmins who say their servers can't handle >5MB attachments. Mine can, and the warez community will be able to, without a trace of a doubt.

As aside, the NNTP protocol behind Usenet seems to be similar to Audiogalaxy groups, but not similar enough. The peers are not individual users but individual dedicated servers. Usenet is also way too uncontrolled, even with moderators. I'd prefer SMTP mailing lists. Now we just need to find a way to make SMTP attachments be distributed over willing users...hey look! Bit Torrent!.

Warez by mail. You heard it here first. (Note that although warez has a negative connotation, especially legally, it is a big sucker of bandwidth. And once warez pioneers the P2P email, the world of legal uses will follow!)

BitTorrent works great for distributing ISOs and videos to large audiences without huge bandwidth costs...

This could be a lot easier if P2P had it's act together.

BitTorrent

why aren't more people using bittorrent when they're trying to distribute 100 meg files? there would be no bandwidth shortages then..

Anybody wanting start coding such a thing? :)

Do go read about BitTorrent, though - it does use a number of the ideas you've mentioned for efficient distrubtion.

How about BitTorrent? The more people offering content with it, the greater utility it will have. (And perhaps an answer to the /. effect?)

That was BitTorrent, and although I am a big fan of it myself, it will suck at streaming audio, because you will most likely _not_ download the first part of the file first, which is really nice for that chronology correct streaming effect.

Swarmcast is cool, but it sounds like you're talking about BitTorrent.

BitTorrent

Thankfully, I haven't gotten a single piece of mail pestering me about the license since I switched away from public domain, even though MIT is almost as permissive.

I did do one slightly controversial thing - I capitalized the legal discraimer properly. Usually it's all caps, which I think is ugly and pointless. I did leave the part where it says "AS IS" in caps though.

BitTorrent development, by the way, is proceeding apace. The first mature release, with a finalized protocol and no phoning home on startup to make sure it's still a current version, will probably be released within the next few weeks.

You can get the BitTorrent installer for windows by running this file. You can then download the url given above by clicking on this link.

If they had used BitTorrent to host the file, their bandwidth problem would be solved (or at least improved).

We've had several large deployments of files which are a couple hundred megabytes and up, getting sustained downloads of a couple hundred downloaders at once, serving off a dsl line, and it's worked well.

By the way, BitTorrent, Swarmcast, and OCN all check secure hashes under the hood, so data integrity isn't an issue.

http://130.237.161.56/NWN_Tools_BETA.EXE

AusGamers
(Sydney Australia)

Notice how all open source peer-to-peer networks are mediocre? Freenet, Gnutella, you name it. Until a real implementation of Freenet, in ANSI standard C, is available, Freenet is not an option.

A new interesting peer-to-peer project is BitTorrent, presented at CodeCon and with source freely available. As their website suggests, BT is aimed at corporations rather than warez kiddies or music freaks. Basically, your server is used to manage the P2P connections and also to provide actual content. BitTorrent is the answer to high-bandwidth connections, cheaply.

A new Phantom Edit has just been released this month. True it's not by the same guy that did the original (LA) version, but then again the 2nd (NY) version was done by 2 unrelated people in NY, so I guess it makes sense for the 3rd (DC) version to be made by yet an other unrelated person.
You can find info about it at the phantom edit forum. Also you can download a 2cd VCD of the new version (thanks to Bit Torrent!) from me here.

Please DO NOT xfer files in bulk. Its running financially strapped. You should buy cdrom archives of the bulk of it before the site suffers and dwindles from bandwidth abuse.

Cryptome should definitely consider a P2P network for transfering their files. I'm thinking along the lines of BitTorrent. This would no doubt cut down on their "financially strapped" bandwidth while increasing it for everyone else downloading.

The reason to have a tree structure rather than a mesh structure is, quite simply, that a mesh structure is a lot harder to implement.

BitTorrent, which I'm the author of, does a mesh properly. It also has real-world deployment experience - it held up against slashdotting quite well. Thanks go out to everyone who's downloaded using it.

I'm a bit skeptical of their claims of robustness and QoS. I have real experience with the way real machines behave on the net, and trying to get real-time streaming working before you've even got file transfer going seems like putting the cart way before the horse.

There's also the issue of interrupts when peers higher up in the tree drop out or become slow, and then there's leeching problems...

As for doing simulations, I'd love to have a way of doing simulations which was at all useful, but my experience has been that real-world net churn and congestion behavior is just so funky that back-of-the-envelope calculations are as good as you're gonna get.

BitTorrent is...suspect. Even worse, its creator is a bit much. Please see, on the same site, http://bitconjurer.org/a_torturers_account.html and http://bitconjurer.org/it_happened.html. This Bram Cohen is One Sick Fuck.

BitTorrent is...suspect. Even worse, its creator is a bit much. Please see, on the same site, http://bitconjurer.org/a_torturers_account.html and http://bitconjurer.org/it_happened.html. This Bram Cohen is One Sick Fuck.

BitTorrent is...suspect. Even worse, its creator is a bit much. Please see, on the same site, http://bitconjurer.org/a_torturers_account.html and http://bitconjurer.org/it_happened.html. This Bram Cohen is One Sick Fuck.

From the author's site:

BitTorrent has been created by me, Bram Cohen as a full-time project over the last eight months.

• Are you getting pauses where no download is happening? If you are, please be patient, it should kick up again (or start in the first place) after a while.
  
• Are you behind NAT? People behind NAT may be getting worse performance, it's a complicated issue.
  
• How's your upload/download ratio? There are enough people now that you may see the phenomenon of getting about the same download rate as your upload rate - Cutting off your uploads wouldn't help with this, your peers would just get pissed off at you and stop uploading (I'm not kidding, it has tit-for-tat leech resistance.)
  
• Did you run into any technical glitches? It's still fairly young software, so there may be a few little things to iron out.
  

Burris