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Not exactly. The only mention of an SDK on the Bittorrent site is part of a "device certification program", that would undoubtedly involve paying Bittorrent in exchange for licensing their now proprietary information and some offical seal of approval. There is no mention of open source projects being able to see/use any changes in the protocol. Luckily, I assume that most bittorrent trackers (public or private), will ban any incompatible official client if the protocol does change, rather than adopting the official client and abandoning all of the others.

We're talking about two different things. You're assuming that average people, when faced with two options, will pick the difficult one with no benefit to themselves, magically listening to an inconvenient person telling them that the easy option is "amoral". I'm more concerned with how Stallman will get people to actually listen to him. At this rate, he's bound to have as much success as the anti-whalers.

If your goal with life is improving society rather than achieving personal success, this works perfectly fine. It's just about the same choice that Stallman made and it's the same choice that thousands of free software programmers make when they use their spare time making software that the whole society benefits from.

Besides, Stallman has on numerous occasions mentioned ways to make a living while making free software, and many of the aforementioned free software programmers use these. Making private software (software that will never be released to the public, intended for use in only one place), doing support, making donationware or doing something other than programming all make you a living, whilst avoiding making proprietary software.

Technically, BitTorrent was written in Python first. Azureus (despite people's complaints) is a huge and fully-featured client (and server!), so it's a good example of how Java can help make a hugely complex application that runs fairly fast in comparison to C/C++ or similar.

You can't be serious.

My thoughts exactly. So you can no longer download legal things on BitTorrent like Linux ISOs... or the movies you can legally buy on BitTorrent

What a joke!

http://bittorrent.com/

Sarcasm aside, I noticed even with someone else's "legit" copy (I wouldn't call sony a legitimate business any more) on their DVD player that could play it, there was an extremely annoying faint rectangular pattern moving from right to left across the screen almost all the time. Anyone else noticed it?

http://www.bittorrent.com/feedback and the service
feedback@bittorrent.com

http://www.bittorrent.com/feedback and the service
feedback@bittorrent.com

If you're talking leading INNOVATORS, Bram Cohen and BitTorrent are notably absent. BitTorrent is IMO absolutely the most novel and fascinating idea that was released straight to open-source. Their funding also ranks up with the other people mentioned. So why were they omitted?

Why is everybody posting "I have them... I might post them if you are interested".. do you want us to beg or what??

Just in case you don't know how to make a torrent, here's a guide for windows.

http://www.bittorrent.com/guide.html

download link if you don't have it

http://www.bittorrent.com/download.html

If you have linux, e.g. Fedora, then it's installed by default and should be even easier.

Why is everybody posting "I have them... I might post them if you are interested".. do you want us to beg or what??

Just in case you don't know how to make a torrent, here's a guide for windows.

http://www.bittorrent.com/guide.html

download link if you don't have it

http://www.bittorrent.com/download.html

If you have linux, e.g. Fedora, then it's installed by default and should be even easier.

I know people will hate me but check http://www.bittorrent.com/ the 'Official" site. That is what Media Execs/Law Agencies see when they wonder what the heck is Bittorrent.

For example, Civilization III "Gold Edition" (remember there is freeciv, opensource!) is Number 1. I didn't hear Sid Meier posting it to bittorrent for free distribution.

I am evangelising Bittorrent in every legit way possible, some morons even accused me of being "Bittorrent author" on Versiontracker OS X but currently, Bittorrent.com does everything to prove it is piracy software.

"It appears to me that they are doing everything that they can to keep BitTorrent as legitimate as possible in the eyes of the public..."

No, sites like LegalTorrents and even BitTorrent.com itself are "doing everything they can." ISOHunt puts absolutely no effort into maintaining legitimacy; when you visit a tracker site and see that the top stuff mirrors the top ten movies, CDs and games, it's pretty clear that the owners care not one whit about being "legitimate." Plus, the name "ISOHunt" is a pretty poor choice if you're trying to specialize in legal torrents.

If they had wanted to create a tracker for "legimate" content, they could have. Others have. But there's very little money in that business model. There's money in piracy, so that's the direction they chose.

"show me another North American-run online music store that has major label content and no DRM"

http://www.bittorrent.com/
And the best part is their subscription price.


DISCLAIMER: yes I know Bittorrent is NOT a real online music store. It's called humor so, Lighten Up Francis...

If that's your concern, use the official BitTorrent client.

It's Open Source, written in Python, and the code is there for you to see.

I suppose there will be some who will do the following on their PS3's..

wget http://download.bittorrent.com/dl/BitTorrent-4.20. 9.tar.gz

tar -xvzf BitTorrent-4.20.9.tar.gz

cd BitTorrent-4.20.9

python2.4 setup.py install

"you could have every reality TV program at your fingertips for a little less than the cost of an average house."

It's not just the big studios. Smaller non-profit festivals are reaping huge exposure and benefits from allying with BitTorrent.

Every year for the past seven years, there's a film making festival called the Duke City Shootout in Albuquerque NM. The idea is that writers from all over the country submit a 10-12 page script, seven of the best get picked out, and the Shootout brings them to Albuquerque to help the writers film their scripts.

No, not pro writers. Guys like you and me. (Well, depending on who you are, it might just be me.)

Respected professionals in the film world (read: Morgan Freeman) are heavily involved behind the scenes, and some of them mentor the crews on the set. One week of madness later, you've got yourself seven brand new indie success stories and a whole lot of exhausted, happy people.

The Duke City Shootout is super cool, and a great place to get your hands on new and interesting video gear. It's literally top of the line digital tech. Apple, BitTorrent, Intel, and a host of other companies are footing the bill so that they can show what can be done by dedicated, creative amateurs with a little guidance and the right toys.

BitTorrent is one of the sponsors this year. They're going to distribute the winning films for free, and they've even got a backload of winners from years past. Admittedly it's not like downloading a complete cinematic experience -- the Duke City Shootout download will, for example, finish the day you start it.

Check it out for yourself: Duke City Shootout home site, and the BitTorrent host for the last year's winners.
</shill>

Well, you could read up on contributory copyright infringement, safe harbor provisions and other elements of US copyright law.

Oh come on!

BitTorrent.com struck a deal even with MPAA a while ago, to make this thing legal:
http://bittorrent.com/

Now tell me, how the fuck is this providing any less of a safe harbor for copyright holders?

Well, you could read up on contributory copyright infringement, safe harbor provisions and other elements of US copyright law.

Oh come on!

BitTorrent.com struck a deal even with MPAA a while ago, to make this thing legal:
http://bittorrent.com/

Now tell me, how the fuck is this providing any less of a safe harbor for copyright holders?

1. Emule - This is one of the best we found out there. Hint (Search for server.met on google to update your server list)

2. Bearshare - Nice Gnutella client, lots of good hits

3. Limewire - Another Gnutella client. It even works on the Mac!

4. Shareaza - A beautiful Gnutella client with no spyware.

5. BitTorrent - Perfect for downloading movies, or that latest linux distro

6. KaZaa - Old favorite. Oh yea - Aussie users, you can't download - Yea Right!

7. Azureus - BitTorrent client that works on Mac, Linux, and Windows 8. Morpheus - Wow. They are still around? Wha happened!

9. Gnucleus - Open source Gnutella for you freeloading open source hippies out there - Yea I am talking about you

10. Napster - Ah, just put this one here to see if you are still reading, and I guess for shits and grins too

So there you have it folks. These are slim pickings. Get um while they still work!

Well, good luck finding the singles of the sam quality for less.

It isn't really that hard.

Err.. you mean for less, like free, right?

he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography

For your next act you should rant about how Tim Berners-Lee is actually in league with the phishers and scam artists who run websites on the internet. Or how Bram Cohen is personally sharing every song, book, game, and movie ever created, all at the same time.

Using BitTorrent or any other P2P (Peer-to-Peer) software do not make you a criminal. Manufacturing a knife or using a knife will not make you a criminal. Its how you use it. Are you using it for cooking or any other legal activity OR are you using to killing people.

BitTorrent uses a wonderful concept to deliver large content over the Internet (see how it works). Again it can be abused by distributing and downloading illegal contents such as pirated music or movies.

Recently I downloaded an evaluation version of multimedia centric Linux OS named Tomahawk Desktop using BitTorrent.

If not for BitTorrent, its impossible for the company to distribute it over the Internet or for me to download it. It's license allows the evaluation version of the Tomahawk Desktop to be given to others free of charge. While downloading via BitTorrent, you are giving part of it to others free of charge. So, how can I become a criminal by downloading legal content via BitTorrent?

“But for cpu intensive stuff it's a bit slow.”

I am not sure, maybe we can ask Bram Cohen to find out.
I do know that it is written in Python, and it uses GTK for its GUI.

I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers.
Sell your idea to ebay, they might like you. (and the highest bidder wins!)


  If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included?
That's easy, BitTorrent.


  How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers.
1) Visit homepages of said OSS
2) Get the sources
3) Right-Click Ctrl-V
4) Get headache integrating code from multiple projects^W4) Discover 'magical' missing libraries^W4) Consider rewriting everything with existing code as reference^W4) Give up^W4) ????
5) Profit!

These lawsuits will be very different from those in the past. Torrent spy and Isohunt both do not host any files of thier own, as they are just indexes of torrent trackers (which hold the actual data to where the file is located).

The difference here is that Lokitorrent, or suprnova even were both hosting the torrent files themselves.

I remember reading a story here on slashdot that the MPAA was forcing Bram Cohen, (the creator of bittorrent) to remove his search engine from his http://bittorrent.com/site. This was due to the fact that Bram's search engine listed copyrighted materials. What's interesting that that if you go to Bram's site now, and search for say "Metallica" you will find files from amoung other sites, "torrentbox.com". Cohen seems to be getting away with what isohunt and torrentspy are doing quite well.

> Oh, or you could use swarmcasting (for example, BitTorrent). It's not as good, but tends to
> mean bandwidth usage is more localised (because clients will tend to connect to clients close
> to themselves in network terms).

No, BitTorrent doesn't care about where peers are. It only cares about how fast they are uploading. If ISPs didn't cap upload between subscribers then the clients would definitely prefer local peers.

In any event, BitTorrent and CacheLogic have announced a caching system so ISPs can reduce the border traffic from BitTorrent transfers.

use, display, frame or utilize framing techniques to enclose the Sites, or any individual element or materials within the Sites, including without limitation, the BitTorrent name, any BitTorrent trademark, logo or other proprietary information, the content of any text, or the layout and design of any page or form contained on a page without BitTorrent's express written consent;

1. US: http://video.google.com/

2. Rest of world: http://www.bittorrent.com/

3. Profit!

Hmmmmmmmm...

I'd recommend something like rTorrent or even the original BitTorrent for both robustness and low resource usage. CLI torrent programs will always be far less resource-intensive than a full-blown GUI like the non-free Windows ones or other popular programs like Azureus.

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

so does the bittorrent authors know or care that Allpeers is using their name in their advertising?

Anyone know if these two struck a deal, or if Allpeers is just using the bittorrent name to get eyes on their new product?

I think I read Allpeers is encrypted, and if i remember corrently BT is not (I could be wrong).

That really isn't the way to word an email on such a topic to a corporation, you need to be more formal...
-------------
To Whom it may concern,

I have noticed that you are shaping packets (*are they shaping, or are they blocking the traffic?*) which you identify as being BitTorrent traffic (http://www.bittorrent.com/). I assume your reasoning behind this is that BitTorrent traffic accounts for a very high percentage of overall bandwidth usage on your network and your assumption that all BitTorrent traffic is of an illegal nature.

However your actions are affecting many completely legitimate uses of the internet and are making your service severely crippled for many of us. For instance, the most popular online game in the world at present is World of Warcraft (WoW). This game, as most do, supply occasionaly patches and updates which require downloading of sometimes quite substantial volumes of data. BitTorrent makes this method faster for the end users (myself included), and reduces the load on the company's servers also, allowing more people to download the content in a far shorter time. Apart from this use, which is impacting me the most, there are many other items transfered using BitTorrent which are just as legal and useful to your paid subscribers.

I ask you to reconcider your blocking of this traffic, else I would like to be released from my contract to you with no penalty as you are no longer providing the service which I initially signed up for.

Sincerly,

Yournamehere!
--------------

Something along those lines anyway... (spell checked of course)... and I would lay off the legal crap... nothing will turn off a tech support or customer support officer more than some little kid (whether you are or not, that's what they'll see you as, trust me... I have run an internet provider's customer support centre) claiming that they know something about the law when really they don't... it just makes them instantly go "We've got another RIAA nut here...." "Really? Send them the pre-canned response".

Threatening to end your contract with them and demanding to be released without penalty will get you far more action than vague mentionings of cans of worms and lawsuits.

BitTorrent!

Wikipedia is a good choice, especially given the founder having just been murdered by the wife of that stupid Op-Ed columnist. I find it ironic the way this turned violent given how outraged he was at being associated with the Kennedy assassination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorr ent_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_tabl e http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html

Considering that according to http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html they don't need a tracker per se, just a link on a site/blog. So...I'm fairly certain that this can be simply seen as a token gesture towards "what was" instead of "what is" or "what will be" in the torrent world.

sometimes a 90% solution is good enough ...

You maybe right but isn't this more like a 10% solution falling to a 0% solution after people realize the movies they want aren't listed on bittorrent.com?

Most people know to use google (movie title filetype:tor) to find torrents.

Plus bittorrent is released under an open source license so Cohen's no longer in control of the code.

Perhaps he's duping the studios -- gimme so money and I'll help you fight movie sharing, knowing full well removing links from his site won't do much in the long run but he can get some cash in the meantime.

http://www.bittorrent.com/FAQ.html#corruptdl

How do I know the download isn't corrupted?

BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing (SHA1) of all data. When you see "Download succeeded!" you can be sure that BitTorrent has already verified the integrity of the data. The integrity and authenticity of a BitTorrent download is as good as the original request to the tracker. Checking the MD5/CRC32/other hash of a file downloaded via BitTorrent is redundant.

http://www.bittorrent.com/ ;)

Whenever there's a possibility of a Slashdotting...

They had to hget the right Cohen...

Not Bram Cohen (something abbour torrents...)
Not Job Cohen (Amsterdamm== ... )
not leonard cohen for distributing copyrighted material. (although he does have an license for his material....)

well, some millions buy you a item low on this list.

If you're going to use that, you might as well use this: http://www.bittorrent.com/

The combined install/live DVD allows you either to install Ubuntu permanently on a computer, or (by entering 'live' at the boot prompt) to try Ubuntu without changing your computer at all. There are three editions available:

Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Edubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

BT uses SHAfor their hash algorithms.

From the Wikipedia article:

The SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) family is a set of related cryptographic hash functions. The most commonly used function in the family, SHA-1, is employed in a large variety of popular security applications and protocols, including TLS, SSL, PGP, SSH, S/MIME, and IPSec. SHA-1 is considered to be the successor to MD5, an earlier, widely-used hash function. The SHA algorithms were designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and published as a US government standard.

Unlike the hashing algorithms that Kazaa used, SHA is a strong hashing algorithm. SHA is used a number of important cryptographic algorithms, so if the media industry is going to break it, the United States government will be shaking in their boots.

You won't have to be worried about that anytime soon. The NSA is on our side here.

For starters, why not make a trackerless bittorrent-like network? Oh well, back to the land of unicorns and castles in the air. :(

Trackerless torrents are already supported, even in the official client.

If you're asking for a eDonkey-like thing with BitTorrent as the underlying protocol instead of the FastTrack network, that already exist too in the form of eXeem.

However, from my experiences, it's about as good as eDonkey in efficiency. That's the problem with less centralized networks. Since it's so easy to just seed yourself, people start seeding 20 copies of seemingly the same thing, where half of them were maybe misnamed torrents, and the rest 10 are forming groups of 5 instead of one group of 50, causing the speed to be about 10% of that on a centralized and more controlled tracker.

Also because such UI's basically encourages seeding and downloading from multiple sources, a lot of users may seed 5 things at once and leech from 10, and you run into eDonkey's problems with unfocused transfers. You think "yay, I found something with 20 sources", and then you see each source had about 2 kbps to spare for that specific torrent, since it's so easy for those to just start a lot of different downloads at once.

Socialism? Have you not read the paper (pdf) (google HTML version) on tit-for-tat that uses economic models from game theory as a basis for the bit torrent protocol? It's pretty capitalistic in my opinion.

I'm not 100% certain, but I have a vague feeling that you really don't understand BitTorrent. You don't have to leave the client open after you've downloaded your file. You are sharing bits and pieces of the file you're downloading as you're downloading it. For more information on the actual protocol and it's design, visit here.

AC because I moderated...

It doesn't sound like you're really clear on how BT works... so I'll sprinkle excerpts from the BT FAQ in with my own comments.

IMO is the whole tracker/seed deal. This part should have been made transparent to the point that users didn;t have to see or understand it. I personally never saw it as being that good of a system in the first place. It is not elegant nor does it lend itself to people using the software as it is intended.

How is this opaque? If BT is installed, I click on a BT link (which I need not understand), BT opens and begins downloading. I fail to see how eDonkey/gnutella/kazaa are "more transparent" than this.

As for needing a tracker & seed, how do other P2P's beat this? You can't download from shareaza unless at least one person is "seeding" there, either, and you can't search the network unless you connect to a peer (who works as your "tracker"). If anything, BT is distilled P2P, simpler than the others, because it omits the whole search/index system, and targets one file at a time.

The whole BT thing is a good idea for software releases and large files people are looking to download from a single site, say I go to a distro site and have a choice of FTP/HTTP/BT

Yes.

but to use it for P2P is just useless in my eyes.

Please describe for me how you could NOT use BT for P2P sharing. BT is a P2P program because you are downloading the file from peers who are sharing it.

BT doesn't include a search & index system; it has always been intended to use the WWW for search and index, as opposed to including these features in the client, like gnutella, kazaa, etc.

The whole Zen "the interface is no interface" thing was a little unsettling too as I had no idea that my downloads were being slowed by my firewall back when BT first came out until I used a version that showed that there was a problem.

So you had a problem with the first version of BT, that was fixed in subsequent versions. And didn't you just ask for an interface where users don't have to understand the guts?

I still think there is a place for BT and software like it, but not for P2P filesharing.

You download pieces of files that are shared by peers. There is nothing else to it; that is P2P. If you have an alternate definition of P2P I'd love to hear it.

As much as I hate to admit it, I like having n00bs and clueless users on my system so I can access stuff easier and faster.

Yes.

BT was more for the tech savvy and they tend to be smart enough/greedy to never seed a download unless they happened to walk away from a download that completed.

Peachy, because it's not just the clueless n00bs that are uploading.

***

From the FAQ:

What is BitTorrent uploading from my machine?

Pieces of the file you're currently downloading. BitTorrent trades pieces you have with pieces your peers have.

I don't want you stealing my bandwidth! How can I stop it from uploading?

You could hack the source to not upload, but then your download rate would suck. BitTorrent downloaders engage in tit-for-tat with their peers, so leeches have very little success downloading.

***

So, you can't DL from BT without uploading, unless you're using some 1337 hack which would definitely put you in the tiny minority. Furthermore, constricting your upload bandwith narrows your dl bandwith, which nobody likes.

I find that with most files I download, I end up with a >1 ul/dl ratio--even if they stop immediately after completion.

That's right, no matter how greedy and tech-savvy I am, short of hacking my own client I will be uploading. Compare this to every other client I've used, where I invariably set

So, a legitimate provider can just keep that initial seed running, rather than stop it after a few uploads; if they run the seed on the system that would have run the HTTP server for a HTTP download, your worst case speeds are close to HTTP, and your best case speeds are higher.