Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla and BitTorrent?
mcrbids asks: "Recently, I submitted this bug report to Mozilla's bugzilla requesting the additional feature that Mozilla should support BitTorrent files natively, so that Moz could support inline image tags with BitTorrent, among other things, so that high-bandwidth sites can survive the dreaded 'Slashdot effect'. However, Torrents (and many other P2P suites) have been used largely for warez and porn. Do you think the potential politics behind this outweigh the benefits of BitTorrent, such as getting a full Linux distro with record download speeds?" Update: 04/29 16:16 GMT by C :One of the links in this article was removed at the request of a site administrator.
Providing inline support of a protocol does not a political issue make. That's like saying "FTP is mostly used for warez but also an excellent place to get distros."
First.
I think that there is the potential for much more with torrents, even though the main market for it at the moment is warez/porn. I think perhaps tv studios should take note of it as a potential distribution method for a "new market".
Aurelius (fp?)
BitTorrent generally doesn't work very well on small files. This is because clients tend to drop off too fast. In fact, you can calculate the "optimal filesize", that is, the length when even if the client exits right after finishing the file, the torrent will survive and sustain itself. I believe it is at around 1GB, but I don't have the figures handy. Mabye the guy who did the calculations will chime in sometime.
This brings another problem with BitTorrent - it doesn't work well unless clients are connected for a while after they finish the file. This could be "quick-fixed" by leaving the client open until it has sent at least one copy of the file out (or that many bits, your choice).
The third problem that it would have is that BitTorrent generally opens a whole bunch of network connections. Many of those are incoming (NAT people won't work as well), and many are outgoing. This large amount of sockets tends to make some of the cheaper commodity cards break. You see alot of these problems on the BitTorrent mailing lists.
Also, Porn has always been an early adopter of new technology. VCR tapes, DVDs and the internet are excellent examples. Because porn uses it isn't a reason to count the technology out.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
The discussion hasnt even teterred out, and its far from a clear thing. At best, its a misunderstanding/disagreement over how best to handle a new file format.
.torrent files is the same as any other media app - via a plugin.
At worst, its the Mozilla team saying (rightly) that the best way to handle
From the discussion on the bug report, it sounds like the torrent dev's havent made a plugin, dont realize the power of plugins, or dont want to make a plugin.
If there was a fully functional plugin that couldnt do some particular thing, that would be different. Instead, its just a standalone app, asking for the Moz team to 'link it up'.
Again, just my take on it.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Maybe it should be supported in squid.
Squid normally runs on a gateway machine and usually has better connectivity internally and externally.
It could connect better and provide the cache benefit both internally and externally. There would be no need to configure your browser to share files, while it might be possible on your proxy. Actually, squid almost does this with it's proxy-to-proxy protocols, which is almost like what adding BitTorrent would do.
p2p file sharing is great, and we all know why. But it has one serious flaw. Searching a p2p network is complete ass compared to searching google. But a web server doesn't do well at serving very large files. So if someone wants to have say, a video blog, they shouldn't have to pay for the zillions of megabytes in bandwith, nor is it a fast/reasonable way to simply link to the file and use http/ftp. And pointing all your visitors towards a p2p program like WinMX or Kazaa is ok, but it has problems. You can't guarantee visitors will get the file. Many will not care enough to go through the effort. The file could be renamed, or altered or otherwise false.
Bit Torrent allows webmasters to overcome these problems. Because of BitTorrent you can put a link to a video on your web site, without paying out the ass or crashing and burning from the load. Your visitors have to go through very little effort to get the file. Even if nobody else is sharing, you have to be, so at least they are guaranteed to get the goods. And they are guaranteed to get the correct goods. And they don't have to search relentlessly for it.
One thing that pisses me off, however, is that every time I want to download something with bit torrent I have to open up Internet Explorer. I used to use IE until I discovered Phoenix(Firebird) months ago. I don't want to have to keep opening IE every other day to download a single file. If BitTorrent doesn't work with Moz it's either a fault in Moz or a fault in BitTorrent. And it should be fixed either way.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
OK, so it's a protocol, like say ftp or http, but different. So it seems, as per the bugzilla discussion, that the problem should be solved by creating a mozilla plugin to handle URL's written torrent://domain.name/localpath/file.torrent .
I would expect that mozilla can have a plugin that asks to handle a given protocol when it is encountered. Anybody know if my expecation is reality?
Finally, how exactly do they know what the total bandwidth of distributing RH9 via BitTorrent was?
People talk about BT like it's the greatest thing in the world. As far as I can see, it's moderately clever but new and untested.
.torrent file instead of some other communications protocol that replaces http. I don't see much analysis of how it performs or what size files it works best or even what thought went into its design.
I only see one half-baked Python implementation, and I don't see much content using this at all. I got my Red Hat ISOs from Red Hat with no problem.
I don't know much about the protocol or why it uses an out-of-band
I don't see any analysis of why I might want to "donate" my bandwidth to some person I don't know, or why I should expect bandwidth from anyone except the person I'm downloading from.
Maybe bittorrent is not the best solution. Maybe simply directing downloaders to different cache machines (like Akamai) offers better complexity/throughput performance. Who knows?
It doesn't work well with NAT, as mentioned above, and the solution is not to proclaim NAT "broken". I keep all my ports closed anyway, I'm not going to open them for someone else.
Maybe Bittorrent is greater than sex, but right now it seems very "faddish" and half-baked.
Plus the name is extremely.. awkward.. "bi-torrent?" "bittttorent?" "bit-horent?"
My point is of course that Bittorrent is good to play around but mozilla should probably be one of the LAST programs to bake it in directly.
Why not put in rsync:// support first?
NAT breaks the Internet's noble property of openness, whereby any node can accept and send IP datagrams to any other node. It is unfortunate that NAT took root as it did, but fortunately it is becoming an increasing nuisance as more services spring up which require ability to accept incoming connections. Hopefully IPv6 will some day let us get rid of NAT's festering carcass.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!