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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.
... is a way to distribute web page archives. A single tarball that contains HTML files with relative links and images, and a flag in BitTorrent to let the clients know that it is a web page archive. Then slashdoted sites could be put into a torrent and displayed in the browser with a single clickthrough, instead of "Open Torrent File," "Save Tarball," "Decompress," and "Open." Freenet is awesome in this respect, because you can link to Freesites from the public web, but BitTorrent's lack of anonymity makes it a lot faster and more useful.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
It's open source, for pity's sake. Get your lazy butt in gear and write it yourself, it's really not that hard. That is, if you know the first thing about writing code and aren't just a selfish immature punk who expects freebie handouts. Scratch your own damn itch.
Visit Bitzi.com.
Search for the file you're looking for. View the ratings people have given files, click on the 'magnet://' link for the file you want.
The 'magnet://' link (actually a crytographic hash) opens in Shareaza (see Shareaza.com for the excellent Windows client, bitzi lists a few other clients for other platforms), finds the exact file you're looking for (or waits and keeps searching every now and then if it's not available) and downloads the file.
When downloading (while simultaneously uploading to your peers in a swarming fashion - just like BitTorrent), Shareaza uses cryptographic hashes to make sure the download you asked for comes through intact, uncorrupted, complete and exactly the right file you asked for.
Ta-Da! Problem solved and you never have to bitch about P2P networks again.
First of all, torrents are not that useful for small files. If a website had a LOT of images it might be reasonable since you can create a torrent of a number of files and somewhat avoid the small file penalty.
Second, the BT protocol is far from established and stable. Bram mades non-trivial changes in minor release numbers, eg the 3.1 to 3.2 changes. He is very interested in backwards compatibility but things are still at the stage where that is not guaranteed and there are all kind of extensions that people would like to add to the protocol.
Finally, BT would be of little use to the "average joe who has a few pictures of his backyard roller coaster" that gets posted to slashdot and dies. First of all, he or she would not know that a slashdotting was coming, and therefor would have to have a tracker running all the time, ready to serve the torrents. Currently the "reference" tracker is written in Python, which means joe schmoe needs to somehow get that running on their server... in the case of peoples' homepages that are susceptible to slashdotting, usually it's lightweight/free hosting and they don't have the option of saying "Hey sysadmin, can I run this Python server on some funky port (that will need to be opened on your firewall)?"
Also, any change in the web site would require the torrent to be rebuilt, and the old one removed.
Finally, the tracker would die under a slashdotting. While BitTorrent allows the "heavy lifting" of the transfer to be spread out amongst the swarm, every user that wishes to join must contact the tracker... indeed, as users download they constantly contact the tracker to get updated peer lists and keep the tracker's info fresh. If a site cannot survive serving a slashdotting through Apache (which is highly tuned for what it does) then it's certainly not going to be able to provide the CPU and Ram that the poor little python tracker is going to require to manage a swarm of tens of thousands. Go to any of the illicit trackers (such as torrentse.cx) and note that while the web pages may be relatively snappy, the tracker is what gets killed and always has very long connect times and LOTS of timeouts. The admins of torrentse say that they are getting about 4000 hits a day, and they are pulling their hair out writing custom trackers in php and mysql (and spread over multiple ports) to cope with the load. Now, how for the love of god is joe average's tracker supposed to support a near-instantaneous 50,000 hits or more? It makes no sense.