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BitTorrent Guide
An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent is the new latest/greatest P2P app to come and one of the MP3 rags has published a guide to it. Shareaza has already started to implement support for it, though support is in the early stages. The ruling is blazing fast downloads, but the difficulty of finding .tor files and other issues shows it is still a work in progress with strong niche potential. Information to host files on BT can be found here." It remains to be seen if Bit Torrent can outlive P2Ps bad rep since it is a really useful application.
If you're into the whole anime thing, like I am, Bit Torrent is a godsend. BitTorrent is the biggest thing to happen to digital fansubs since DivX.
/.ing away. Something like that will require much thinking however.
Prior to BitTorrent acquiring digital fansubs of anime was extremely difficult. Especially if you weren't at a college campus. The files are 200MB, so dial up users are out. Releases were made on IRC fserves, so propagation was slow. Things made their way slowly onto other p2p networks like WinMX and DC, but you were never able to find anything and everything. And only IRC fanboys could get things guaranteed as soon as they came out.
BitTorrent changed everything. Check out Anime Suki. The fansubbing groups are now setting up torrents of every episode they release. And every day the newest ones are listed as they come out. So anybody who has a fast enough connection, or is willing to wait for 200MB can get fansubs when they come out, guaranteed. The best new stuff is not limited to the fanboys anymore. And you don't have to deal with other p2p networks where people will do "trad3z onli!" or otherwise cancel your download. And no queues either.
The problem with BitTorrent is that when a file is no longer popular, BitTorrent becomes useless. And if a file is small BitTorrent is also useless. You need lots of people downloading and uploading and you need a big file. Prior to BitTorrent putting a video on a web page either meant you were badass or a big company with big ass servers and bandwith. Or nobody visited you and it didn't matter. BitTorrent brings video back to the web. WebMasters no longer need to fear crashing and burning if they host an awesome video.
If only there was something like SiteTorrent that found some way to keep
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Now, my issue is.. why can't I easily help serve that file again? If bittorrent would allow me to select the torrent file and the local file to use, I would be more satisfied. (and no, obscure command-line parameters aren't welcome, if it's for windows, then at least provide a sufficient GUI interface).
Indeed. It's more of a mirroring tool than a "file sharing" tool. Wanna download the latest Madonna mp3? Use kazaa/gnutella/whatever. With bit torrent you'll have a hard time finding the seed file.
For an example of how little mainstream content it carries compared to other p2p networks I did a search for porn with a torrent file search engine. I was dissapointed with the results.
The torrent creation guide relies on the stock completedir; bleh... a much better replacement is MakeTorrent. Currently it's an enhanced/modified completedir (sources are available, so you can use it under *nix), but I'm working on a complete rewrite. There are guides here and here.
I'm also developing an alternative client, and many people prefer the interface to the stock one.. it's called burst! (front-end is released GPL, back-end currently still relies on the python code which is MIT).
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
I wouldn't call it a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense.
No, it isn't a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense. Bit torrent is perfect for short term kinds of downloads.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say I make games and I release a patch for it once a month. If every one of my hundreds of thousands of users tried to download that patch at the same time, my bandwidth would be slashdotted so to speak. Even if I could handle the load, I'd be consuming gigs and gigs of bandwidth in just a few days.
But if I torrent that file to all my users then the bandwidth consumption spreads across the internet like a virus (for lack of a better word) and I save money. It's also better for the user because they're not relying on a central server to supply the file. If my server goes down 12 hours after the patch is released, the file is still being distributed across the net.
Obviously in 6 months the torrent won't be as reliable a downloading source because the patch is too old and not as many people are patching. After a week, the rush of people grabbing the file at the same time is over and then I release the real thing instead of the torrent on my website so the people who were too late in the patching can get it.
The beauty of torrent is timing. If you have a popular file to share at a specific time, torrent's your application.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
...it's just that we share more and more. But a typical mp3 album is still on the order of 3-5mb*10-15, a DVD rip 650-700mb*1-2, and a game 2-3 cds. Even the 7th Guest was two CDs back when I had my 1x CD reader. Better compression like .ogg, mpeg4 avc and similar means that files actually become smaller, not larger.
Not to mention bandwidth increasing. When I had ISDN, I used download accelerator *all the time*. Now I got 1Mbit and hardly ever bother, because it's so fast anyway, at least given the right server.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As many have pointed out, if you have an asynchornous connection where you can download way faster then uploading, then uploading too much blocks TCP ACKs and kills your download speed. This is why clients that let you adjust the upload rate "sprang up".
This does not give people an excuse to leech. I'm currently co-ordinating with a number of other developers to create an anti-leech tracker (it keeps track of how much you've uploaded and how much you've downloaded, and will begin to warn and/or deny you at a certain ratio after a certain ammount of time).
The reason BT's speed is dropping is not becuase people are limiting uploads, but becuase popularity is growing. There aren't 100 people on a file anymore, there's 2000.
Do a little test. Grab BT Availability Checker from that page, and run it on a torrent that's got lots of people (new simpsons episode, matrix reloaded, whatever).
If you're lucky, half of the 50 or so peers you're sent (out of 2000!) will be actually alive.
There is currently no way to "match up" people who should be sending things to one another (one the same ISP or LAN), but again, we're working on it.
BT is still in it's infancy, but the future looks good.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
How the fuck did that get Informative +2?
torrentse.cx is actually a decent BitTorrent search engine. It's not all porn. If the poster said something like:
Here's a great search engine if you use BitTorrent he probably would've been modded higher.
Apparently it's Slashdotted at the moment, so you might get the "Slashdot sux" message or a redirect.
...although BitTorrent can resume any sequentially-downloaded file that matches the Torrent (IE the ISO of some distro that cut off halfway through); it'll check for any bad pieces and start you off (pretty much) right where you left off. You can use it for files that you have completed but that may have corrupt bits, too...it'll replace them with the correct bits from a working seed. (I've done both on occasion.)
... this could be useful for those 2-3 minute audio/video clips that the commercial news services run as well. "Breaking news" is always that, a lot of people nailing a server to get "the latest".
Napster, the obvious first example of P2P file sharing, maintained a centralized index of everything it knew about, which was one reason it could be sued to death, so most of the newer file-sharing applications found ways to also decentralize their indexing (which is harder.) BitTorrent avoids the whole problem - the person running the tracker is the person publishing the file, and the indexes of who has what pieces are transitory. So if the distribution is legitimate, fine, and if it's not, the copyright owner can go sue the publisher who ripped them off.
So from an applications standpoint, yes, the person distributing a file can sometimes use it like Akamai or AT&T or Speedera to ship their stuff out faster, except that it's quasi-free because it's using the downloaders' bandwidths instead of a big caching service's bandwidth. But one big difference is that BitTorrent is designed to handle big files, while the caching services can handle anything - so they're useful for keeping your front page from being slashdotted (or superbowl-commercialed), and for the graphics on your front page, as well as for distributing the new release of your music CD or your software update. The caching services also provide a function that BT doesn't, which is accelerating delivery of small files by delivering them from nearby servers - instead of hauling them 50ms across the continent or 200ms across the Pacific, you're grabbing them from nearby, while BT requires an index hit from the tracker before fetching content. BT scales very closely with demand volume because it is P2P, so the more demand there is, the more servers there are to fill it - the caching services scale because they've got big honking servers spread around the net.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They weren't brought down, they are redirecting the Slashdot.org referrer URL to that page. Like most Torrent sites, they are hosted by a web hosting provider, not on their own little T1 or something. So they have to pay for traffic by a certain rate. Constant Slashdotting will bankrupt them. I can't imagine they also want the public attention that links on here bring for various legal reasons. Slashdot is free to link to them all they want, freedom of speech can't stop them. But that doesn't stop the sites from redirecting Slashdot to null pages until they learn to stop.
Torrentse.cx alone has been linked to on here over 5 times in various "BitTorrent" articles. Enough is enough, yes BT exists, great. Unless you are a monkey, you shouldn't need 5 articles to remember that. Stop posting links to these sites on here unless you want to see them brought down, just enjoy using them. Sheesh.
This is exactly WHY bittorent is so useful. While the typical home pipe is huge compared to a few years ago, the SOURCE system pipe hasn't grown much. You now have 500 people trying to get an ISO from a single computer sitting on a dual-homed OC-3. The mirrors these days are swamped with too many requests for the same data.
BitTorrent allows all of us to share the burden. In the process, the system as a whole gets much faster. We could be seeing an end to the typical mirror system. A new paridigm, possibly based on freenet and/or bittorrent, is long overdue.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I'm still confused as to how this is meaningfully better than designs like ed2k or overnet (which have a common multi-source ftp, though with different indexing protocols).
eMule has had a credit system forever which favors people who upload, and being open-source, can be tailored to anyone's likings. Anyone can run an ed2k index server... plus, sources can be embedded within the ed2k links themselves, and with source sharing, all you need is a few valid sources to find most of the rest.
As far as I can tell, the only reason BT might seem faster is because there has been quite a few high upload capacity seeds for the files.
Can anyone explain to me the significance / usefulness of BitTorrent over these other designs?
Lots of reasons, actually.
For one, the originator ('seed') of the file maintains authority over the file, and maintains canonical checksums for the segments of the file. This means that the originator is known, not anonymous, and you know that what you're getting is the same as the seed (i.e., I can't download the RedHat ISOs, insert a Trojan, and then propagate it to others unless I seed it myself.). Sure, this will crack down on illegitimate sharing, but it will also eliminates the fake files (i.e., "What the *&%! do you think you're doing?!") currently swarming over Gnutella.
Second, the protocol is a step ahead of Gnutella's. Leech control and segmented download are built into the protocol, so it's guaranteed to work with other torrent clients.
A direct comparison with Gnutella is not terribly applicable, as they serve different needs. Gnutella was created in the shadow of Napster, for completely dispersed, distributed, and somewhat-anonymous peer to peer file sharing. BitTorrent was created to offload most (but not all) of the bandwidth required to host large, popular files. Horses for courses.
You suggest that if your main server goes down, the distribution continues. But, don't you need a machine that keeps track of who's Torrenting so that all of the BT clients know from whom to send/receive?
.torrent, but I couldn't connect to the host. There may very well have been someone else out there with more of the file than I had and/or there could very well have been someone else out there with the full file that wanted to share, but I couldn't get to them because the host wasn't up.
In some of my recent experimentation with BT, I tried to Torrent a file, but it didn't work because the main server wasn't hosting it anymore. I had the
I think the point to BT is to reduce the bandwidth requirement of the main host, rather than to eliminate the need for it to stay up all the time. So, with BT, given a large enough audience, you could theoretically host a fairly large collection of files on a smaller-than-normal upstream pipe because your clients would be utilizing their normally-unused upstream, rather than you sending data multiple times needlessly.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Uh, there are lots of porn torrents out there. The only thing now is instead of short video clips or pictures, it's entire porn film DVD rips. Usually DivX or SVCD encoded. Unless it's 100 megs, it's usually not worth making a .torrent out of.
I'm still hoping for a protocol similar to bittorrent, but that runs over http. This is because the office I work at uses authenticated http proxies for internet access, with all other ports/protocols disabled. Unfortunately, very few applications actually support authenticated http proxies for their access, so I'm limited to trying to keep a reliable ssl tunnel up to my home workstation. Unfortunately, the 30-80KB/s that I get at home is nothing compared to the potential 100MB/s I can get at the office.
I d/led it yesterday for the first time. I liked it, so I of course donated $5 to his Pay Pal account. Within a couple of minutes, he wrote me a thank you e-mail.