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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.

208 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. Potential? by harveyswik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, if Bit Torrent can be implemented as a standard protocol for all web browsers *then* it will have real potential.

    Potential dissipate the ./ effect!

    1. Re:Potential? by RiverTonic · · Score: 1

      Yes, if a lot af people start using it, it really can become a standard.
      And the more people that use it, the faster everyone can download.

      --
      This is RiverTonic's sig.
    2. Re:Potential? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      I read a week or so ago that mozilla's position was that nobody had yet written a plugin to support. When they do, then they'll discuss whether to include it officially.

    3. Re:Potential? by los+furtive · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I've given up buying CDs since it's illegal anyway to copy the music to my computer or mp3 player.

      It's not illegal yet. And with an 'I give up' attitude like that you're not helping those who haven't given up yet and are still trying to defend their rights.

      --

      I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.

    4. Re:Potential? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      perhaps I should modify it to indicate that I'm in the uk, where it is indeed illegal.

    5. Re:Potential? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      Er, no. There isn't any free-use right in the UK. You aren't allowed to copy cd's at all. (By default of course - individual cd's may grant you that right).

    6. Re:Potential? by 16f877 · · Score: 1

      you are allowed to make a single backup copy as long as its for your sole use and not going to be distributed.

    7. Re:Potential? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      You are allowed to make a "genuine" backup copy of software (I do not know if this includes cd's).
      This does _not_ include encoding your cd as mp3's.

      http://ukcdr.org/faq/#fairuse_mediashifting

  2. Probably it will always stay... by RiverTonic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... a tool to download very big files like iso's. The other case where it really is useful is when links to large files are posted on slashdot. In that case it's already useful for files over a couple of mb.

    --
    This is RiverTonic's sig.
    1. Re:Probably it will always stay... by TopShelf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And as we move forward, file sizes in general will keep getting bigger, making BT more useful over time. Check back in a couple years, and we'll see how pervasive it becomes...

      --
      Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
    2. Re:Probably it will always stay... by secolactico · · Score: 4, Insightful

      a tool to download very big files like iso's

      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. If you want to download a distro iso and the mirror sites are full, bit torrent is the better choice.

      --
      No sig
    3. Re:Probably it will always stay... by EpsCylonB · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Probably it will always stay... by LX.onesizebigger · · Score: 1

      The 'I was just doing research' defense. Now where have I heard that before?

      --
      I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
    5. Re:Probably it will always stay... by David+McBride · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But as files get bigger, so will the typical network connection.

      Remember when 9600 baud modem links were fast?

    6. Re:Probably it will always stay... by EpsCylonB · · Score: 1

      Prolly the last time your mother caught you looking at pr0n on the internet.

    7. Re:Probably it will always stay... by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      Too bad as they just got their new equipment and server relocation :p

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    8. Re:Probably it will always stay... by EpsCylonB · · Score: 1, Informative

      How the fuck did that get Informative +2 ?

    9. Re:Probably it will always stay... by eht · · Score: 1

      Not really, when I had a 9600 baud modem, there was still stuff it took forever to download, heck 28.8s and the original Diablo demo took about 10 hours, if you check out some of the bittorrent sites they have dvd-r images on them, even with my current cable modem still would take quite a while to download.

      Like hard drives and memory, you'll easily find a way to fill it up.

    10. Re:Probably it will always stay... by LX.onesizebigger · · Score: 1

      Come on, don't tell me you didn't see that one coming from miles away. Then again, seeing the setting for our highly civilized discussion, I suppose I should have seen your come-back coming as well.

      --
      I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
    11. Re:Probably it will always stay... by G27+Radio · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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.

    12. Re:Probably it will always stay... by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    13. Re:Probably it will always stay... by evilviper · · Score: 1

      Okay, but how is it any better than any other P2P app like Gnutella?

      I suppose network overhead for searches, but the overhead isn't too bad really, and in the future, it will only improve.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    14. Re:Probably it will always stay... by sketerpot · · Score: 1
      If that becomes the sort of common sense thing that everybody who knows about BT knows, then I think we can get past the percieved legal issues (it's a lot like one of those P2P filesharing piracy things!). BTW, it's sort of funny to see slashdot running cheerful stories on a partial cure to the slashdot effect.

      BT can be very cool, but people have to realize that it is just as legitimate as mirror sites.

    15. Re:Probably it will always stay... by hmallett · · Score: 1

      It's the defense Pete Townshend of The Who used when child porn images were found on his computer. Maybe that's where?

    16. Re:Probably it will always stay... by leshert · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    17. Re:Probably it will always stay... by evilviper · · Score: 1
      and maintains canonical checksums for the segments of the file.

      Haven't read up on Gnutella since v0.54 have we???

      Search google for magnet URIs. You can search for a file based upon the SHA1 hash... Sure, searching by filename you still run the risk of getting a corrupt file, but if you find the file with it's SHA1 hash, there's nothing else it could be, no way to corrupt it, no way to insert a trojan, etc.

      Leech control and segmented download are built into the protocol, so it's guaranteed to work with other torrent clients.

      There's no leech control in Gnutella, but every Gnutella client I've used in about 2 years has supported segmented downloading... No problems at all downloading from multiple nodes, no matter what version they are using. Besides, it's the client end that needs to do the swaming control... The server end just sees it as a typical reget at byte XYZ.

      A direct comparison with Gnutella is not terribly applicable

      You're right... Gnutella does MUCH MORE, yet bittorrent gets all the exposure and praise here for what Gnutella has been doing even longer.

      BitTorrent was created to offload most (but not all) of the bandwidth required to host large, popular files.

      Gnutella can distribute the bandwidth for popular files as well, but also for very rare files, files you might not have the SHA1 hash for, files you don't know the names of, or files you don't even know you want...

      Yet BitTorrent still gets the spotlight. I still don't know why.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    18. Re:Probably it will always stay... by evilviper · · Score: 1

      You can search for a file based upon the SHA1 hash... Sure, searching by filename you still run the risk of getting a corrupt file, but if you find the file with it's SHA1 hash, there's nothing else it could be, no way to corrupt it, no way to insert a trojan, etc.
      Also wanted to add that the Magnet/URN/SHA1 is just as small and as simple as a web URL, so you don't have to have the file stored on a websever, and bother to keep that file up for as long as people might want the file. It's not binary so you could get it from a google cache, etc. Much easier to provide a Gnutella/eDonkey link than a bittorrent one.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    19. Re:Probably it will always stay... by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    20. Re:Probably it will always stay... by LX.onesizebigger · · Score: 1

      That is what I was (jokingly) referring to, yes. At least someone got it ;)

      --
      I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
    21. Re:Probably it will always stay... by Angry+Pixie · · Score: 1

      That being said, as I understand it, one of the uses of BT is precisely as a file-sharing tool for distributing television episodes and music videos. That's in line with earlier comments about BT's ability to move large files.

      This site seems to have some info various sites and channels using BT. http://www.bittorrentsites.co.nr

    22. Re:Probably it will always stay... by jandrese · · Score: 1

      Maybe because Bittorrent scales well? Whenever I fire up my Gnutella client, not only can I never find what I'm looking for (whereas Animesuki is a godsend), but my connection gets flooded with search requests and whatnot. Also, about 50% of the time when I try to actually download something on Gnutella, it turns out to not actually be there. The Unix clients sucked hard for a long long time too (how long did it take to get something with a gui and upload support?). Quite frankly Gnutella seemed like a dead end to me. Far too many leeches and not enough content. Bittorrent's automatic sharing of the files you're downloading and good anti-leech protection means you always get good transfer speeds on those big popular files.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    23. Re:Probably it will always stay... by evilviper · · Score: 1
      not only can I never find what I'm looking for

      What do you want me to tell you? If people don't have what you are looking for, you aren't going to find it.

      my connection gets flooded with search requests and whatnot.

      Admittedly, Gnutella is not for people without high speed connections, but there are bandwidth controls in most clients. Expect about 1K per/second for each connected node, and set your number of peers accordingly.

      about 50% of the time when I try to actually download something on Gnutella, it turns out to not actually be there.

      How's that? Not there, (as in a faked search result) or you weren't able to download it (because the node was already uploading too many files)? Both problems have been addressed rather well.

      how long did it take to get something with a gui and upload support?

      Well, GTK-Gnutella had sharing several months before the end of 2001.

      not enough content.

      You must be kidding. Gnutella has an absolutely huge number of files.

      good anti-leech protection

      There's no such thing. That goes double when the app is open-source.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    24. Re:Probably it will always stay... by Arker · · Score: 1

      It actually sounds an awful lot like the donkey network. I understand mldonkey is working on a plugin for it too. But I wonder what advantages it has over the donkey/overnet protocol?

      --
      =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
      Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  3. as far as the difficulty finding torrents goes... by httpamphibio.us · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you just need to find different sites for your specific needs, for example one site that will have a weekly torrent for that tv show like to watch, another site for the latest films, another for your cds... yeah, it takes a bit more work than other p2p programs, but it's worth it to get around the bogus files and slow download times of other p2p programs. and where do you find these torrent sites? google...

    --
    sig.
  4. "P2P"? by Gorimek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wouldn't call it a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense. Isn't it more of a "poor mans Akamai"?

    1. Re:"P2P"? by Omnifarious · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Maybe it is a poor man's Akamai, but IMHO, it works a lot better than Akamai does. For example, it works well even if your ISP doesn't have a hub running BitTorrent. And the publishing step is much simpler than Akamai's. So, perhaps, Akamai replacement is a better term.

    2. Re:"P2P"? by Kethinov · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!
    3. Re:"P2P"? by Istealmymusic · · Score: 1

      You don't have it call it a P2P application "in the typical file sharing sense". But it definitely is a P2P application, no denying it.

      --
      "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
    4. Re:"P2P"? by Felipe+Hoffa · · Score: 2, Informative

      Refer to the /. discussion Mozilla and bittorrent?, where the poster has an idea about using bittorrent as akamai. Quick answer: different tools, different uses.

      Fh

    5. Re:"P2P"? by yy1 · · Score: 1

      I don't see why websites that have files avail for download wouldn't want to provide a bittorrent link along with the other "traditional" links
      The tracker uses up alot less bandwidth per user than sending out the whole file and it scales beautifully, as long as there are other people interested in the file, and a bittorrent link is just a small text file really that has the hash and other info needed to dl the file, so you can use it as a drop in replacement for any other type of file, you just have to set up a tracker or use an existing one (tracker uses standard http webserver i believe).

      I think the fact that "p2p" has this negative connotation that the media has spun is what's stopping websites that bitch and moan about their bandwidth costs providing files from using it.
      I think that trying to equate it with a distributed network/search engine is wrong, its more of a transport method. FTP is "p2p" in its purest sense but its 1to1 where this is 1 to Many. The file stays available as long as there are people interested in having it (for the most part, there is this big hue and cry about leaving completed downloads avail but that's a people issue, not a technological one).
      I think that its the future, it lets people serve files that may become popular that they would not normally be able to serve from their personal websites, its a great technology and we are the better for it.

      Hearing about it integrated into stuff like Shareza makes sense, but I wonder what they will use for a tracker, as shareza is ment to be a pure p2p distributed search network and the tracker is definatly a point of failure.

      --
      Because, sometimes they just have to touch the stove.
      -YY1
    6. Re:"P2P"? by ahaning · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?

      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 .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.

      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."
    7. Re:"P2P"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Why stop using BT after the initial rush has gone? Just leave a source running on your server, that way if no one else is downloading, a user gets the same speed as if it were a regular patch file. But if other people happen to be downloading, or holding a completed download open, then a user gets even more bandwidth and you save money.

      This is the beauty of bittorrent. It's never worse than just hosting the original file yourself.

  5. It's changed fansubs by Apreche · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 /.ing away. Something like that will require much thinking however.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
    1. Re:It's changed fansubs by httpamphibio.us · · Score: 1

      gah! yes! now i can finish watching the only anime show i've ever watched, jungle wa itsumo hale nochi guu! excellent!

      --
      sig.
    2. Re:It's changed fansubs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If only there was something like SiteTorrent that found some way to keep /.ing away. Something like that will require much thinking however.

      How about mod_torrent for apache? Right now every file you want to share with bittorrent has has to be configured separatedly and attached to a tracker. With something like mod_torrent you could specify that for example all avi files, zip files etc. on a host should always be uploaded trough bittorrent.

      On a file request the web server starts the tracker automatically if no one else is already downloading the file. There would always be at least one seed, the web server, and users would share the bandwidth load if the file was popular. Even if no one else will be downloading the file at the same time distributing the file trough bittorrent should only impose a very small overhead.

    3. Re:It's changed fansubs by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      That sounds pretty interesting actually. Wonder if it will ever get implemented. Though I dunno if everyone wants their upload going to that. Ofcourse this will probably more of a geek option.

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    4. Re:It's changed fansubs by Com2Kid · · Score: 1
      • Prior to BitTorrent acquiring digital fansubs of anime was extremely difficult.


      Actualy, private FTP access was (and still is) the way to go. :)
    5. Re:It's changed fansubs by crisco · · Score: 1
      great idea

      second half would be torrent support built into Mozilla so that stuff could display inline with the page.

      at worst it would only slightly lessen the bandwidth used by the site, at best it would help sites cope with being slashdotted, farked or whatever. of course, the database driven sites that choke something between apache, php and mysql wouldn't be helped but the ones with big downloads might stay up.

      --

      Bleh!

    6. Re:It's changed fansubs by tempmpi · · Score: 1

      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.

      It is a big thing to happen to digital fansubs, but it isn't a godsend. Fansubs were supposed to be only available to fanboys/girls, that have watched most commercially available anime and want to watch other anime that is unlikely to get commercially available. Now most anime are licensed (but not announce) before they air in Japan. So most fansubs now are just an excuse for piracy.

      Bittorrent is pushing into same direction. Bittorrent works really well for really popular stuff, that is very likely to get a US DVD release in the next year. But it works only mediocre for stuff that isn't that popular like very old anime or stuff like Mermaid Melody. Old shows or shows for childern are where fansubbing still makes some sense. So Bittorrent only helps fansubs where they aren't needed anymore and are contraproductive.

      If you don't know about fansubs and the ideas behind it, read this very nice writeup on everything2

      --
      Jan
    7. Re:It's changed fansubs by NamShubCMX · · Score: 1

      Actually, alt.binaries.anime and alt.binaries.multimedia.anime and alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.reposts have traffic of over 10G/day...

      --
      We've always been at war with Eurasia.
    8. Re:It's changed fansubs by GiMP · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, it isn't. Running a high-traffic private ftp costs a fortune, but with BitTorrent you can have more people downloading and more bandwidth per-user... with little to no cost.

      BitTorrent eliminates the 'leecher' problem that FTP has because it is designed to serve the file you're downloading to the other downloaders.

    9. Re:It's changed fansubs by Com2Kid · · Score: 1
      • No, it isn't. Running a high-traffic private ftp costs a fortune, but with BitTorrent you can have more people downloading and more bandwidth per-user... with little to no cost.


      True true, but BitTorrent is not designed and does not work well for large volume archives. Finding older material on Bit Torrent is reliant upon there being somebody out there who feels like "seeding" it.

      On the flip side, I have had, in the past, private FTP access to sites with over 80GB of shows on them, with entire series arranged and ordered available for download 24/7.

      The key is just finding somebody with the funds. :)
    10. Re:It's changed fansubs by GiMP · · Score: 1

      If someone wants to provide a private FTP they could just as easily provide a private, seeded, bittorrent. It wouldn't be nearly as effective as a public bittorrent, but it would be still be better than an FTP.

  6. The second link by Isbiten · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Has links to warez. I thought slashdot had some policy about not posting links to warez...

    --
    I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    1. Re:The second link by Horny+Smurf · · Score: 2, Funny
      Read the FAQ!

      Does slashdot have a policy about posting links to warez/pr0n/illegal content/etc sites?

      Yes! We never link to them until after all the editors have verified the site is currently up, and downloaded all the goodies.

      Answered by CmdrTaco
      Last Modified: 6/14/00

    2. Re:The second link by Duds · · Score: 2, Insightful

      there's not warez there. .torrent files are not warez. There is no copyrighted content in the file.

      To claim so is to call me a drug dealer for the following sentence. "There's a lot of drugs avaliable in Soho"

    3. Re:The second link by Snaller · · Score: 1

      I don't know about american law, but under most laws it would still be illegal to host a torrent since you are a abetting a crime (what you think is not so relevant as what the judge think)

      --
      If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
    4. Re:The second link by Erasmus+Darwin · · Score: 1
      "To claim so is to call me a drug dealer for the following sentence. "There's a lot of drugs avaliable in Soho""

      Try applying the following question to each case: "How much effort does it take to go from the information given to the final illegal product?"

      In the torrent case, a link to a site with warez torrents gets you 90% of the way there. In the Soho case, you'd still have to randomly cruise streets, looking for a dealer.

      Even so, I wouldn't say that linking to a warez site is necessarily illegal, but I'd say that under your drug analogy, it'd be a lot more like saying, "Ted in Soho sells drugs."

    5. Re:The second link by bwt · · Score: 1

      I assume you mean a torrent to pirated content. If so, then you are more like Napster than P2P, because you have the power to control access and prevent the piracy of the specific work and you would be expected to know whether it was pirated or not.

      It's odd that you think this is clearer under other laws -- it's mostly only the US that has actually tested these legal waters.

    6. Re:The second link by shepd · · Score: 1

      In that case, if I had a map with the corner of Cedar St. and King St. marked (a popular whore hangout) I would be breaking the law to hang that up in my office?

      How strange... I'm glad I don't live where you live! :-)

      --
      If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
    7. Re:The second link by Snaller · · Score: 1

      Are you sure? Its not illegal to be a whore where I live ;-)

      --
      If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
  7. My issue with bittorrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Okay, so I was using bittorrent on a windows box to download the Doom3 trailer (posted here), and it works great.. 200KB/sec, so when it completes I decide, "sure, i'll help other people out by leaving it running". Windows, being the beast that it is, eventually crashes and the bittorrent app goes down along with it.

    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).

    1. Re:My issue with bittorrent by RonnyJ · · Score: 5, Informative
      Now, my issue is.. why can't I easily help serve that file again?

      You can, just open the torrent file again, and try to save the file to the same location you did before. It'll then check the file is OK and continue serving it for others.

    2. Re:My issue with bittorrent by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
      Windows, being the beast that it is, eventually crashes and the bittorrent app goes down along with it.

      Are you using a LinkSys network card? If so, your crashes may be because of BitTorrent. When I would open more than 1 torrent it would blue-screen. Someone on a /. thread showed me the light, just install separate drivers and you're good to go.

      Since then I've had up to 7 torrents DLing at once with no problems.

      You can read about it here.

      --
      I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
  8. short term - new clients are too configurable by SuperBanana · · Score: 4, Insightful
    At least the way anime groups use it(they've discovered it beats the hell out of IRC on "release day"), it's for short term. However, it varies group to group- some will leave BT downloads seeded for weeks.

    Still, if you're looking for something older than a few weeks, you're looking at something like edonkey, but speeds will be far more pathetic.

    The problem with BitTorrent is that "advanced"(ie, unofficial) clients are springing up like weeds, and they let you fudge with all sorts of parameters(how many clients you upload to and stuff, for example). If the p2p authors didn't originally let you tweak it, it's probably because you SHOULDN'T tweak it. Edonkey has seen the same problems- you should see the configuration parameter list for mldonkey. It's horrible- more rope for users to hang not themselves, but the network.

    Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download.) I noticed right after the "advanced" and 3rd-party tools came out that speeds dropped.

    1. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      AFAIK, if you lower your upload rate you will also download slower. There seems to have been quite some thought put into the design of the BitTorrent protocol.

    2. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      Yeah it's great to see that for once leeching is only going to hurt yourself. The only thing that you need to be worried about is people closing the window right after they have downloaded. But some trackers will ban you if you keep doing that.

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    3. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Danj2k · · Score: 1
      Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download).
      If you're on DSL, maxing out your upstream will kill your downstream. The ability to limit upload bandwidth usage is essential for anyone on this type of connection in order to make any sensible use of BitTorrent. The modified BitTorrent client I use doesn't allow you to set your upload bandwidth to zero.
    4. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by CTho9305 · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately, on 768/128 ADSL, leaving my upload uncapped results in crappy download speeds... so I have to limit uploads to ~5kB/s or lower for decent download performance. On the school lan, however, uploading doesn't cause any trouble.

      However, it shouldn't be long before more anti-leech apps come out that slow you down if you don't share yourself.

    5. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by kryptkpr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!
    6. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by jooon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The official client let's you tweak everything as well. There are command line parameters for everything that you can see in the experimental clients. Those clients just built a GUI on top of already existing functionality.

    7. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Robotech_Master · · Score: 1

      Two words for you, my friend:

      traffic shaping

      --
      Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
    8. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by labratuk · · Score: 1

      ...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.

      Compile QoS & friends into your kernel.

      --
      Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
    9. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by SomeGuyFromCA · · Score: 1
      Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload...


      Nonononononono. Maxing upload is *bad*. If you max out your upload, you can't ACK any packets coming in, which kills your downstream; eventually the connection'll time out. Then you're screwed.
      --
      if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
    10. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by DarkZero · · Score: 1

      Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download.) I noticed right after the "advanced" and 3rd-party tools came out that speeds dropped.

      Whether or not the ability to change your upload speed is a good thing or not is actually debatable, in my opinion. Take the recent release of Ragnarok Online, for instance. Once you download the game, you want to play it, but because it's an online game, you need at least some of your upload speed to play it. With the ability to change your upload speed, you can put the required 10kbps upload or so to playing Ragnarok and the other 12 or 20kbps upload to serving Ragnarok Online to more people on BitTorrent. Without that, you just have to shut BitTorrent down to play the game, which wastes 20kbps that could've been used to send the game to more people.

      Because of the processor and bandwidth load of constantly uploading 30kbps to people, I usually have to shut BitTorrent down whenever I want to use what I've downloaded, even if it's just a video (I, like many people, have a slow machine). The ability to easily throttle BitTorrent would, in my case, actually contribute to others, rather than taking something away from them.

    11. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Makoss · · Score: 1

      That's why you need to control your connection.

      --
      Building a better backup.
      Zettabyte Storage
    12. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Danj2k · · Score: 1

      Sure, I'll get a "real DSL line", as you put it... right around the time when British Telecom start offering them. Which will most likely be the same time that hell freezes over, pigs start flying, and Windows becomes GPL'ed open source.

    13. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Danj2k · · Score: 1

      I tried reading the LARTC howto a while ago, it was as clear as mud. I tried their "wondershaper" thing too, and that didn't seem to do much for me. Granted, LARTC is almost certainly a better solution, but I couldn't get it to work. For me, selecting "dsl/cable slow" from a combo box in BitTorrent is considerably easier and has essentially the same effect.

    14. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by Makoss · · Score: 1

      True it took me a few hours to get my traffic control exactly how I wanted it as opposed to, what, 20 seconds? But I do a lot more with it then just keep uploads from killing my downloads.

      Wonderful thing about the world is that there are different solutions for different needs.

      --
      Building a better backup.
      Zettabyte Storage
    15. Re:short term - new clients are too configurable by mysticalreaper · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the link man. I've not yet accomplished anything, but this site contains the info i need to so all kinds of cool stuff with network shaping in linux. Man, i new reading /. comments would pay off eventually!

  9. Another attempt to incorporate bittorrent... by azzy · · Score: 1

    .. into a more easy to use application is Effusion which is an attempt to embed bittorrent within an irc application to make sharing/downloading a little easier on irc channels. However it is important to note that just because bittorrent is very convenient to share files, it is not designed to replace other p2p sharing apps with dodgy content. The bittorrent developers, and indeed also the Effusion developer (me) stress the LEGAL use of bittorrent technology. Note that it is trivial to obtain the source of files with bittorrent, so do not share anything you don't have the right to.

  10. wow by daveatwork · · Score: 1

    is this server using bit-torrent to serve html cos id have thought this site would be /.'ed by now, but it still loads up super quick. Could you serve web content using bittorrent?

  11. Some great bittorrent sites by dr+ttol · · Score: 4, Informative
    For the slashdot crowd, http://f.scarywater.net is for them.

    For everything else, http://www.torrentse.cx, which has a comment system for each torrent file so people can post up their thoughts. Also they allow people to upload their own torrents. This site has the following sections: Misc, Movies, TV, Music, Porn, Books, Games, Software, Comics, and Anime.

    Also, http://www.suprnova.org is good too, but has been having a lot of problems lately. They have: Games, Movies, TV Shows, Music, Apps, Misc, and DVD

    http://www.bitetorrent.com has TV Shows, Movies, Music, Apps, Games, Comics, Anime and Misc. Allows people to upload their own torrent and has a tracker as well.

    http://torrents.slash0.org/ also includes TV Shows, Movies, Games, and a Misc section.

    The following are the best TV-only BitTorrent sites. http://www.marksailes.uklinux.net/bt/ http://www.tvtorrents.com

    Anyways, those are the most popular BitTorrent places. And with me posting this now (and perhaps getting modded up =D), they should be even better and faster (if the website doesn't die from the load first).

    1. Re:Some great bittorrent sites by CausticWindow · · Score: 2, Funny

      www.torrentse.cx redirected to Slashdot.org, now it just shows:

      Slashdot sucks.
      --
      How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
    2. Re:Some great bittorrent sites by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      Naw it says

      Slashdot sucks. Oh yeah, we'll be back.

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    3. Re:Some great bittorrent sites by Aurelius42 · · Score: 1

      Just an FYI: http://torrents.slash0.org/ has many of the features the torrentse.cx site has, and is still answering requests. They have a comment system, you can upload your own torrents, and the categories are a little more refined than the other sites. Go check it out!

    4. Re:Some great bittorrent sites by Aurelius42 · · Score: 1

      Why don't you elaborate instead of just saying "Your site sucks." Especially since you are posting as AC...

  12. Re:no. by CTho9305 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No checksums? It uses SHA-1 to verify file integrity. That is pretty reliable!

    Resuming with another p2p app? What apps let you do that anyway? When would you want to resume with another app?

    Forced to upload? That is what makes downloads so fast. If everyone leeches, nobody gets good download speeds.

  13. why BT works by zenst · · Score: 1

    BT works well ATM as the current client doesn;t allow/offer any form of throtteling, this is more important when it comes to the upload stream and as such there are alot of good download clients out there for you to share/distribute from. This issue is when throtteling clients come on the scene (started already) which offer you the ability to have a full T1 yet for all effect offer a pishy modem upload rate to everybody else and then 1 at a time.

    Once these clients start to take hold then BT will be just as fast as all the other P"P networks out there.

    Upload throtteling should be the privledge of peole who sponser/contribute to the development of p2p clients and not joe public who eventual kill the spirit of the networks with there greed.

    1. Re:why BT works by Duds · · Score: 1

      Well that's what you get if you use open source software ;)

      Kidding of course but it'd be a lot harder for throttling clients if the original hadn't been so open.

    2. Re:why BT works by Faust · · Score: 1

      From the BitTorrent FAQ:

      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 if you are going to be bastardly, expect to get pathetic download rates.

  14. Re:hard to find torrents? by psyco484 · · Score: 1

    tubgirl huh...that's retarded... Just type it in that little thing I like to call an address bar. Unless you're totally inept, in which case tubgirl is probably the greatest thing you've ever seen. In all reality though, torrentse.cx is great for finding stuff.

  15. Thanks, Slashdot. by suntse · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Hey look at this cool new bittorrent tool. People are illegally trading games and movies and mp3s with it. Here's a big list of sites where all the pirates exchange information for all of you!" Brilliant. Say goodbye to all of the bittorrent site you can find from this slashdot article. They won't last long now.

    1. Re:Thanks, Slashdot. by Istealmymusic · · Score: 1

      Are you from the RIAA/MPAA?

      --
      "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
    2. Re:Thanks, Slashdot. by Duds · · Score: 1

      Not signed by every country.

      Thailand comes to mind immediately.

      Hell, there's a very small soverign country on an oil rig off the UK. They've signed no treaties, you can host ANYTHING there.

    3. Re:Thanks, Slashdot. by bryehn · · Score: 1

      no shit, man...another one bites it. the whole idea when i started using bt a few months back is that it was underground, and kept kazzcrap out of your way...today is a sad day indeed.

    4. Re:Thanks, Slashdot. by hmallett · · Score: 1

      You're thinking of Sealand, which is actually an old gun turret built during WW2. The hosting company based in Sealand is HavenCo. They will host anything except for child porn.

  16. BitTorrent by kryptkpr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:BitTorrent by teamhasnoi · · Score: 1
      I am presently using the Experimental client; while it works rather well and looks alright, it puts a zillion 'BT's in my sys tray and windows on my desktop - one for every ahem 'linux iso' I have completed. Does your client keep it to one, with a pop-up menu? Or am I destined to have 23 'BT's across my screen?

      As a recent new user, I am constantly amazed at the sheer speed of BT for large files, and would love to see more use of it on /. (even though I downloaded the D3 trailer, and saw a lot of people 'close their windows'. grrr.)

      BT seems to me like the beginning of an excellent solution to /.ed websites, and the easier it is to make a .torrent file and distribute the start-up? file, the more content we'll see.

      Here's a question: Is there any way to reopen the file for sharing? Say, close it when I'm doing something bandwidth intensive (RTCW), and bring it up later?

    2. Re:BitTorrent by kryptkpr · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, burst keeps one icon, with a constantly updated pop-up menu to show transfer progress and state. You may wish to enable "Start Transfers Hidden" under options if you don't want to see the console downloader windows (they're for advanced users and seeders, but they let you adjust upload rate and number of unchoked uploads at will, using up/down/left/right).

      To re-open a file for sharing, follow the procedure for downloading it again, and choose the same destination file. It will go through a checking phase, and will then stay at 100%, and you will begin seeding.

      --
      DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
    3. Re:BitTorrent by __aasfhc1949 · · Score: 2, Informative
      Hello teamhasnoi:

      Once the file is completed, you can stop uploading (sharing) it at anytime and resume it later on just by double-clicking on the *.torrent file (just make sure it points to the directory with the downloaded file). It'll check the file first and then begin uploading to other clients.

  17. P2P has it's problems... by Realistic_Dragon · · Score: 1

    ...and those problems are nearly always the users. Networks are stuffed full of leeching goits who deliberatly try and minimise the ammount they upload, making P2P much less useful.

    The best P2P solutions are ones run where bandwidth is excessive (DC on campuses for example, where 1mb/sec upload was no skin off the nose of the user with 100mb/sec internally) or private groups (like my local SSH+DC system that only has 6 users).

    Freenet seems to be pretty good at enforcing people to be altuistic and not selfish, as well as taking away any worries about traceability or culpability. It also helps that the person inserting the content is not the one mirroring it to the users - everyone shares the load equally which keeps it managable. Try putting up real live files on Kazaa and see how fast your connection gets nuked. It wouldn't surprise me if long after the current generations of P2P clients had collapsed under the weight of their own users self centeredness that only that one was still going.

    --
    Beep beep.
    1. Re:P2P has it's problems... by Kethinov · · Score: 1

      Networks are stuffed full of leeching goits who deliberatly try and minimise the ammount they upload, making P2P much less useful.

      The best P2P solutions are ones run where bandwidth is excessive (DC on campuses for example, where 1mb/sec upload was no skin off the nose of the user with 100mb/sec internally)


      Kind of off topic, but can you imagine how many people are going to become leeches and begin deliberately trying to minimise how much they upload after ISPs across the world start limiting monthly bandwidth? The trend is starting and there are some ISPs doing this. P2P is going to hurt badly if monthly bandwidth restrictions start coming in because NO ONE and I mean NO ONE is going to consider 1mb/sec upload "no skin off" their back.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
  18. Re:IT SUCKS by Horny+Smurf · · Score: 1

    if you've got ``Hard Memory'', I think that means your computer doesn't need any more porn...

  19. How BT works by mindstrm · · Score: 1

    I believe BT works by taking the file, and chunking it into pieces... but clients randomly download pieces.. they are not grabbed in order. This makes sense statistically if you want to share the load around.

    To a degree, BT is designed so a client won't send chunks over a certain number to a certain host unless it has also received chunks from that host... is this not correct? This is to prevent pure leeching. You can leech, of course, but your rate will not be near what it can be if you upload.

  20. In My Opinion... by Robotech_Master · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...bittorrent will be most useful as an alternative to web downloading huge legitimate files, like the Baen CD-ROMs or Linux distros. It's blazing fast, or can be, but it's just too easy to shut down a tracker/website, just like what was done to Napster. There's no anonymity here, and the only reason sites like torrentse.cx are around at all is that the RIAA/MPAA haven't noticed them yet. Once they do, kiss 'em goodbye.

    --
    Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
    1. Re:In My Opinion... by Duds · · Score: 1

      there's no copyrighted material in any torrent file. There's a reason FastTrackCentral is still around doing the same with sig2dat.

      They can't actually touch em.

      Plus, so what if a torrent site goes. The .torrents are tiny. You can email, you could hide them on a server or whatever.

      The tracker is more of a problem, and indeed more copyright vulnerable than the sites.

    2. Re:In My Opinion... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Um napster didn't host any copyrighted material, they opperated like torrentse.cx, they just linked you directly to users with copyrighted material.

    3. Re:In My Opinion... by Splork · · Score: 1

      yes, this is very true. a bunch of clueless drooling morons are downloading their illegal warez using bittorrent right now not realizing that they're easily being tracked by various copyright holders because using bittorrent is no different that downloading from a website that makes its complete server access logs public so that everybody can see exactly who downloaded what when.

      its a legitimate tool similar to an ftp client/server or web browser.. many people somehow seem to think that "p2p" means they can use it for illegal purposes without being caught. they'll soon learn.

    4. Re:In My Opinion... by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
      There's no anonymity here, and the only reason sites like torrentse.cx are around at all is that the RIAA/MPAA haven't noticed them yet. Once they do, kiss 'em goodbye.

      <SMOOCH>

      Check it out, the site says "what" in various shades of green on black.

      Something like, "the matrix strikes back?"

      --
      I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
    5. Re:In My Opinion... by Robotech_Master · · Score: 1

      Yeah, they've been saying stuff like that there the last day or so, ever since this Slashdot story came out. Something about how they were having trouble keeping up with user bandwidth as it was, and then Slashdot came along. (My favorite was when they had the page title read "CmdrTaco's wife is fat". :) I imagine they'll be back in another day or so. Maybe by then they'll have switched to the new faster server they were able to afford with recent donations.

      --
      Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
  21. Java Bit Torrent by deblau · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm leading development on the official Java port, here. The code was originally a line-by-line port from the original Python (3.0.2), but it's in the middle of a refactoring to take into account some of the ways Java does things differently. We plan to match release numbers with the original Python codebase. Once we get the code cleaned up, we'll make a 3.0.2 release, and add features to get ourselves up to the current Python. The code is currently in CVS, directions available on SourceForge. We're always looking for developers and testers, of course. If you have any questions, email me directly, my SF username is flickboy. More general comments can go to the boards. We're in the process of getting our own web page up, so cut us a little slack.

    I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.

    If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.

    --
    This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
  22. Trackers are overloaded by real_octane · · Score: 1

    If you used BitTorrent before, you probably noticed that most Trackers currently cannot handle the load created by the hyping of BT. Thus, more Trackers need to be established (See here) </shameless ad>

  23. Actually, file sizes have been fairly constant... by Kjella · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...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
  24. Wouldn't the problem with bit torrent be by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That if we're all using it for web pages (downloading and uploading as we go along) the amount of end user bandwidth (which is unmetered) will increase and the amount of server bandwidth (usually metered) will decrease? Imagine how happy cox would be if every computer on their cable network was functioning as a mini-web server at all times. The ISPs will not like this, and will start either raising rates or capping bandwidth. Yeah, I know bandwidth is getting cheaper, but I'm sure Cox would rather pocket those savings then spend them on network upgrades.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Wouldn't the problem with bit torrent be by Pathwalker · · Score: 1

      The ISPs will not like this, and will start either raising rates or capping bandwidth.

      Actually, they have a simpler plan - kick anyone they catch using Bittorrent off their system.

      From what I've heard, BitTorrent infuriates the cable ISPs.
      Apparently their whole infrastructure was designed for users accessing one or two web sites, and downloading files, not each user randomly connecting to hundreds/thousands of other systems. Bittorrent users generate a load equal to several hundred normal users. A few of them can slow down an entire area for everyone else. Plans are underway to set up systems to detect and disable accounts that are using BitTorrent.

      They are taking this seriously, and you probably will not like their response.

    2. Re:Wouldn't the problem with bit torrent be by MyHair · · Score: 1

      You're comparing BitTorrent to web pages. I compared it to other p2p programs, and I think The ISPs would prefer this to the alternatives:

      Kazaa & Gnutella: While this is open your entire shared folder is available for browsing and uploading to others, and some people might leave it on all the time.

      Freenet Project: Similar to above, and if you're a permanent node then you're trafficking packets that aren't even to or from your published FreeSites.

      BiTTorrent's beauty to me--and I suspsect the ISPs--is that the user picks one file to download and share rather than a slew of files. I suspect that generates less traffic for the client than jumping on another p2p for a while to find and grab your target file. If you're running a tracker your ISP might not like it, though.

    3. Re:Wouldn't the problem with bit torrent be by Vengie · · Score: 1

      You don't know very much about peering agreements, do you? If one cox user was sharing a file that many other cox users wanted, I can ASSURE you that cox would be VERY happy.

      --
      When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
  25. Re:no. by Istealmymusic · · Score: 1
    as for resuming, lets say i got half a file from kazza, i can rename it and resume it from dc++

    not possible with bt

    Not possible with eDonkey as I understand it.

    The best P2P programs don't download blocks sequentially, but in random order (avoiding the last block distribution problem). BT and ed2k are among these, and its the reason why you can't resume from foreign programs. No big deal.

    --
    "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
  26. rsync can resume BitTorrent downloads by Brian+Ristuccia · · Score: 4, Informative

    BitTorrent creates a sparse output file and then populates it with data in a quasi-random order. You can't resume these files with software that assumes that all data up to the end of file mark has been populated, but you can resume with any rsync or any other program program which supports differential file transfers. Rsync will checksum the blocks with missing data, determine that those blocks don't match the remote file, and transfer only those blocks.

    1. Re:rsync can resume BitTorrent downloads by Evil_Timmy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...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.)

  27. Re:A strong niche portal by TwistedSquare · · Score: 1

    And in case you can't be bothered to click, the site currently reads "Slashdot sucks. Oh yeah, we'll be back." due to this link being posted...

  28. Please by RiverTonic · · Score: 1

    Not everybody who reads /. is used to speak and write English all the time. Although they try to write in English. You should give them a chance. And I'm sure you understand the message what they try to say.

    And your technical knowledge has nothing to do with your language skills.

    --
    This is RiverTonic's sig.
    1. Re:Please by skookum · · Score: 1

      The point is that if you are going to publish a document in English and wish to be taken seriously, you shouldn't have dumb spelling errors. If English is not your native tongue then publish in whatever IS your native language. You can misspell all you want on your web pages, but I will tend to ignore you because you can't take the time to proofread what you write.

  29. Re:Don't think so... by TwistedSquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    " BitTorrent, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes) and therefore will eventually die:" Did you miss the part where major Linux distros use it to send out the latest version?

  30. Questions by gehrehmee · · Score: 2, Insightful
    As I see it, there are two obstacles to bittorrent becoming a player in my usual internet usage:

    1) Large collections of small files: It would be really cool, to me, if small files out of a large catalog could be picked and chosen over a single bittorrent session. I'm envisioning this being used for things like debian package pools. Forget all these mirrors, let's find a way to let everyone who downloads an individual package share that with the next person who wants it. I don't know enough about other distributions, but anyone else who has to keep a large number of small packages up to date would benifit greatly from this.

    2) Small, high-demand, and/or frequently changing sites. One only needs to look at http://www.suprnova.org/ and http://www.torrentse.cx/, two major torrent hosting sites, to see the problem. All too often small informational sites with no real massive payload get squashed by the slashdot effect. Surely the idea of using bittorrent's neccesarilly distributed nature to move around signed, up-to-date, small suites of related html & images is amoung the biggest potential opprotunities for small-time independant web publishers to survive high bandwidth demands?

    --
    "You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
  31. suprnova.org /.'ed by SilverStreak · · Score: 2, Informative

    seems like SuprNova (http://suprnova.org), a large BT link site has been slashdotted. what a pity... as reads on main page: "Thanks for asking slashdot... users, we will be back" it raises the question if slashdot should inform the webmasters of the potential increase in bandwidth use because of the post on slashdot, or whether it is their problem and slashdot is exercising free speech.

    1. Re:suprnova.org /.'ed by allgood2 · · Score: 1

      I've always (well last year or so) that this should be true, at least for smaller sites. I don't feel that people have to tell Apple, Microsoft, or Google that they've posted links to your site, but I've always felt that those of us posting articles or links to smaller sites, should offer some warning to the site, or temporarily mirror the download link (when its a file, etc.). Let's face it this sites are generally paid for by a single individual who is offering something we consider valuable or at least momentarily intersting enough that we may raise their monthly hosting rates from $10/mo to an overusage charge of a couple hundred bucks.

      Free speech and personal liberation aside, just because you can do almost anything you want, has never meant that you should. Courtesy is the backbone to civility. If your frequenting a site that you love, thats been posting daily how hard they've been getting hit by DoS, how they've been forced to switch ISPs because the ISP is tired of the DoS, and they are begging for donations so they can purchase more bandwidth, then common courtesy might state that you speak to the site owner before posting the site address on Slashdot.

      Maybe some /. rules of etiquette would be in order, nothing major, just some written common courtesies that people could read when they sign-up for an account.

  32. Potential problems? by rbbs · · Score: 1

    Surely this type of service is great in an asynchronous environment, but aren't the vast majority of fat pipes around the world are upload capped? as the number of users increases, surely the sum of the bandwidth downloading will ultimately be limited by the bandwidth uploading - not a problem at the moment as there are a good number of people on t1s etc, but as more and more people use the service, is this not going to become a problem?

    1. Re:Potential problems? by heff · · Score: 1

      i saw that, i think that blows.

      i've got a dsl line capped at 12k/s, why would i want to spend all my time recieving files at 12k/s as well? I'd rather use usenet.

      --

      --

      |-_-| . o O ( bEef!)

    2. Re:Potential problems? by rbbs · · Score: 1

      sorry - for asynchronous read symmetric...
      (its been a long day)

  33. useful for... by zogger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... 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".

  34. another sighting of a slashdotting by SilverStreak · · Score: 1

    in other news, torrentse.cx, another majoy BT link distro has been brought down as reads on main page: "Slashdot sucks. Oh yeah, we'll be back." with a page title of "CmdrTaco's wife is fat" where have they been the last few months??!

    1. Re:another sighting of a slashdotting by lkturner · · Score: 1

      This isn't the first time torrentse.cx has been slashdotted. They were brought down sometime within the last two-three weeks due to a mention on slashdot.

    2. Re:another sighting of a slashdotting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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.

  35. Yep by Snaller · · Score: 1

    Yep, since its open source it will be easy for the RIAA to find out who is downloading and DDS them (if you are lucky)

    --
    If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
    1. Re:Yep by moncyb · · Score: 1

      Which will show them for the terrorists they are. BitTorrent gets the original file from a centralized server. Their whole excuse for DoSing people was they supposedly couldn't track down the person distributing the supposedly "infringing work" and sue or DMCA them.

    2. Re:Yep by shepd · · Score: 1

      >Yep, since its open source it will be easy for the RIAA to find out who is downloading and DDS them (if you are lucky)

      If they do that to 95% of the world's population, they will be in deep shit. I'd like for them to try, though.

      --
      If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
    3. Re:Yep by Snaller · · Score: 1

      I read the other day who some torrent sites actually where being DDS'ed - of course that was the sites which carried the torrents, not people who downloaded them. Nobody knew who was guilty though.

      --
      If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
  36. Re:as far as the difficulty finding torrents goes. by Intocabile · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Downloading the newest Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle at the moment. Bittorrent is really great for getting TV shows before they air, it's like my own personal Tivo that ignores causality.

  37. Thanks for Asking? by Milican · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So here is a blurb from suprnova.org


    Thanks for asking slashdot...

    users, we will be back


    OK, so now people are getting pissed if we slashdot their servers. Since when on the Internet do you have to "ask" to see a webpage. Well, if you don't like it then don't post your servers on the *public* Internet. DUUUUUUH! I have an idea, don't want us coming in? Make things password protected for your precious little community. Don't be a bitch because someone is interested in your site. Next thing you know people will be bitching because a search engine found their site. [SARCASM]Thanks for asking Google![/SARCASM]

    Thats the end of my rant.

    JOhn

    1. Re:Thanks for Asking? by KJE · · Score: 1
      hey AC, don't think you're any better here. Isn't the whole idea behind Bit Torrent that the more users the are the better? I really hate the feeling that some people on the net seem to have that anyone who's a "n00b", or someone who isn't "part of the scene" is a worthless piece of shit.

      Figure out a way to handle it... hey, why don't you just put up a link to a torrent that holds the web page instead of bitching on /.

    2. Re:Thanks for Asking? by Nogami_Saeko · · Score: 1

      Why not just look at the http-refer info and automatically redirect anyone coming from slashdot away from torrentse.cx to goatse.cx?

      N

      --
      "Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
    3. Re:Thanks for Asking? by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 1

      I think torrentse.cx did so once, though it was to a picture of tubgirl instead of the goatse.cx guy.

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
    4. Re:Thanks for Asking? by Steven+Blanchley · · Score: 1

      I've heard about the tragedy of the commons before. I believe I saw it posted here as a comment on some article about problems with eDonkey. The BT protocol is designed specifically to avoid those kinds of problems. If you upload slower, you download slower; that's how it works.

      The reason it's bad to /. these sites is because the indexes are dynamic, and generating them thousands of times a minute isn't cheap.

      There's only one real way you can "abuse" BT, and that is by closing it as soon as a download completes instead of leaving it on for a while afterwards. It will still work, just not as well. And contrary to popular opinion, I don't believe every /. user is a cheat like that.

  38. Obligatory FAQ posting... by oobar · · Score: 3, Informative

    The BitTorrent FAQ and Guide site is rapidly becoming the main collection point for all information BitTorrent. If you have questions or curiosities, check it out.

  39. Re:Don't think so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    " BitTorrent, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    " Kazaa, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    " mIRC, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    " Direct Connect, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    " FTPs, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    " The Internet, while being a cool technology, still only exists for users to download files which are either copyrighted (warez/mp3/svcd) and/or illigal (porn of varying extrmes)

    You're right!!! It's just a matter of time until they shut us down! Get all the MP3's you can before Metallica and the RIAA stop the Internet!

  40. Re:no. by Bisqwit · · Score: 1

    Sometimes the download rates with BitTorrent are sucking, but what is really excellent is this:
    When you are downloading something via one way, a website for example, and your wget gets terminated or the file appears to be damaged or anything -- no matter what you _were_ downloading with, you can always resume it with BitTorrent.
    BitTorrent ensures the resulting file will always be complete, but it won't redownload what you already have.

  41. ... (Obligatory Fight Club Comment) by nuclear305 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The first rule of BitTorrent, is that you don't talk about BitTorrent. Now all the torrent sites posted here are slashdotted, and the rest are being DDoS'd. The key to a successfull filesharing network is that it's not publicized.

    1. Re:... (Obligatory Fight Club Comment) by pacc · · Score: 1

      Now that there is only one week of TV left until summer hiatus I cannot think of any other purpose for bittorrent than the last unconclusive episode of "24". If it has a bold enough cliff-hanger you can expect the torrent business to start up again sometime in the late autumn.

  42. Re: Poor Man's Akamai� Yeah, okay� by VJTod · · Score: 4, Informative

    What's difficult about publishing content on akamai?

    I drop a file on my webserver and the content will be automatically published to a server geographically local to whomever accesses the content. I publish my content directly to my website as I always have. I never publish the content anywhere else.

    I don't need to configure individual files to be available through bittorrent.

    Clients accessing my content don't need a plugin.

    BT & Ak both work well even if my ISP doesn't have a hub running akamai.

    If it is in any way a replacement for Akamai - why is BT's website just text? (maybe because you can't bittorrent content like you can akamize content)

    Is BitTorrent is a poor man's Akamai?
    Hardly.

    Besides - bittorrent is just files. Akamai has several different types of services most related to distributed content distribution. From individual files to whole websites can be hosted on the Akamai network. [nba.com] is completely hosted on the akamai network - requests to nba.com rarely ever hit the core servers.

  43. popular by jooon · · Score: 1

    A great site to see just how popular BitTorrent has become is bstark's topten list. It doesn't list all trackers out there, most notibably the one that had the redhat 9 torrent, so the top list isn't all that accurate, but it is fun to see how popular some files are.

  44. Yes, P2P by billstewart · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You're mistaking the term "Peer-to-Peer", which describes *how* the program works, for "things people use early popular Peer-to-Peer-based tools for" and also because you're confusing "how you let other people have your files" with "how you find files other people have." BitTorrent is Peer-to-Peer, because the way it distributes files is primarily by sharing them between peers, a piece at a time, rather than by getting them all from the host or whatever. Unlike some of the other P2P systems out there, BitTorrent doesn't have a central index of files that are available - it does its indexing on the pieces of a single file, and the person who runs the tracker for a file is usually the person who has the complete copy they're distributing.

    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
  45. A "90% upstream max" client would help by billstewart · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Bram spent quite a while figuring out which things need tweaking to get the performance to optimize. Some of them are more critical than others, such as the "no leeching" approach. There are two basic difficulties with it, one of which might be easily fixable:
    • Using *all* your upstream for uploads can dog out the rest of your applications. It's nicer to be able to limit the uploading to 90% of your upstream so that ACKs for other things get through. That's probably fixable; I don't know if Bram's working on it.
    • ADSL and Cable Modem are asymmetric, and no-leeching limits you to your upstream rate, not your downstream, which is probably the *real* reason people tweak it. From an overall system perspective, it probably works almost as well if you balance the N:1 asymmetry by keeping the uploading going for N times as long as the download took, but it's hard to do that well, and of course kiddie leechers aren't going to think of that.
    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  46. Mod Troll Down Please by billstewart · · Score: 1

    He's made a couple of trollish comments on this topic. It's obviously not abetting a crime to host a torrent for something you're allowed to copy freely, so things like Linux ISOs and Jam Band Concert Tapes are just fine.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  47. Re:STUPID SLASHDOT by bryehn · · Score: 1

    NO SHIT!!! the whole community was in jeopardy to begin with, this is just gonna crush it. as usual...if /. reports it, it goes to crap.

  48. Failed to mention the blue screen issues by teridon · · Score: 1

    I just installed bittorrent, and after an hour or so it bluescreened my Win2k box. Yes, I have a linksys NIC, but I have the latest drivers for it -- guess that isn't the problem...

    --
    I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
    1. Re:Failed to mention the blue screen issues by skookum · · Score: 2, Informative

      Read this: http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/#freeze. You should use the drivers linked and NOT the latest from Linksys.

  49. Cable companies and servers by billstewart · · Score: 1
    The cable industry has been suicidally clueless on the issue of home cable users running servers since almost the beginning. The problem is the perception of bad service, which was partly caused by some bad equipment in their beta-test city (performance really sucks if you've got 10% packet loss), but the PacBell "Don't be a Cable Web Hog, buy DSL Instead" TV commercials really hurt them. Cable bandwidth is very asymmetric, and the early equipment didn't have the capability to throttle upstream very effectively, so it was easy for a few big uploaders to dog out their neighborhood's upstream, and therefore trash downstream performance as well. Now all of the equipment tends to throttle upstreams to 128kbps or 256kbps instead of 768, and packet-shapers are cheap and effective enough to do fair queuing on the upstreams.

    The biggest problems the cable modem companies had, beyond their initial technical learning and of course the supply of capital, were how to get subscribers to buy the stuff. The way to do that is to have really cool applications that need broadband, and the way to get them is NOT for cablecos to think them up and offer them in walled gardens, it's to make the tools available for then net to invent and discover them (either by users or by commercial companies - it doesn't matter to them.) Anything they do which makes that not happen is seriously detrimental to their success, and the fact that they squashed server development during the Internet Boom means they lost the chance to have VCs funding it. On the other hand, a few more years of Moore's Law have increased disk space and processor capability on home machines and game consoles, and decreased the costs of hardware widgets (e.g. little firewall appliances), so that may get them some development that didn't happen in 1990.

    Most cable companies had three opinions about Napster - the official ones were "Servers - BAD!" and "Copyright violaters - BAD! BAD!", and the unofficial opinions were "Well, Duhh, why do you think people buy cable modems, it's so they can download music." The current equivalent problem is Wifi - they really really need to find a way to visualize open Wifi networks as an opportunity to get more customers, rather than a bunch of evil bandwidth-sharing service thieves. Perhaps a tunneled gateway service that would let them charge $5/month for WiFi access to anybody who's already a cable subscriber and $20/month to anybody who's not?

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  50. At least they *got* it.... by The+J+Kid · · Score: 1

    From the uk site:

    why are all the BT sites down? 90% of them are under DDoS attacks, from unknown sources
    - Jakara


    Unknown sources? Us? Slashdot?

    Nahhhh..... =)

    --
    Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
  51. Re:googling for torrents by ejeetify · · Score: 1

    think the name refers to something like "my prrrecious torrentses".

    You are incorrect.

  52. libtorrent by ikewillis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check out libtorrent, a C implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. I know many people are having problems with the current Python implementation, specifically in the area of resource consumption.

  53. Fast Downloads? by ShishCoBob · · Score: 1

    Since when was 7k/s considered fast? That's the most I've ever gotten with it, files big and small. The problem is that upload speeds are being capped lower and lower on broadband connection in places. Mine is only 15k up and I know a lot of people have only 30k up. When several people try and download a file and then quite when it's done (like most will) it's just not going to work.

    --
    http://www.maximum-cars.com - My little hobbie.
    1. Re:Fast Downloads? by skookum · · Score: 2, Insightful

      7 KB/s isn't shit, but 175-200 KB/s isn't half bad, which is what I can get on popular torrents. You probably need to cap your upload bandwidth and forward the BT ports if you are in a NAT environment.

      And BTW, here's a thought for you: even if a client is limited to sending at 5KB/s, if you are connected to 20 such clients that's 100 KB/s. Now consider the case of 75 peers.

    2. Re:Fast Downloads? by phaze3000 · · Score: 1

      The BitTorrent clients I've seen limit each user to 10 peers. Still, 50kb/sec for a 5kb/sec upstream isn't too shabby..

      --
      Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
    3. Re:Fast Downloads? by skookum · · Score: 1

      There exists no such client that I'm aware of; Bram's official version will easily connect to 50 to 75 peers for a popular torrent, if you let it. Same with the experimental builds. You may be confusing the fact that the default port range (before version 3.2) was 6881-6889, but you only need one port per torrent, not one port per client; and the range was extended to 6881-6999 as of v3.2. It's not a limiting factor anyway as you can specify any port range you want with the --minport and --maxport command line parameters that exist in every version.

  54. How is it better than ed2k? by danila · · Score: 1

    What I don't understand in all the hype BT receives is how specifically it is better than ed2k network?

    eDonkey also has hashes (and more conveniently it doesn't require hosting a .torrent file - ed2k text link is enough). eDonkey has chunk-based downloading and everything else that was mentioned in this discussion.

    Is BitTorrent really better than ed2k? I understand that some groups of people may just stick to it, making certain kinds of content easier to obtain from BT (like anime fansubs already mentioned here), but are there any technical advantages?

    --
    Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
    1. Re:How is it better than ed2k? by Negatyfus · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry-- excuse me? What client are we talking about here? For Windows, EMule isn't harder to use than your average other file sharing app and with LMule you'll have this GUI available on Linux. I even find compiling/installing mldonkey to be a breeze and that one even supports BitTorrent now!

      I also don't see how BitTorrent would be technically superior to ed2k, were it not that people say BitTorrent is blazingly fast, while edonkey is kind of slot (but downloads always complete). There are also many sites that put up ed2k links.

  55. Re:as far as the difficulty finding torrents goes. by Intocabile · · Score: 1

    If anyone wants torrents to the four episodes of Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle that are airing tonight go here http://www.marksailes.uklinux.net/bt/ .

  56. My Review by syzme · · Score: 1

    I've actually been using a bit torrent implementation for a few weeks now. The folks over at Digipatch use bit torrent to move really big (1.1 GB and up) SHN and other lossless recordings of live music around.

    My overall review: a good idea. I felt like I was contributing a lot of bandwidth, and not getting that much in return. Download speeds never got over 20 kbps. This could easily be fixed when more clients join the network. But hey, I got some good Gov't Mule and Dead shows that I would have never gotten off Kazaa.

  57. BitTorrent Is Useful But At Times Annoying by seinethinker · · Score: 1

    I agree with what other people have said about BitTorrent being blindly labeled as a P2P. I frankly do not find BitTorrent as useful as WinMX or Newsgroups are for MP3s.

    I think BitTorrent creates a semi-fair sharing structure that would be great for small downloads rather than large downloads. I think it's probably an excellent way to share patches, isos, and updates etc.

    And yes, it has changed the access of Anime fansubs dramatically. I agree, like others, the drawback is that if the file isn't popular anymore, where everyone has episode 4 and are now on episode 32 i.e. Naruto, your chances are slim to none to get within the same day or the next.

    Any amount you're getting will be far surpassed by the amount given to those uploading (because you are a seed, too). So, in other words, there is a side effect of unintentional bandwidth leeching.

    Also, another drawback to large files is corruption. It's painfully frustrating to download an anime fansub, only for it to be corrupted in the end. Combine that with the scenario aforementioned, and you just end up very angry at your time lost.

    I think for me, I will stick to newsgroups. Although, .rar files are so inadequate considering other types of encoding methods, the use of WinRAR and SmartPar, reduce the number of corruptions and the downloads are speedier.

    --
    Truth like surgery, may hurt, but it cures. - Han Suyin, Chinese Physician and Writer
    1. Re:BitTorrent Is Useful But At Times Annoying by trashme · · Score: 1
      I think BitTorrent creates a semi-fair sharing structure that would be great for small downloads rather than large downloads. I think it's probably an excellent way to share patches, isos, and updates etc.
      Actually, I think BT is best for large file transfers. With large transfers peers stay on the network for large periods of time, allowing them lots of time to upload as well as download.
      Also, another drawback to large files is corruption.
      Have you ever actually gotten a corrupted file from bittorrent? BT uses SHA-1 hashes on file chunks it downloads. If a file segment doesn't match the hash, that portion is downloaded again. If you download a corrupt file via bittorrent, chances are the original was corrupt.
  58. Re: Poor Man's Akamai� Yeah, okay� by Omnifarious · · Score: 1

    It's difficult because Akamai has to go through a bunch of stupid effort to get the content to where it's going. It's also difficult because you have to sign up with Akamai to arrange to be able to push your content through them in the first place.

    If BitTorrent were natively supported in Mozilla, you could host entire sites using it too. In fact, I rather would. Most of those picture heavy sites that get Slashdotted within seconds of their appearing on the front page would be just fine if they were published through BitTorrent.

    IMHO, HTTP is a broken protocol, and the fact that sites can be Slashdotted proves it.

  59. No good.. by LilGuy · · Score: 1

    I can't see at this becoming a huge home broadband user network. It's too inflexible.

    There are millions of broadband p2p users on cable. Nearly all cable services cap at 128-300 kilobits/sec. That's would be fine and dandy except for the fact that nearly every one of those users has a Windows operating system.

    Now that's not exactly the worst thing in the world, but when you're trying to download files while uploading at the same time -- as BitTorrent basically requires that you do -- your downstream will go straight down the crapper. Why? Because with windows there isn't a way to set up packet prioritzation, aka traffic shaping.

    As you're sending more and more data out to people, there's less and less room for your simple ACKs from your downloads to get to their destination, resulting in either the server waiting before it sends more data to you, or retransmission of the same data until it gets those ACKs. ACKs by nature are incredibly small packets.

    If you were to be able to set up windows to automatically send them before any other data, you'd be able to keep your upstream, without affecting your downstream.

    I learned about this a while back when I was wondering why the heck my Bit Torrent downloads always dropped to like 10 k/s when I was uploading multiple files too. I've searched around and can't find any simple solutions to the problem for windows. All traffic shaping tools are apparently built for Linux and BSD. I did find one but it required a $1000 license to work after 30 days or something. Please.

    And for those of you who want to flame me for not mentioning QoS for the newer Windows OS', QoS is only good if an application recognizes and utilizes it. Otherwise it doesn't do jack.

    Perhaps someone else knows of a simple solution?

    --

    You're nothing; like me.
    1. Re:No good.. by cthulhubob · · Score: 1

      I dunno what to tell you man - the programs you want all exist for free, but they're all for Linux. I don't think iptables is going to be ported to Windows anytime soon (since it's part of the Linux kernel).

      The good news I have for you is that you can get the ISOs for Redhat 9 off of Bittorrent - it's not hard to install either :)

      --

      In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
  60. If demand is high, by mindstrm · · Score: 1

    this isn't as much of a problem as you think...

    this is why bt randomizes which blocks to fetch... so that even among only those who are actively downloading, most people will have chunks you need. It doesn't start at the beginning and work towards the end.

    Staying online afterwards is nice, adn courteous.. but it's not necessary for bittorrent to do what it is.. which is to provide faster downloads when demand is high.

  61. Comics by Zepoman · · Score: 1

    Other than animes, the exchange of comics has greatly increased by BT, I think.. I found about BT when trying to complete some comic collections from dcplus. That big files with "complete series", "#1-to whichever is the newest" sure helps a lot.

  62. Re:hard to find torrents? by gl4ss · · Score: 1

    i hope i don't get burnt by the torrentse.cx staff for this..

    but it's online, only the entry page is changed, you can still get the lists if you get in through directly to something like torrexsxx.sex /index.php?blaba=3

    -

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  63. ed2k and overnet by ingenuus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:ed2k and overnet by kryptkpr · · Score: 2, Informative

      eMule uses a 9mb piece size, BT uses a 256kb - 1024kb piece size.. this means partials go out quicker. Also, ed2k links only store a hash for the whole file, whereas BT stores a hash of each block inside the .torrent files .. this makes it impossible to effectively poison a torrent with bad data.

      eMule is designed for sharing lots of different files, whereas BT is designed for sharing a few, specific files.

      BT also favours people who upload (not only that, but people who upload faster), it's just transparent to the user.

      Anyone can run a BT tracker, and when these operate properly, they take care of all source propagation in a central manner, which can then be optimized.

      --
      DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
    2. Re:ed2k and overnet by ingenuus · · Score: 1

      Thank you very much for your knowledgeable response... it was enlightening and concise. The smaller variable chunk sizes alone seems like a big improvement. I know that emule is working on incorporating tiger hashes into the protocol to protect against such poisoning of the md hash.

      I read the very brief protocol spec and faq... it appears that at least some optimization is performed on the client side (tit for tat)... does the tracker just determine which sources to send out to effectively distribute the load? What's the max downloaders a tracker can handle (proportional to bandwidth)? Can multiple trackers exist for the same file? Can you download even if the tracker is no longer serving / tracking a particular file? With my newbie understanding, a tracker sounds a lot like an index server for a few select files, no?

      Ah so many questions... maybe I'm better off looking for more docs? :) In any case, thanks again for the good info and for piquing my interest.

    3. Re:ed2k and overnet by kryptkpr · · Score: 1

      The tracker does indeed determine which sources to send out, but this model could be much improved. I believe that each client should advertise Country, ISP, and a user-configurable string.. and trackers should try to match up people who are close to one another, or people who specifically want to be matched up. This would help at places like universities.. I'm currently working on a client that will have this support (currently it's based on the experimental client, with the adition of a Win32 GUI and console mode Win32 status windows.. it's called burst!).

      A tracker could theoretically handle a very large amount of people, as it's all based on stateless HTTP. It does not take a lot of traffic at all, and most communication is already gzipped.

      Multiple trackers for the same file have been discussed, but the idea was shot down. It would be too difficult to properly synchronize between the two of them, to make sure both know of all peers.

      No, the trackers a central point of failure. If they're down, the .torrent is useless. It has been discussed that putting in backup trackers (so make announce url a list instead of just a string), but Bram doesn't want to implement it because he wants to encourage fast, stable trackers.

      A tracker is much like an index server, but it also knows about the status of the transer of each peer (they periodically "check in"), so it's more like a hive mind :)..

      --
      DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
  64. But the tracker is traceable by SIGBUS · · Score: 1
    Don't forget, however, that the .torrent file contains a link to the tracker that acts as the "traffic cop" for a BitTorrent session. Kill the tracker, and the .torrent file becomes useless.

    Thus, BitTorrent is best used, as the OP said, for legitimate material.

    --
    Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
  65. WinMX versus Bit Torrent by Roelof · · Score: 1

    Just tried 'm both and noticed this whilst sitting behind a FreeBSD NAT box, that BT has an upload and download rate of 40 KB/sec whereas WinMX claims no upload capabilities are present.

    OK, so my ADSL hookup is pretty much swamped, still I oughta have some KB/secs spare...

    Roelof -- the red nosed hacker -- Osinga

    PS this is not criticism per se, just something I noticed, is all

  66. DUMMIES by death+or+glory · · Score: 1

    the links to all your favorite torrent sights weren't posted by slashdot editors. why don't you mod all the links to torrentse down?

  67. HTTP broken? by PaddyNu · · Score: 1

    IMHO, HTTP is a broken protocol, and the fact that sites can be Slashdotted proves it. You're wrong. Sites being /. has nothing to do with the HTTP protocol. It's the servers (hardware/software/bandwidth - take your pick) not being able to cope with the extreme number of visitors. I don't really see how a technique such as BT would improve on sites' availability. Most sites consist of rather small images and text files (HTML pages), and having to download a .torrent file or similar before downloading the content would just increase the volume needed to download from the server (this goes for the client too - even after downloading a .torrent file, it would still need to download the content, which includes all the overhead of HTTP headers and TCP/IP connections). However, I do agree that the HTTP protocol could use some improvements...

    1. Re:HTTP broken? by Omnifarious · · Score: 1

      Most of the time when I've seen Slashdot link to a simple page of text, the site hasn't been slashdotted. The sites that go down nearly instantly are the hardware case mod sites where someone has taken a bunch of pictures (even a 50k picture will be slower to download than a .torrent file) of her work and hosted it on her server in the basement.

  68. mod_torrent by ceswiedler · · Score: 1

    I'm not an expert on HTTP: would it be possible to add .torrent as an 'accepted protocol' to an HTTP request/response (like gzip)? Then apache could automatically switch to using bittorrent as a protocol once enough bandwidth is being used for a particular file (of enough size), for clients which specify torrent as an accepted protocol.

  69. Re:no. by den_erpel · · Score: 1

    Let me guess, you're one of those point-and-click OS users.

    If this is your single reason to reject BT, both arguments are wrong (except different p2p).

    Btw, it's called sharing, I think it's a good thing that uploading is enabled, it's one of the things that feeds the success of a distributed file system (Ok, I'm stretching here). Imagine downloading a debian iso when your neighbour in your LAN has the file, ...

    --
    Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
  70. What if... by MacWiz · · Score: 1

    What if the bulk of the content creators are now just waiting around to see what everyone is going to do.

    The P2P distribution model is free advertising. All you've got to do is get people to look for you and the rest is gravy. It's all free.

    It used to seem like the radio worked that way. Now musicians use P2P.

  71. Asymmetry increasing? by Judge_Fire · · Score: 1

    I remember when uploading was as fast as downloading.

    Nowadays, the typical network connection is getting faster in an asymmetrical way, with uploads getting relatively slower.

    IMHO, this is bad. Its moving us further from the idea of distributed content, towards a traditional scheme of broadcasting.

    J

  72. Re:BIT TORRENT LINKS! by AwfulCarter · · Score: 1

    Well done buddy, they took it offline. Hope you're happy.

  73. I know, I'm feeding the troll by fizbin · · Score: 1

    But come on.

    Python is "some obscure scripting language"?

    Python's not some obscure scripting language. Lua might qualify as "some obscure scripting language". Maybe you could also qualify pike as "some obscure scripting language".

    But in any case, the BitTorrent developers completely document their protocol at the network level; for example, nothing depends on how Python serializes or deserializes a certain structure - it's all specified in terms of bytes carried in standard IP packets.

  74. nitpicking by cgenman · · Score: 1

    7th Guest the game was actually only 1 CD, with 1 music CD for, well...

  75. Toward a bittorrent discovery protocol by fizbin · · Score: 1
    So in order for this to work we need to have a way for the browser to automatically discover that a certain page (or at least the content it links to inline, like .avi files or .jpg files) is available via bittorrent.

    There are a three different ways to do this that I see right away:
    1. One way is to have a special <meta> tag in the page header which says "look at the .torrent file located at _href_ for a list of the files linked to by this page".
    2. We could also design a special content type and just wrap files which should be bittorrent'ed in <object> tags, and place a regular object or img tag inside.
    3. And finally, there's the method mentioned elsewhere here: let "bittorrent" become an acceptable content-transfer-encoding and have a mod_torrent module for Apache that will transmit a dynamically created .torrent file for files over a configured size.

    While the second option is arguably using all of the w3c's carefully spec'ed out extension mechanisms in the proper manner, the last option has a lot to recommend it - it's largely automatic to the page creator once installed on the server; it's also something that could be configured to only activate when load exceeds a certain value.

    On the other hand, the first option could be very useful on a page that had, instead of a single 30 Mb file, 300 100 kb files (because then the page could advertise one bittorrent archive of all the linked files). Doing that nicely with mod_torrent would be extremely tricky.

    Unfortunately, the .torrent file format really is designed only for large files or file archives (think .tar files) - it doesn't carry information about the original URL easily in the archive, making the first option rather kludgey. (Though I suppose, given the rather extensible nature of the format, this could easily be added, or a base href could be given in the <meta> tag)

    So - thoughts on this? Which way addresses best the problems that it's reasonable to throw bittorrent at? Also, which is easiest to get into the browsers?
    1. Re:Toward a bittorrent discovery protocol by crisco · · Score: 1
      I like the concept of the third option the best, make it as transparant as possible to content creators (unless they wish to play with httpd.conf or .htaccess files) and of course the end user.

      But then again I don't know enough about bittorrent and the .torrent files to really suggest much.

      Could the mod_torrent pull the support information out of the request headers? Browser version or an indicator in the User Agent string would be a bit kludgy but might work.

      Could the mod_torrent supply torrents of all the files over a certain size, possibly grouping them by directories. Of course, providing a means to manually specify torrents would be nice as well.

      How many torrent capable browsers would it take to make this worthwhile? Of course, if using a torrent capable browser meant the difference between getting to a /.'d site I'm sure a few more people would be happy to upgrade to whatever version of Mozilla they needed to support it. Best part is, if it is built into the browser there are going to be pleny of peers to pull from.

      --

      Bleh!

    2. Re:Toward a bittorrent discovery protocol by fizbin · · Score: 1
      Could the mod_torrent pull the support information out of the request headers? Browser version or an indicator in the User Agent string would be a bit kludgy but might work.

      Indeed, it would be kludgy, and completely unnecessary. See Section 14.39 of RFC 2616. A browser with support for a given encoding simply declares that it supports that encoding in the TE header of the request.

      As for automatically creating torrent files, I think here's the order stuff needs to be worked on in order to implement this:
      1. Talk to the bittorrent people to coordinate a standard "base url" extension to the bittorrent .torrent file. Actually, while we're at it, coordinating a standard "mime type" extension wouldn't be such a bad idea, either. For single file archives it doesn't matter much, but for multi-file archives, it's essential.
      2. Float a proposal for a bittorrent Transfer-Encoding, and what that means. I would strongly suggest that what it means is that the server may return a bittorrent .torrent file which either describes how to download the single file asked for or describes an archive containing this file.
      3. Write a first draft minimal apache mod_torrent which would only serve up manually created .torrent files that had been specifically configured in (in an .htaccess file, for example)
      4. Write something in Mozilla that could start accepting these files. This is the hard part; I can't even tell if Mozilla allows this kind of thing to be done with plugins (the documentation is not clear; I think that plugins are only ever invoked for specific mime types). Unfortunately, if Mozilla does not allow for plugins that provide a new Transfer-Encoding, but only for those that handle a new Content-Type, then this effort is at least partially screwed. We'll have to jump to the ugly method of considering .torrent as an alternate Content-Type. (I suppose that one advantage of this is that in the early stages, we won't need an apache module and can instead rely on apache's content negotiation, along with manually created .torrent files)

      Once all this is up and working, there can be discussion of automatically creating .torrent files. We really though need a browser implementation first.
  76. Re:Actually, file sizes have been fairly constant. by skuzzlebutt · · Score: 1
    Old Man Stauf built a house

    And filled it with his toys

    Six guests all came one night

    Their screams the only noise

    ...


    Sorry, couldn't resist a dusty T7G reference



    I tend to disagree, though. If you look at the size of the average game (T7G was actually unusually large for 1992) and the size of much of the freeware/shareware on Tucows, or as a like-for-like, look at the download size of Netscape 2.02 (3.25M) vs. Netscape 6.2.3 (25.9M)

    --
    My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
  77. similar protocols? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  78. that Bram, such a nice young man by scubacuda · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm entering this thread kinda late, but I just wanted to mentioned what a fucking cool guy Bram Cohen was (the maker of Bit Torrent).

    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.

  79. Re:napter by tomhudson · · Score: 1
    Um napster didn't host any copyrighted material,</quote>

    Yes they did. Not only did they host the songs (it wasn't a p2p application), but, to save bandwidth, when you "uploaded" a song, if it was already on-site, they didn't bother uploading your copy.

  80. Re: Your sig by Planesdragon · · Score: 1

    Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."

    Actually, it's a very, very effective anti-conception technique--beats the pants off the rythym method, no chemical inbalancing, and when it fails, you know immediatly. (Failure, of course, doesn't always result in a pregnancy.)

    The problem isn't effectivenses--it's that, by relying on people to go against what their instinct are screaming at them to do, it has a god-awful high error rate. Especially given that those who aren't in a position to use a better form of birth control, or have the necessary operations, are of the segments of the population not known for their willpower or their ability to go against their instincts.

  81. Re: Your sig by ahaning · · Score: 1

    Please google for that string.

    http://www.rvt007.com/vasectomy/faq.htm

    That's where I got the quote, but making it a link goes over the 120 char limit :-(.

    --
    Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
  82. That was not trolling you idiot moderator! by Snaller · · Score: 1

    Why don't you use your mod points for something sensible! That guy was an idiot! The thread was about hosting illegal stuff, and that is what i commented on - then he adds its not a crime when you share something you are allowed to copy freely,ie something the thread was not about, ie he was an idiot. And so are you for moderating this as a flamebait. Jerk.

    --
    If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
  83. Re:napter by zsmooth · · Score: 1

    Um napster didn't host any copyrighted material,

    Yes they did. Not only did they host the songs (it wasn't a p2p application), but, to save bandwidth, when you "uploaded" a song, if it was already on-site, they didn't bother uploading your copy.

    Ummm... no they didn't. Napster acted as an index. File transfers happened peer-to-peer. Napster was most definitely a p2p application. It was the first big p2p application. It's disturbing that someone with a 5 digit /. UID doesn't know this...

  84. Re: Your sig by Planesdragon · · Score: 1

    That's where I got the quote, but making it a link goes over the 120 char limit :-(.

    Oh, I'm not doubting the general point of the sig. ("Those who rely on the withdrawl method are often parents"), I'm just nitpicking the terminology.

    It'd be like the doctor saying "being shot in the foot can kill you." It can't, really--not the way that being shot in the head can. But you can die of shock, bleeding to death, etc...

  85. Re:napter by tomhudson · · Score: 1
    Bullshit - once napster folded, it came out that napster had their emplyees rip over 100,000 cds and host them on their own servers, rather than "waste" bandwidth uploading stuff from their "clients".

    This only came out after the courts had already found napster guilty of contributory culpability, so there was no need to re-litigate. They were already in the process of being shut down.

    And, since it required centralized servers, it was not a true p2p app. Napster had control of what went in and out.

  86. Re:napter by zsmooth · · Score: 1

    Please provide a link backing up what you're saying. The *only* thing that was ever uploaded to napster was a list of the songs on your machine. When you actually did a file transfer, you sent the file straight to the recipient, or them straight to you.