Slashdot Mirror
Ask Bram Cohen about BitTorrent
It's a clever P2P 'information broadcasting' concept, as the simple diagram on the BitTorrent home page shows. It's gotten a fair amount of notice, especially here on Slashdot. And reader Ignorant Aardvark wrote to us about BitTorrent sites disappearing, possibly because of RIAA/MPAA intervention, so this technology is now generating some controversy as well. The person behind BitTorrent is Bram Cohen, and he's agreed to answer 10 of the highest-moderated questions about BitTorrent you post here. So ask away (after reading the project FAQ and other info about BitTorrent and Bram, of course). We'll run Bram's answers as soon as he emails them back to us.
If I'm not mistaken BitTorrent was originally created to make it easier for people to access ISO Distros using the P2P concept, taking strain off the servers that originally hosted them.
I guess with the news that it's gathered as of recent did you ever foresee people using BitTorrent for illegal purposes? (i.e. hosting full albums, distributing illegal ISOs, obtaining full length movies) Do you fear the consequences that often come from the RIAA/MPAA?
Bram,
Do you have any plans for improvements to BitTorrent to improve some of its (few) weaknesses, such as searching for torrent files, bandwidth usage by trackers and inability to download if the tracker goes off the air?
If there is controls built in to stop certain traffic such as the Matrix,what makes you think that this will last any longer than Napster?
Are you taking any precautions for your clash with the RIAA/MPAA?
Useless sig.
why did you choose to code it in python?
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Do you feel that BitTorrent's core functionality can one day be integrated in the operating system as a file system? The ability to share files among disparate systems in remote locations can be seen as extension of what was started with HTML, et. al.
Ahh just what the sites already getting hit hard need.. yet another good slashdotting...
/sigh
It's not very often that someone downloads the latest greatest software package and finds it ships as interpreted source, in a previous era this would reek of "unprofessional" but with languages like Perl and Python, it's more common and respectable, and this package helps to that end. Why did you choose Python? Is there something Bit Torrent does that Python handles in a saner fashion than other languages or was it a simple case of, "I know Python"?
trends of de-centralisation? What are the contingency plans for when the RIAA does go after bit torrent sites?
or is there one?
Do you see uses for the BitTorrent code and architecture other than file downloads?
What are some of the type of things you envisioned being traded over BitTorrent?
Do you already have a defense planned if certain acronyms come knocking?
http://use.perl.org
Do you intend to make searching for bittorrent downloads easier? If so how will you avoid RIAA troubles ?
As the person with the most in-depth knowledge of BitTorrent, what do you see are the weaknesses of the BitTorrent model?
As more and more ISP's subscribe to the theory that a consumer does need as much upload bandwidth as download(as seen in the current cable modem/DSL industry), how will Bittorrent scale to meet the problems it was set out to correct? It seems to me that it would severly limit the benefits of having an application of this nature.
BitTorrent has seen a wide array of usage since it debuted. Many have been surprising and it has caught the fire that makes sofwtare a success. How do you personally measure the success of BitTorrent? Has it achieved the goals you first set?
Torrentse.cx is down because it was originally supposed to be a semi-private [or at least obscure] site serving a medium-sized community of people. The problem is that it got so popular that the guy who runs it [the enigmatically named hello.jpg] went waaay over his bandwidth cap and shut it down to prevent him from going bankrupt. There is no RIAA/MPAA conspiracy going on.
p.s. yo Bram, it's James.
Do you think BitTorrent could (or should) ever be expanded to cover an entire website, rather than just one file at a time?
:)
It would save a lot of small sites from being flattened by a larger website. ***ahem***
BitTorrent Transfer Protocol maybe
Probably an obvious Yes, but if so what was the nature of the threat ?
Obviously what people do with Bittorrent is outside your control, but what do you think will happen in the coming months/years regarding the growing control methods of the **AA industries, and consumers needs for a flexible product? Do you have any suggestions on what should be done against piracy? As someone who created a product that provides a valuable service, where do you see bittorrent in all this?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Does the RIAA/MPAA scare you? I would hate to build something, put my 'blood, sweat & tears' into something and then have these 2 breathing down on.
I installed BitTorrent yesterday in order to get Red Hat 9. I'll be honest, it didn't work that well for me(I'm impatient, and it was faster to repeatedly try ftp.redhat.com and dl it once I could get connected.) Maybe I didn't wait long enough for it to work, or perhaps I wasn't sharing enough to get a good dl rate from the network.
At any rate, I'm clueless as to how this thing works, or even what it is doing at the moment. There is no UI, no shortcut to any docs, nothing. Was this intentional, or is it because Bit Torrent is still in development and things like a UI and documentation are low on the list? Currently I have Bit Torrent installed, but I have very little idea about what it is doing on my computer or what I can do with it - other than hunting around the net for FAQ's etc.
I'm not complaining - I just haven't had the time to look for these things. If they were there I probably would have used it more.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Popular tracker sites (where you submite a .torrent, and it modifies it and becomes the primary tracker) seem to have a scaling issue. I won't mention the site but their are trackers that get 2,000,000 hits a day, and 50k-65k visitors. Trying to download a torrent tracked by an overused tracker such as this one, can be frustrating. While bigger/faster hardware is a temporary solution, what other options exist for scaling trackers better?
.torrent could have an array of tracker sites, that seemed like a quick and easy hack to get some scalability, have you seen or thought of any others?
Now, I'll also say, I wonder about performance of PHP trackers (as this one is).
I also saw some place where you mentioned the should use round-robin DNS for the tracker host to "scale". This isn't a good solution though, as any network engineer who runs a large internet accessible website will tell you. Cachine of DNS records make round-robin not as effective as it needs to be.
I saw a suggestion where a
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Bittorrent is a great protocol, similar in many ways (but clearly superior, for large files, to) ftp. Like ftp, though, there's no way to easily search for files. It seems to me torrents should have some additional metainformation in the .torrent file itself (such as the content type, bitrate, etc.), instead of just the file name. And then perhaps you or someone else could easily write a global torrent search system. Have you given much thought to this sort of thing? Any plans? Or are you hoping someone else will take these ideas and run with them?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Ask Bram? I'm so stoked!
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Now that BitTorrent has grown into something that's completely out of your control, do you have any fears that the powers that be will come after you seeking damages for things other people have done with your software?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Do you have a new url for the Matrix Reloaded .torrent file?
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
If you were to start from scratch, what would you change about bittorrent? Decentralized trackers? Imposed bandwidth caps? Better karma system?
Now that the product is in a semi-usable state, has the decision been made to feature-freeze and to focus on quality control? Running the OSX client turns my iBook to mush. The linux client brings my dual AMD MP system to its knees. I love getting large files (ie: ISOs) at great speeds, but when it renders my computer useless for the duration of the download it ceases to be useful.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i mean it happened to kidnappster and other p2p programs. because bittorent as far as i know isnt connected to any commercial entity could you be sued for damages?
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Bram, what's your take on BitTorrent alternatives or alternatives that use the BitTorrent network?
when come back bring pie
Supposedly, through user donations, they are moving Torrentse.cx to another server. The current server reached its bandwidth limit and Hello.jpg decided to just leave the site down until the new server is in place.
What are your view of ethics, morals and programming and your motivation?
Obviously, there is a problem with decentralized p2p that you solved. Is it the fact that there was a request, self-created, that you were solving? Or was it in hopes of doing something 'good'?
What are your views on working on other technologies that are on the fence, like DRM, exploits? I don't mean in terms of creating to be malicious, but for learning or for profit.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Where can I find a screener of Reloaded?
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Still seem to be fairly big barrier to entry. I understand, of course, that in the beginning these may be best set up by the tech savvy, but it still took me a little while to track down all the stuff that was necessary. And then I find out it requires Python. Python is great, but it's not my thing, and none of my servers support it. Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm asking, other than will setting up a tracker be any easier in the future? And will those trackers be any more server kind?
I remember certain adult movies being released to test out bittorrent. Why are you only allowing tests of rather tame isos now?
You've got a paypal dontation button to help compensate you for your non-trivial expenditure of time...how well is that working? Is it an adequate revenue stream, or just enough for a pizza or two?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Bram,
0 5/27/133822 3&mode=thread&tid=188&tid=97
:)
Do you feel you might be a target of litigation or any sort of legal action because you're the "point" person for this project? Stories like these prompted my question:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/
It looks like the media companies are looking for someone to "drag over the coals."
You've been asked on the mailing list a couple of times, and I haven't seen an answer.
:)
What are your plans for the future direction of BitTorrent? Do you have any plans to design a protocol to enable trackers to coordinate? Any plans to enable BitTorrent to dynamically start sharing a file from an "upload" directory, based on distributed searches? In other words, are you interested in making BitTorrent a "full-service" P2P app in the style of Kazaa, etc...? Or are you happy with the functionality as it is?
Or are you perhaps waiting for the BitTorrent community to start chipping in some of the work, rather than leaving you to do all of it?
(Note: I'm not saying that it's somehow insufficient the way it is. I'm really just curious about what your plans are. One thing that keeps me from attempting to help with coding at all is that I have no idea where BitTorrent is headed, or if you even want any code contributions at this point.)
Have you had any talks with akamai or download.com or other big players about possible partnerships? Do you see money in your future?
User-based Search and Share is the defining feature of other P2P apps like Kazaa and Gnutella. While Bittorrent is more of a swarm downloading protocol, do you have any plans to impliment a user front-end to do something like user-based hosting or searching or tracking of .torrent files?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Have you been contacted by any companies for use of bittorrent? I'm sure in many corporate environments it could be used to cut down on the size of servers required to handle large files.
I'd like to hear your stance on the unofficial BitTorrent clients that are showing up. Some of these clients do more than just present a more user-friendly interface, they allow people to tweak some settings, most notably throttling their upload speeds.
Since BitTorrent's model of "everyone sharing the same data" is fundamental to it's success, it seems like a client that selfishly restricts re-uploading is the complete opposite of the BitTorrent philosophy.
Any thoughts on future changes to eliminate or minimize this kind of cheating?
I think working in obscurity is the best way for p2p.
The Overnet project is pretty nice but the media/RIAA/MPAA had said noting of it yeat. For an old edonkey user like myself Overnet is the best thing in p2p.
www.edonkey2000.com for latest release.....
Cinsidering the system wasn't originally designed to be a music / movie swapping system, would you have any qualms with working with, rather than against, the record and movie industry to make the program less contraversial? What are your views on their attitude towards Biotorrent (IE: Do you think they'll ever make compramises with those that make these systems) Sorry if that question is too long / complicated, but it could be interesting.
Yup...
For situations like I am in (behind a corporate firewall), there is little chance of getting permission to poke a hole for BT.
However, it is just at the edge of feasibility to set up a bastion host running some form of BT proxy, whereby the basition runs BT, and the clients inside connect to the BT proxy via a web interface.
Has any thought been given to something like that?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Are there any plans to extend Bittorrent into areas such as webcasting (I believe it is a similar model with small delays for people that access the content later?)
S
...I can cut onions with it. Or I can cut someone's throat. Maybe we should go after owners of knives - they can be used for illegal and terrible things.
Or maybe I am an adult. Maybe you can arrest me when I commit a crime and otherwise leave me alone in the privacy of my home, my castle.
Damn the Sonny Bono law and all others that subvert the Constitution!
i know you can read my mind boy, meow meow meow meow meow meow...
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I think that bittorrent can be of significant commercial interest. It might be used for software updates for instance. Have you pursued this path or have companies approached you?
I certainly hope you'd keep a free version available, but a more feature-rich version would surely land you a great deal of money with the right pitch.
It seems that P2P is quickly becoming a "killer app" on the Internet, and BitTorrent certainly brings it into the mainstream.
However, NAT gateways render P2P useless, especially in large organizations where port forwarding is rarely an option. How do you see BitTorrent dealing with this problem until IPv6 is fully deployed and we can all have a private IP address?
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
You recently had some success in distributing RH9 isos. Was RedHat involved with this process? Are they evaluating your technology for other applications (esp. up2date)?
While I am moving away from RedHat because of the changes to up2date, it would be interesting to see a major UNIX player (perhaps even a BSD) begin distributing errata via Bittorrent - perhaps even allowing a configurable parameter to control the "willingness to upload."
Bittorrent integration into Solaris patchchk would also be quite a coup for your team, granted that they are perl-centric.
How do you think the different ports of Bittorrent (i.e. Windows/MAC version) has affected the available content?
Do you think the availability of pirated material has increased since releasing these ports?
If you had it to do over, would you have released these ports?
In my recent test, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum were downloading the same link, over the same time period (although they weren't started at exactly the same time) and were even on the same broadband ISP (with the same bandwidth).
Why did Tweedle Dee seem to have great speed, maxing out his bandwidth, when Tweedle Dum couldn't seem to get higher than modem speeds? Is the bandwidth evenly distributed? Is there a preference system? Is it first come first serve? Does Tweedle Dum simply have bad luck?
It's too bad your joke will never see the light of day in the minds of most /.ers.
Or should I say you are batting 1 for 1 in the joke department.
Or, even more obvious, that joke sucks!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
How well are these new implementations interoperating with the reference implementation?
And do you cooperate on the protocol design with those developers?
and other government organisations ? If yes, what were their comments ?
d00d, do u have Matrix? plz give me.
Create a Chord-ring for each single file, every chunk of a file gets its own key in the 160-bit keyspace. Replace the trackers IP with an entrypoint to the Chord. In short, everything stays exactly the same, only clients lookup chunks in the DHT instead of asking a tracker about them. Why don't you do that ?
Like any tool, whether it is doing right or wrong depends on who is using it. A hammer is a tool to a carpenter, but a weapon to a criminal.
The mistake you made was trying to use BitTorrent to download an oldish file. The way BT works best is when there is a /. effect occurring. When a new ISO of RH9 comes out, there is a bullrush to get it which overwhelms mirrors. BT solves this by having users DL from other users and the mirrors at the same time. Once the majority of users have DL'd the ISO's, they are going to close their BT client. It's been weeks since the RH9 ISO's came out, so most everyone has closed their client. This means you are mostly DL'ing from the seeding servers and not the users. The seeders aren't really built to handle massive bandwidth.
BT is a temporary solution for getting high demand files. It works in an inverse supply-demand curve: the higher the demand, the higher the supply of bandwidth.
IANAL, but I play one on
Why did you choose to use binary format for .torrent files instead of clear text?
When, in Windows mind you, if I drag a random file (probably one over 1GB) into BitTorrent's sub EXE (or right-click, send-to), it not only tries to read the entire thing, but:
1) Won't exit nicely
2) Won't exit forcefully
3) Won't stop reading my hard disk after I delete or move the file
4) Won't let me reboot or logoff
The only way I can get it to stop reading my hard disk at all is wait until i get so mad that I forcefully pull the battery out of my notebook and scream "DAMN YOU Bram Cohen!!!"
What I'm getting at... why did you decide to write BT in Python? From the splash page of the BT website, it seems like you're eventual target are companies, or rather, the customers of companies. I can't help but think that Java would have been a better choice, not only for better platform support, but since it's already mass-deployed, and it's superior browser integration, not to mention it would be a much smaller download (currently ~= 3MB for Python-based BT). Are there any benefits of using Python (other than it's refusal to exit when killed via task manager... heh)?
"'Tis a... er... 'tis a story of a man's great love for his... fellow men. "
I'm wondering the obvious: have you been approached by any Big Corporationtm-type groups to pull the BitTorrent source and binaries from your site? What about scare tactics? Have you spoken with a lawyer yet to determine just how much liability you'd have were someone to attempt to sue you?
(Incidentally, I'd assume your liability to be zero, but the way the world's running right now, scapegoating has become a popular hobby.)
- Cloud
I love BitTorrent, it maxes out my cable modem at 200 down, 30 up; no other method of downloading can fill the pipe.
The only problem is the reliability of certain sites with content -- which I'm sure you have no relationship with; but if BitTorrent could piggyback off Freenet, it might go a long way toward improving the stability of these sites.
Also, are you going to do anything with the bittorrent.com site? (That's the one Mozilla "suggests" first when I start typing "bittorrent" in the URL bar.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
What's the advantage of BitTorrent over, say, the FastTrack network? What's the difference, if any?
Hi Bram,
Why don't you just use Overnet/*Donkey? Same thing in idea, but with search capabilities. Why split the P2P community resources yet again?
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
bittorrent follows a similar idea to Freenet, but freenet suffers from none of the weaknesses that plague bittorrent: no central points of failure, real anonminity.
of course it is a much more complex protocol and often badly suffers from bugs slowly propagating throughout the network as they upgrate and test changes to it. so the ride can be a bit rough, but a few months ago i was able to download 700 meg iso's from freenet at 30 k/s, which is quite decent considering that that person who posts the content is kept anonymous. good tradeoff to me.
for the time being, i am using bittorrent more and more because it is fast as hell, but I really think on the long term it will be a blip in history due to its centralised model. i mean, i sure as hell wouldnt want to be a seed node for a big hollywood movie considering the president set by recent lawsuits.
tasty electronic music vittles
Considering that Bittorrent is used for more legal purposes than illegal, and that many web companies would see bittorrent as a money saver since bandwidth costs are one of the highest costs of running any web based infrastructure, do you see, or have been approached by Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera to natively support bittorrent in their next browser releases without any external Bittorrent application?
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
So I guess my question is: why is there no way to prevent complete 2.5/1.5 Mbps saturation when opening a .torrent link? Or more to the point: what are you doing to change this so that we have a usuable product?
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
you can get access to all the p0rn that's out there ?
What torrent extensions would be necessary to support this?
.torrent extensions have been proposed? Which of these are viable?
I'm thinking adding a base URI field and a mime-type field would be necessary, but I'd like to know what thought he's given to this.
What
As far as I can tell the genius of BitTorrent is allowing peers who themselves do not yet have a complete file to share the parts they do. With all dew respect to the effort taken, the rest is just functional glue that allows the system to work as it should.
The eDonkey protocol used the same basic premise. How is BitTorrent different to it and other P2P protocols and why did you make that choice?
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Rule of tools, my man. A hammer can be used to build a house (a morally accpeted practice) and to bash somebody's head in ( not a morally accpeted practice). BitTorrent is JUST A TOOL. DEAL WITH IT.
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
Have you heard about any large sites/companies like SourceForge adopting BitTorrent as download mechanism? From what I understand, this is what BitTorrent was originally planned to be used for the most.
Would you accept a job offer from, say a major movie rights corporation, that plans to use [a variant of] BitTorrent for distributing its DRM Video-on-Demand data?
http://www.tvtorrents.com is great site to grab episodes of some of the latest T.V. shows. I just use it to download Enterprise eps. You all should give it a try. It has a nice tracker / statistics system as well.
One of my more time consuming hobbies is fansubbing anime. One of the most dependable and fast ways for us to allow people to download our episodes is via bit torrent. Bittorrent allows for a small group, without a .edu xdcc bot, to be able to send their files to many many more people than before. Did you expect people to be so reliant on bit torrent? Especially the wide range of users, being ISO distros and anime episodes distribuition.
... to have an official "start time" for files, posted in advance, so that people can get ready then hit it all at once. Makes more sense than just posting a file at random, with people all over the world at different time zones trying to make use of the features of bit torrent to not do it correctly, ie "at the same time for maximum effect".
Have you thought about implementing anonymous features in Bittorrent? What about making bittorrent fully distributed, as in no tracker.
I think one of the most interesting thing would be to hear what thoughts a developer of a p2p network has regarding illegal filesharing.
How does it make you feel that people are using your software to illegally distribute copyrighted material?
Anyway, here are some questions:
Yeah yeah I know, one question per post, sorry
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Users don't want to use their bandwidth to feed other users for non-free things. For example, if Windows Update implemented this sort of functionality, you'd never hear the end of it. Open source, piracy (and probably even game demos), users are willing to share in exchange for getting something themselves.
It seems to me that people would be an lot less likely to use P2P software for illegal purposes if the software provided more accountability. But, at the same time I can see the benefits of anonymity, especially when it promotes civil disobedience as a form of protest against unjust and unreasonable laws. What do you think about balance between accountability and anonymity in general and in bittorrent particularly?
We've seen how BitTorrent is valuable for distributing large files (like iso images) across the internet, but have you thought about other uses for the technology? A couple ideas that come to mind are:
(1) extending the HTTP protocol to allow web sites to become p2p. This would alleviate bandwidth problems for sites that serve medium to large sized files (such as photo galleries).
(2) file servers. A company with a heavily utilized file server could offload a substantial amount of the load to the client machines for commonly accessed files.
These would only apply to static/read-only data, of course. Any thoughts?
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
> Measure Twice, Cut Once, Swear like a Sailor, buy another.
Ah, so you installed a new shower curtain rod last week too, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
BitTorrent's trackers track users' downloads. It is not only a single point of failure, but also a privacy problem if the data downloaded is legally or morally questionable.
:-)
Do you see this as a problem that needs to be fixed eventually?
Or do you think it's the problem of those people who use BitTorrent and have something to hide?
So it's a feature?
All of this "Information broadcasting" technology is very exciting stuff. I'm very curious where do you currently live? If you could answer the question with an address that would be very helpful. I've got a subpoena^H^H^H^H^H^H some documents I'd like you to look at.
Thanks in advance,
Hilary B. Rosen
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Do you see BitTorrent as a remedy for the "slashdot effect"?
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Many freeware/shareware folks like to keep download stats for marketing purposes, so P2P software and mirrors really irk them....
In order to foster more love from freeware/shareware distributors, could BitTorrent be made to inform the end user (me) that BitTorrent was going to send a "notice of download" (not including any personal information, such as an IP, etc) upon sucessful download (that I could preview before sending of course)?
If *I* was Warner Bros, and eveyone offered to distribute and pay for all the bandwidth for the next version of the Animatrix, while I still got to see download statistics, i'm not sure I'd even would need to provide a direct link to the 150 meg QuickTime files.
With this kind of feedback mechanism, the software/media providers get all the love - download stats, far far far less bandwidth used -
and we get all the goodness - their free movies, software, freeware, data, etc. Its the ultimate mirror.
Or am i missing something?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
If you're on a win32 box, you can run:
"btdownloadgui.exe --max_upload_rate [X] --responsefile file.torrent"
Where [X] is the rate of kB/s. This will throttle the bandwith available to BitTorrent.
On a *nix box, I believe you just subsitute ".py" for ".exe"
Every day more and more BT clients are popping-up, with features not originally intended for the protocol. Do you feel that these features, such as multi-tracker search features, are doomed to kill "the network?" On the flipside, what are your thoughts on other, "classic p2p" clients now incorporating BT technology (heh, IANAM*), such as the new Shareaza beta?
And I know I'm cheating here, but:
What can you, me, or we as a community do to ensure that BT stays pure, or at least, survives in it's original, intended state?
put the what in the where?
It is entirely deliberate that there is no UI. No offence, but users are idiots. Give them any options and they'll play with them, even if the default setting was entirely optimal.
As to what BitTorrent is doing - all you really have to know is:
(1) It goes away and does nothing more when you close it. Unlike, say, "Red Swoosh" or other background P2P downloaders.
(2) It uploads. If you're unhappy with consuming outbound bandwidth, don't use it.
Torrense.cx is down because they ran out of bandwidth for the month and are also switching hosters. They've posted this all over the place so you either WANT to start a conspiracy theory are really ARE ignorant. BTW, lets all keep putting it in the headlines so the RIAA can fucking hear about it every other day. Fucking slashdot editors have NO brains at fucking all.
* I Am Not A Marketer
put the what in the where?
have several origin servers with good bandwidth on each. it would then be almost guaranteed that you'd peg your incoming bandwidth.
From what I have heard, the problem with P2P is the overall dependence on a single server or a set of servers. Every network to date has been dependent on at least a few common servers, if not a single common server. Even Gnutella has this problem (you have to get host information from database servers, therefore if they fail, the network will inevitably fail). Since BitTorrent is based on trackers, this could also be a problem. Is there any plans to allow the mirroring of trackers to ensure that the network doesnt die out? The other issue is Scalability. How do you plan to work on that?
Anyhow... the problems are this:
1. How will you ensure the availability of trackers?
This could be done by mirroring the trackers.
2. How can you scale the system to support more users?
Again, this would be able to be done by adding more users and trackers, since each client contributes.
3. Provided BitTorrent becomes popular, how can bad/improper file transfers be prevented?
MD5 hashing could be used to find files that are invalid. According to the site, this is already done. MD5 hashes can theoretically be spoofed however.
The bittorrent project seems to be aware of these issues, and are working on them, so they show promise. Which is good.
hahaha. that's wonderful
The main problems I have had with bittorrent is its heavy usage of bandwidth. I like being able to surf while downloading files (like RH9 .iso's) - something I can do with FTP, since it is only one stream being sent.
.torrent files) at a certain point (let's just assume 1 or 2 seeds), this would certainly be of help.
Unable to find a client with the ability to limit download rates (or connections to 1), under Windows, I've settled for the experimental client. It is usually not any better, but at times I can at least lower my upstream to send http requests.
An official Windows Client that can limit the number of up/down streams would be highly appreciated.
Another problem with bittorrent is when seeds for less-popular files go offline. As people cannot be seeds for more than 10 (at least, I think that's when I ran out of ports in Windows...), and most probably would not make the ammount of upstream that would generate. If there are any plans for a server client to automatically re-seed files (from a given list of
Are there any plans for limiting up/downstream (even though I know the protocol was designed around the fact that everybody should share) or a server software designed to easy the distribution of older files?
Now that SCO has claimed that it owns the rights to Bittorrent, everything that is shared with it, and your very soul, how do you feel about the lawsuit in progress?
BitTorrent excels at sharing large files (or clumps of files), one at a time with laser-like precision. When you open a torrent - you download everything that torrent is sharing. No more, no less.
Bittorrent also goes away when you close it - you're only uploading when you're downloading, and it's controlled by the user as to when you stop.
Asking about it being used as a remote filesystem is about as apt as asking if Windows notepad can be used for instant messaging - both can input text (transfer files), but serve completely different purposes.
hello.jpg is the owner of torrentse.cx
How do you plan to use the $10 I gave you?
I suppose you have little to fear from the RIAA/MPAA. Outlawing BitTorrent would be like outlawing ftp or http. Those guys are already facing embarrassment in that their arguments against p2p can be used against search engines and the internet in general.
Check out Brams musings on technology, drug use, and law, here.
That being said; should you still proclaim one of your aims is "digital piracy" given the current environment?
Thanks,
--BigBir3d
can someone PLEASE point me to some links on bittorrent
It interests me how you have a hybrid solution - a P2P app that relies on server-based files to function.
I've noticed several ideas (and have a few of my own that I won't bore you with) for taking the last step, and making BitTorrent no longer rely on a torrent-aware server to function. I must assume there is some reason that you're not pursuing this direction, and was curious as to why.
i've seen it purple, black, and grey/white streaked. what color is it today?
What are your thoughts on Yiffing and Furries as it relates specifically to BitTorrent? PS: Make BT skinnable please.
BitTorrent can't be completely shut down like you mentioned. Anyone can run a tracker (it's a little Python script), and from these trackers you share files. The legal ISO files Bram is sharing on his website are still working fine. MPAA/RIAA just went after the owners of trackers sharing illegal things. Check out TorrentSpy, it lets you check on the status of files shared on a BT tracker.
Now that its been talked about here the unwashed masses will flock to it, and it will appear on the A's radar screen to be attacked..
Sort of like what happened to napster, it was great till it got noticed by the public.. then it was just a matter of time..
It was fun while it lasted..... Blah.. cant people just mind their own business?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Thanks for another story. This is 2 days in a row. Let's keep the tracker sites down, shall we. This so sucks.
threatening Bram because of bittorrent would be about like threatening Microsoft for writing and distributing IIS and windows file sharing or threating the apache developers for writing a web server.
I have installed bittorrent and it seems interesting but I think it has several inherent weaknesses and if I might make a couple suggestions.
The entire thinking behind bittorrent is that it should improve download speed and remove the high bandwidth bills for parties wishing to host large files. Using these assumptions, I see the follow that frustrates me.
You have to use google to find a site which is hosting bittorrent files and then you have to use this sites search engine to find what you are looking for. I find these bittorrent sites very Mickey mouse. You should develop a system for searching also; I think this would greatly improve the popularity of this product.
Just my 2 cents
one of the lessons learned working on mojonation in its original days was that "search is hard" so its best to leave that up to the people that know how to do that very very well.
Many home NAT gateways come with an Evil feature called UPnP that ms is pushing for the future. basically they let any "application" inside behind the NAT detect the gateway and easily ask it to open one or more ports thru to the host in question using some extreemly bloated soap-ish xml-ish queries to the NAT box.
;)
"application" is in quotes because microsoft makes it super easy to send people an auto-executing "application" to their Outlook mail client.
bittorrent doesn't support UPnP but things of that nature can be supported. It is intended to make P2P networking behind nat much more plausable.
Why doesn't BitTorrent come with a man page?
Whether or not it is the intention of this poster, the questions are loaded with traps the MPAA/RIAA would love to use against you in court. BTW, you really should start a legal fund raiser of some sort. You WILL end up in court, because you WILL be made an example of. On the flipside, if we can all stand behind you when that happens, it will be us making examples of whomever comes after you. Of course, I don't know you personally, but I believe you are a Nederlander. That's good. Stay there, and for god's sake don't set foot on US soil for a while and maybe they can't get you into court in the first place.h tml
So, anyway, Bram, thank you for the technology, sorry I sound so conspirist. :)
I know this sounds paranoid, but look at the way SCO tried using arbitrary old quotes from RMS, ESR and even Almighty Bruce to "smear" them here: http://www.sco.com/scosource/quotes_from_leaders.
The same thing is becoming a court tactic to attempt to show cause, i.e. Napster pretty much lost because of the "especially since they are exchanging pirated music" quote: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-241977.html?tag=rn
put the what in the where?
What kind of response will you give to the lawyers. I always thought in cases like these you could take "guns dont kill people, people kill people" approach and say you cant control what kind of content your users post. But normally that doesnt work. So when the RIAA comes do you plan to fold or fight?
You're right, it can't be completely shut down, but it's so close to it that it doesn't much matter at this point. The official BitTorrent site, hosted on Bram Cohen's University, was taken down, as were all of the BitTorrent link sites. The project is effectively dead now, and anyone running a tracker to serve illegal files can expect a C&D like Torrentse.cx and suprnova.org got. I'm well aware of TorrentSpy, and it's telling me that all of the torrents I have are dead - hell, even the legitimate ones, like some of the "mirrors for Slashdot effect victims"! I suppose it is possible to find working .torrents for Linux ISOs, but you'd really have to look hard or already have the .torrent files, because all of the sites have been shut down.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Do you also feel the whole commercial copyright agenda has distracted people from focusing on the system and networking aspects of your project? In other words, do you find or think that social issues have dramatically impacted yourself or other people who are simply trying to develop leading edge applications?
Words to men, as air to birds.
Dude, becuz, Python's, like, teh best langauge EVAR!
My favorite feature of BitTorrent is the way it designs a sort-of bizarre 'population inversion' into the distibution system: the more people that are downloading, the faster it goes. (Nothing is more frustrating than trying to grab the latest Knoppix ISO (shudder) at 4K/sec because you're the only person in the universe downloading from your
Any plans to implement a resume download feature or the ability to switch host streams?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
easy: host the .torrent on your website and count its hits.
semi-easy: run your own tracker for your content.
the bittorrent tracker knows how many people attempted to download the content and how many people actually finished getting the whole thing (they become seed nodes).
complaining that bittorrent messes up your hit counts is like complaining that someone taking your content and hosting it on another server to ease your load messes up your hit counts.
According to one of the ops on the irc channel for suprnova, its down cos the feds are involved.
/. editors are a bunch of fuckwits when it comes to links like that.
But yeah,
Bram isn't doing anything illegal. If you think he is, perhaps we should outlaw FTP, HTTP and not let you turn your computer on.
.ISO files surviving the Slashdot effect.
BT is a file sharing tool, but unlike other P2P applications, the centralised trackers (and their hosts) are the immobile weak points. Hell, trackers are regularly crushed by the traffic generated by their own *users*.
90% of the trackers I've seen are sharing legal files, or files that have nothing to do with the MPAA - for example, unlicensed fan-subtitled Japanese animation is booming. But the community is very good at removing files when movies / series *do* get licensed for a US release. I don't think it's a widespread threat to the MPAA - illegal distribution points would be extremely easy to knock offline and prosecute.
There is a demonstratably good use for BT, witness the Red Hat
There's a grey line with the TV show download sites, but if the video streams don't cut out the commercials... I don't see why anyone would want to complain about that ("you're viewing our advertising - stop it!" doesn't make much sense).
And the RIAA has no threat with BitTorrent as it's extremely unsuitable for small files. 100MB+ torrents are probably the sweet spot. Sure, albums could be bundled together into one larger torrent - but with P2P music people usually only want that one song that's good from an album and aren't going to want to download the rest.
It can also be a pain in the ass to share anything with BT - but that's a good thing.
what? you mean a P2P app that primarily communicates data between the peers in the network should not be called peer to peer?
it sounds like you want a term for fully decentralized peer to peer. that is merely a subset of the possibilities.
(another way to think of any p2p data distribution app is as poor-sods multicast since multicast routing on the internet at large is not available to 99.999% of those connected)
I think he was taking the piss, the last I heard the tracker had simply run out of bandwidth due to being linked here.
Although they were dossed recently iir, so maybe the feds are involved because of that..
It's this kind of shit that's gonna bring this situation to a head.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You should really download this excellent unofficial experimental client. It shows statistics for bytes tranferred and number of peers currently connected. Most importantly, it lets you throttle your upload rate so your upstream isn't completely saturated, which would prevent you from surfing the web on a capped connection.
BitTorrent does take a while get started, but you can usually get good speeds if you can manage to connect to a sufficient number of peers. It beats out other P2P systems for sharing large files because there are no queues.
"Microsoft executives also have egg on their faces. The company self-servingly rushed to buy an SCO license one business day after the threat letter, bringing a senior attorney to the office on a Sunday to tell the press how much Microsoft values intellectual property."
Novel Claims Ownership of UNIX System V
Hypocrisy.
- Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.
This is what I think we need. This is a "this post" meets "that post" post. :) .torrent files. We also need mod_torrent for apache. Your files are server per usual to non-torrent browsers, but apache automatically makes .torrents of each directory, serving them as such to the enabled browsers. Good bye /. effect. As a bonus, not using apache with mod_torrent to server your sites would be considered abjectly stupid.
We need a Mozilla Firebird addon and an IE plugin for
put the what in the where?
Then at the end, Novell will come in and say THEY created BitTorrent. Sorry, couldn't resist
Other P2P's have been threatened sued, why not Bittorrent?
How do you walk straight? They must be the size of melons!
I mean that as a compliment.
-buf
I usually don't do this, but the parent is a well-written and insightful post that deserves to be seen by everyone viewing at a threshold above 0.
I don't agree, however, that it's a pain in the ass to share things with BT, or that it would be a good thing if it were. Aside from that, great comment.
I did indeed read the manual...after I suddenly discovered that the seamlessly installed and fully functional BitTorrent suddenly ate all my bandwidth. And pardon me, but dropping into a Windows console to download things that are hyperlinked is pretty unintuitive.
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
Bit torrent uses tcp I feel really deserves its own protocol definition. There should be no reason why you couldn't embed in HTML the following code:
<IMG SRC="bttp://massive-hirez-image.jpg">
Have you thought of this before? Would you (as the creator of the technology) be willing to write an RFC?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My reading of US copyright law indicates that non-commercial, publicly accessible archives are allowed to make copies of copyrighted media for distribution to other such archives. This is in the first chapter under the fair use sub-section 107.
Do you think that BitTorrent fits the definition of a publicly accessible and non-commercial media archive?
First, we should stop calling bittorrent "p2p". That brings up too many bad connotations. It's NOT a filesharing service.
YES, many are using it as a warez service right now.. but ultimately, this is JUST like offering the files for download themselves.. just a bit more abstraction. Instead of offering a file for download, you are offering a meta-file that describes where to download the file.
Yes, bittorrent is awesome.. for distributed downloadnig.. it's one of those things that just makes sense on the internet: If a bunch of people want a big file, why not have all the people currently downloading it help each other out with the download, to relieve congestion on the main link? It makes perfect sense, and it works equally well for any kind of file.
Yeah, there has been an absllute orgy of open warez trading.. but that's ONLY because they can now download faster and keep up with the load.it's got nothing to do with sharing files over bittorrent.. if anything, putting up downloads with bittorrent is more involved than just putting up a file.
It's like blaming HTTP for early warez trading over the net.
Also known as turok.info, later at www.indianpride.us, now at torrents.slash0.org (but down), which were the site for the #tvtorrents channel on EFNet
Anyone know what's up with THIS site moving every 2 weeks? Esp. because the original (torrents.noneleft.bm) site supposedly got enough user donations for a significant server upgrade. Odd that they disappeared right after receiving a bunch of donations.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Slashdot is a bunch of furries.
BitTorrent seems to have better data-side handling than Kazaa or any of the other FastTrack programs, since BT will handle directories, verify file integrity, fragment less, and seed better (since it doesn't always just start at the front of a file).
But it seems that there is a giant disadvantage to BT that FastTrack/Kazaa have inherent, that makes Kazaa more usable.
1) Built in search. Requiring webpages to find downloadable files just seems to be a waste. It makes files harder to find, and since more downloaders gives faster speed, missing a search hurts downloaders.
2) No "share directory" leads to download degradation. Once a file is no longer new, and people have closed their BT client for that download, they no longer are listed as sources, even if they are using BT for another file. So even though tons of BT users have the RedHat ISOs, downloading them through BT today will be slow or impossible. (Although really, without a search, you couldn't share everything anyhow since nobody could find your stuff...)
So the big question is, why is there no built in search, and do you foresee a time when a Kazaa-like search feature gets added to BT (Which would obviously require an addition to the standard)?
I was reading the FAQ in order to formulate an insightful, provocative question, when I stumbled upon this tid-bit:
- Does BitTorrent contain spyware or adware?
- No, BitTorrent contains no spyware, adware, or any other kind of -ware.
I applaud you for avoiding many of the pitfalls of other computer projects by avoiding the plethora of "-ware" that poisins many a good idea, but have you run into any problems avoiding the inclusion of so-called "soft-ware" in BitTorrent?As a follow up, since BitTorrent is obviously not (per the FAQ) software, what is it? Is it, as I suspect, an amorphous semi-intelligent entity working on gathering it's resources in order to become the Supreme Master of All?
Thanks for your time, and for your great contribution to free
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Bram Cohen
;)
Extracurricular activities:
1992-3
Co-captain of Math Team, Stuyvesant High School
1992
1st place team, New York State Math League
Individual High Scorer
1992
Passed American Invitational Mathematics Exam (AIME)
So how often did you get wedgies at your school? Curious nerds NEED TO KNOW!!
Has any effort/thought been put towards bit torrent page distribution? Specifically, a way that one can use BT to mirror webpages. A way to get around the /. effect, and as well would work wonders the next emergency that comes out (see 9/11).
On one of the other BitTorrent stories, someone suggested making a module for Apache, mod_torrent, that would, when asked for files of a certain type (like ISOs, and they would contain only GPL'ed software of course) or over a certain size (1 MB? 5 MB? 20 MB?), would send a torrent of it, and if there were no seeds at the time, would seed the file itself.
That sounds like an awesome module. Do you see it happening? Would you assist someone who was trying to write such a thing?
I would use BitTorrent but I only ever get a few k download becuase I'm using NAT.
What is the possability of supporting push type connections so that NAT users can benifit from BitTorrent?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
anyone agree
Could the BitTorrent protocol be used for things like streaming radio and TV?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
you'll see that if you upload, you get faster downloads; this is not because of how your client works, but how other clients work. Clients exchange bits on a one-for-one basis when they both don't have the full file.
This means that once you have the full file, you just upload to people, as you don't need any parts.. but as long as a client needs chunks, it only sends a chunk when it receives one (sort of). The effect is exactly what is desired.
The reason throttling is in there in new clients is because network situations are often assymetric, and you NEED to be able to somewhat control how much bandwidth is used, in either direction, to get optimal use.
If you firewall off your uploads, your downloads wsill suck in bittorrent.
In windows, XP for example, follow these steps.
;)
1) Open up any folder.
2) Goto Tools > Folder Options.
3) Select the File Types tab.
4) Scroll down to TORRENT.
5) Click the Advanced button.
6) Click the Edit button.
7) In the "Application" text box, add the max upload argument.
8) Click OK, click OK again, then click OK one last time.
Uploading at full speed throttles my whole connection
I use an OpenBSD 3.3 box as my DSL firewall. The new version of pf integrates ALTQ, meaning that you can assign packet traffic to queues based on their ToS priorities. See this writeup for details.
Before I upgraded to 3.3, Internet response was abysmal whenever I was running a concurrent BitTorrent uploader. Now it is much more bearable. (If only I could get PPPoE to stay up for more than 20 minutes at a time...)
Do you have patents on any of this technology. I recall talk in the past of "Swarming" patents and whatnot.
Do you have plans to make money off this, or is your interest purely technological?
Currently P2P networks generally form almost entirely at random- you're as likely to connect to a server on the other side of the world as you are to connect to a server 5 feet away that has the same file. This means you use up bandwidth on all the links on all the machines inbetween. Clearly you can reduce the total amount of bandwidth used, and often latency and throughput, if you (mostly) go to local servers. Are you planning to include any strategies to help minimise this in Bittorrent?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Thanks for spouting total bullshit, well done. The 'official BitTorrent site' is not the one which got taken down by a university two days ago. It is http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ and is still alive and well. Torrentse and suprnova didn't get C&Ds, they were slashdotted to hell and back. Read -> Comprehend -> Post.
Hi,
.torrent files out of files on your server, and seed them? Right now this requires several different packages, including the tracker, maketorrent, and the client (for seeding the files). Having all of this as a single package would be nice for people who want to use BitTorrent for it's many legal uses. Of course, the warez communities who use BitTorrent solely as a P2P app wouldn't benefit from this, but from what I understood it is your desire to promote only the legal uses of BitTorrent.
One of the more useful things I see BitTorrent as is what its name implies: A temporary P2P network to alleviate a 'torrent' of downloads. I especially like the way GameTab News (http://news.gametab.com/torrents.php) handles it: They are always a seed for their torrents, and remain a contributing uploader as long as the torrent is on their site. My question is:
Do you see a BitTorrent server package, perhaps as an addon to Apache or something, that will run a tracker, make
Yours respectfully,
Clint Olson
P.S. Thank you for making this wonderful program!
just because he didn't do anything illegal doesn't mean they won't come after him. :) history would suggest that all they need is a vague affiliation...
Given that P2P's motivation was to allow free transfer of files effeciently one can not help but feel that the motivation to share files of the warez varioty also played a major part in the growth of such approaches to file transfer.
Now that we find that P2P based websites are having a hard time due to the content they show that is available on such networks alone without even hgolding said content or offering it alone, but by mearly showing and offering the ability to select said files; Would you not feel that we are now with the level of the technology and bandwith we have available today to look at intergrating a form of web server over P2P ala WWW over P2P over IP. I suspect that it would be an interesting challange and if not for the usual lack of time and busy savingthe World I'd induldge in such a project myself. WWW over P2P would indeed offer great potential to avail cencorship but at the same time would only just raise the bar for a while. But would offer a very neat use of P2P - sort of a distributed web cache, might even get an ISP to sponsor something like that as well I suspect (AOL does have its more positive points with regards to investment of technology back into the community) - perhaps a new interface for squid would be the approach, still interesting idea and use of P2P would you not agree?
I'm curious, since I haven't seen any of these yet. Any links?
BitTorrent's tracker performs a necessary function, but as we have seen recently it's the achilles heel in an otherwise robust network. A distributed tracker network would solve two problems: One, the loss of one node wouldn't affect everyone's ability to download. Two, it could recognize when different torrents pointed to an identical file (or identical pieces) and combine their clients, resulting in higher bandwidth. Is there a plan to make a distributed BitTorrent tracker?
better yet, do a water displacement test .... excuse me while i go kill myself for even thinking about that ...
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Have you considered implementing non-linear downloading of files such that the end segments of a file are given just-as-high priority as the beginning segments of a file? In effect, users could download the last 30 megs of a file before they've located the first 50 megs of the same file. Doing so would avoid the problem of users disconnecting their clients once they've finished a download, and increase the likelyhood that a complete copy of a file is distributed across the network.
(I don't think it currently works this way)
would be wonderful for non-profit distro like Debian GNU/{Linux,Hurd,NetBSD,FreeBSD} -- apt-get definitely could use bittorrent protocol.
What was you're inspiration to write the software? Did you anticipate it as been as succesfull as it has been?
I recently began using WxPython after deciding it would offer the best cross platform support for my project. The gui for BitTorrent is the first program I've seen written with WxPython that has had such a large userbase. I was wondering what issues you've had with it, and if you still feel that it was the best choice for the job.
Everything will be taken away from you.
that's something that might be better suited to implement through a QoS package. The code would be a nightmare to maintain (and consider that the primary implementations are written in python).
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
In a single company/school/lab/whatever, sharing small bandwidth costs across many servers & having everything be up-to-date would be great.
Squid does that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If America and Israel were to enter into war against one another, on whose side would you fight?
What are you talking about? I didn't want to check everything in your post because it sounds like crazy troll blather, but the torrent files for Slashdot effect victims ist still live and well. The Original site is live and well also.
I read the internet for the articles.
How is this flamebait? It's the truth.
You might not like it, but its fact!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
If you look at his resume - until recently, he earned his living as a Java programmer. So the predilection for Python seems to be bourne of knowledge, not ignorance. So perhaps a better question - what are the advantages/disadvantages of Python over other languages, and why is it your favorite?
What about the possibility of using Gnutella as a distributed and indexable way to find items via BitTorrent?
I think that would give some peer site operators more options and users the ability to search for certian things... pretty sammy tv shows *cough.
Bram: When is the new version of the Mac OS X client coming out? Supposedly the 3.1 version will be updated 'soon' but it's been stalled for as long as I can remember!
What makes BT better than Overnet? Aside from the occasional out of sync linux & windows releases.
What about the subscriber reward delay?
Considering that a large percentage of the users of BitTorrent are people who fansub/download/watch anime, do you, as the author of the software, partake in fansub/download/watch anime?
Thanks!
AGAIN, you think it's a grand idea to take torrentse down. Thanks. You're doing a far better job than any agency you mentioned could dream of.
Maybe you should use BitTorrent to reduce your bandwidth load and costs.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
BT is a nice P2P app, it is a better Edonkey (the hash works! i've had corrupt downloads with emule/edonkey) and it removes those huge servers.
In theory, you can have one tracker for each file. However it makes sense to group files of a certain interest, say Linux ISOs, on one tracker and maybe Buffy episodes on a different tracker.
Torrentse and Suprnova are a nice idea, but they pose a target for ddos attacks, which has happened, like Slashdotting torrentse.cx when someone posted the link to the "Matrix Reloaded Final Theatrical Trailer".
In summary I would not change anything about BT. The "experimental client" solved the issue I got.
Keep up the good work!
RavenZ
Do you see any practical applications of bittorrent in the buisness community? Why have companies, which often have spurts of insane bandwidth necesity (such as the latest game demos) failed to take advantage of bittorrent? How do you think your decisision to make it open source has affected this?
We all know that BitTorrent is most effective on larger files, both because the overhead is more effectively amortized over a larger file and because larger file still = longer download time = longer time on network = more time spent as a seed.
Have you thought of any ways in which the basic technologies of BitTorrent might be applied to increase download speeds for smaller files than those for which it is currently efficient? My best idea on the subject is to package several small, related files in archives whose format would allow you to see *where* in the archive the files you actually want would be located. There would be considerably many people out there who would want the whole archive's contents, who would act as seeds, and those who only wanted certain files could get the archive directory and download the file portions that contained the files of interest to them.
Is this an area which interests you at all, and if so, what are your own plans on the matter?
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
- Take a popular file
- For the person to notify, use the IP address of the recipient of the DOS
- As the file gets quickly moved about the web, the person receives waves of notifications, potentially maxing their pipe.
Probably a stretch, but just a thought.Restricting upload speeds restricts download speeds. This is an absolute must-have feature for those of us on ADSL or other asymetric connection.
This issue causes problems in other situations as well, but there's a simple solution for those on Linux or BSD: traffic shaping. I use Wondershaper, but there are a bunch of scripts out there that set this up for you, and it's actually not all that hard to do yourself if you're willing to spend a little time on it.
The result is ping times and interactive responsiveness that don't change perceptibly regardless of the load. It does cost you a tiny fraction of your bandwidth, since the shaper intentionally leaves just a bit of unused space in your pipe so that new connections can start up, but the overall effect is a huge perceived performance improvement on a full pipe.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There isn't anyone seeding that .torrent file. Doesn't that mean that none of us will get the whole file?
Also, I would love to have a Bit Torrent client embedded in a Web browser like Mozilla.
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
I hope the RIAA doesn't go after bittorrent. It's nothing at all like kazaa.. Kazaa lets you search for music/videos/apps/etc.. kazaa is a utility for pirates, i dont care what excuses they use, the only use for kazaa is to download illegal mp3s and porn.. but bittorrent is just a different way of downloading from the web. Everything i've downloaded using BT is all legal. Linux distros for example. Theres many times when I needed to download a large file and all the servers were down or really slow, but with BT id get the best connection.
If the RIAA goes after BT, that'll be the final straw. I'll have to do something crazy*, mwuahahah
(*crazy as in cry because i cant do anything**)
(**unless someone starts a class action suit against the riaa, id sign up!)
Have you put any consideration into BitTorrent, or something similar to it, becoming an integrated part of next generation operating systems? Have you thought any about what this next generation P2P would be like?
And have you thought any about turning BitTorrent into a money making venture with paid access to a large, fast, stable network of machines (backing up data over the network, encrypted of course)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's a really interesting question!
What do you think of the new P2P Push breed (see story) that is emerging? Being yourself an expert in the P2P field, what do you think the possiblities are of P2P/decentralization growing out into broader types of location such as user location (think chat buddy lists) or website location (decentrealized DNS.)
Other people have developed GUIs for BT. A quick google should provide the goods or there are a few options at...
BT Links
I use this
HTH
Because BitTorrent isn't exactly a P2P application where you can search for illegal. It's more akin to a protocol - like FTP - than a full featured file sharing suite.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
Have you done simulations of the propagation of data from seed(s) to leeches to compare the mean and standard deviation of a leeches transfer time for torrents of different sizes for a set of virtual peers with certain download/upload bandwidth and firewall conditions? What is the relationship between the combined available upload bandwidth of the seed(s), the number of peer leeches their firewall status and download and upload bandwidth, to the transfer time for a file of a given size for a client of a given potential download/upload bandwidth and firewall status?
Are there any plans to create cooperating servers for bittorrent? The client bandwidth sharing is great, however, it would be nice to start downloads from a group of servers, even when there are no clients downloading (ie the servers would communicate and share the load of the requests). The BitTorrent architecture is flexible enough to handle such a thing. In this way, perhaps the load of emerging EclipseSDK would be distributed over the many gentoo mirrors as well as the clients currently downloading. A great application. Keep it up, and others, donate if you can.
Andy
What about the idea of "leaking" the next P2P client without claiming to be the author?
Can anyone really afford the time spent in arguments about the legality of P2P (and court proceedings in some cases)?
Thank you.
Uh-oh. That could be possible. I think it would be more effective to use a hacked tracker that would send out the DDOS target as a peer to many/all clients.
Then again the script kiddies have plenty of DDOS capability with thier IRCbot trojans, so they won't bother.
Going with P2P was a really good idea. How can it be improved?
.
Only by sharing bandwidth can P2P thrive. How to encourage more people to participate?
All I can say about Bit Torrent is:
Thank you for your hard work.
Slashdot was definitely on the ball for interviewing you.
Even the trolls have to admit that.
Can't wait to hear your replies.
XOXO
Will you please stop posting links to individual torrent trackers? They are already overloaded with bandwidth as it is, and getting slashdotted is not helping the situation.
I belong to a very popular forum that found this article and has said some nasty things about ./ and its users, but I will not post them as I do not want to reduce my karma with flamebait material.
Having said that, I strongly urge Slashdot's editors to think twice about posting the actual links (or any stories relating thereto) of torrent trackers.
Respectfully yours, - Brad C.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
are you a relative of the famous mathematician Cohen?
BT seems to be the perfect tool for prevntion of slashdotting of file mirrors; do you ever plan to extend this functionality to a "mini p2p webserver" that would allow website owners to distribute their content to ad-hoc mirrors provided by subscribers/first viewers and then switch to a "tracker" mode, just feeding (appropriately modified) torrents pointing to those mirrors to the readers? I believe this could do wonders to relieve the /. effect, especially if clients will be allowed to keep/share lists of peers to reduce tracker load.
3.2.2 for OS X is in beta. It works fine, so hopefully it will be released soon.
Just the first "if" block should be added to the "done" function.
:(
Basically, it asks you if you wouldn't mind staying connected a bit longer to seed after you finsh downloading and haven't uploaded as much as you download. This would make it more clear to n00bs that staying connected helps everyone download faster. I'm not good enough with Python to add a "Do not ask me in the future" checkbox though
def done(self, event):
if ((35,142,35) != self.shareRatingText.GetForegroundColour()): #it is not green
result = wxMessageBox("You have not yet shared as much as you downloaded. Leaving the client running a bit longer will help the BitTorrent community as a whole. Quit anyway?", "Confirm quit", wxYES_NO, self.frame)
if (result == wxNO): #Don't want to quit. Get out of the quit function.
return
My server
Why "BitTorrent?"
I think BitDeluge, BitBucket, DearSweetJesusThemsALottaBits, GottaBitLeaveABitNeedABitTakeABit, BitBomb, BittyBits, BowlOBits, BitCornucopia or even FsckingTheRIAAInTheBumBitByBit would be more apropos...
My
Limekiller
I hacked together a bencode parser in VB, works fine. I'll trade it to you for a free SHA1 implementation :)
Seriously though, what are you getting stuck on? I found it was easy to conceptualize when I realized a dictionary is just a list with labels. Since each piece of data can be part of a dict or a list, I made a BEKey class (think that's what I named it) with an optional name. The ONLY difference between keys in a dict and keys in a list, is the ones in a dict have names. And of course the BEKey could be a dictionary or list itself, so it would contain other BEKeys. The parser walks through the file recursively and built a tree of BEKey objects. Lemme know what you're having trouble with. I agree it's a moronic format but you only have to write the library once.. Bram Cohen really should have used XML. The extra space used is trivial, after all people are using this to send around gigabyte-long files - I don't think a few hundred K of highly compressible XML will kill anyone's pipe.
BitTorrent really allows clients to pump the maximum from their upstream and downstream - however I've seen my ISP be as responsive as a ./'ed site when something popular comes out on P2P clients... What do you think of trackers providing clients with seed/peer's located closed by network geography?
I personally think of BitTorrent as P2P's Akamai, except open-source. However one thing I have always seen Akamai excel at is using IX peering to reduce load on the ISPs own down/upstream link. I would love to be able to prefer the WAIX, for example, over a possibly equally fast source that is outside of peering and more local resources.
How do you know this? Are you developing it? If so I can help beta test it if you want.
DO NOT start a legal defense fund. Anyone who wants to sue you will use that as evidence in the court trial that you knew you were guilty even before they decided to bring suit.
If you're worried about law suits, raise the money under some other name than "legal defense fund".
Since the patriot act gives sentence enhancers ofr using encryption to commit a felony, couldn't this be used against any sharers of illegal files, since BitTorrent uses cryptographic hashing?
1) Right now I'm trying to download the perfectly legal release of Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, all 250 meg of it. Right now I'm 50 minutes away from my download starting. If BitTorrent would automatically look in people's shared directories, then I could start downloading immediately, and help others download quicker, and save the load on the originating servers. All of the benefits of BitTorrent.
2) Try downloading RedHat with the BitTorrent links that are on their site. Nobody is still sharing them, despite thousands of people having downloaded them.
Its a waste.
The tracker already has all of this data. It has a count of how many people have completed as well as how many people are incomplete and how much they have left to go. (Like this, a CGI script that just reads the tracker's state file.) In fact, there's even a stats generator that makes pretty graphs out of it all. We're working on getting the UI elements to display these stats integrated into the core (example), but for now there are patches that do it. (Shameless plug.) To top it all off, the tracker generates log files that are plain old HTTP logs, and are parseable by pretty much any web stats generator.
If AOLTW/WB/etc ran their own tracker they'd have all the stats they needed. If you upload a torrent to a 3rd-party site and are the initial seed and want to see the stats, pretty much all of them nowadays let you at least see how many total downloads there have been. It's not an issue.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it is an obvious observation that a p2p client relying on a central server for various features is asking for trouble. we know the scalability of bittorrent communities has been crippled in having to rely on apache for key features -- see torrentse.cx (where else could you get 300k/s downloading a file that from a server that takes 45 seconds to generate the index page...)
many bad things have been said about this centralized nature, some that _must_ be fixed in bittorrent (one file one port??), some that just make life easier (really, if you wanted 'search' and better scalability, dump the torrent files on gnutella not apache...) that said, there are some cases where that centralization is necessary... if it weren't for the fact that the torrent files are static, and the fragment download ordering is relatively random, the typical torrent's sustained 100k/s would be more than ideal for streaming video.
given that bittorrent's strength has been shown to be the case where large numbers of users want exactly the same data at the same time, have you ever seriously considered implementing a streaming varient of bittorrent?
are there any quirks inherent in either streaming media formats or the bittorrent protocol that preclude the clients uploading streams to each other to distribute the bandwidth in the fashion we've come to love in our torrents? (aside from needing a _really_ big local buffer, and _no_ lag in the tracker)
As it stands currently, I'm no more likely to be downloading from my next-door neighbor than I am from someone in China. This seems like a glaringly inefficient way to go about things.
.torrent is likely to be less burdensome on the network than the intensely chaotic nature in which things currently operate.
Even a flurry of DNS requests and traceroute-esque prodding upon opening a
Ultimately, it is the users who pay for the network, even if it is "owned" by monstrous corporations. It is therefore in everyone's best interest to use it as nicely as possible.
Are there any plans to add features to BitTorrent which will automatically select (or give preference to) sources which are nearby?
Kid-proof tablet..
Hey, we could publish torrents on freenet instead. Let's see how the RIAA/MPAA will take those down.
Yet they seems to do it. Remember that student who wrote some search engine thingie for distributing files around the campus? The RIAA sued him.
(Note to Slashdot readers:) Bram's done a lot of work on testing BitTorrent with different levels of scaling as he developed it, and that's led to tweaking a lot of the algorithms and parameters to make it scale well and distribute files efficiently. But there's only some much you can fake before you need to try it with real users. The jam band music distributions and Linux ISO distributions have given some good advice, but there's always another order of magnitude possible in the number of people using something simultaneously that might break it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"P2P" doesn't mean "Illegal Filesharing", even if that's a popular application. P2P means a system that works based on Peer-to-Peer communications. That's in fact how BitTorrent works, and it's the right thing to call it. You're mixing up the applications of some P2P technologies with the technology itself, though, sure, some of them were designed to make illegal file sharing convenient.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, Ignorant Aardvark was simply that, ignorant.
Determining by circumstance, I thought this fellow reader never actually went to the torrentse.cx site while it was up and fully operational. Any visitor to torrentse.cx for more than a month before it went down would have noticed the big black text with blue background stating what's going on behind the curtain, and what could be done to fix it. No one could have missed it, unless someone runs at a super-duper-high resolution that's way beyond 1600x1200. i browsed torrense.cx at 1600x1200 in full-screen mode, and i still saw that announcement!
That threw out the RIAA/MPAA vs. torrentse.cx conspiracy theory.
While the rest of his statement was true, regarding bittorrent sites disappearing and the controversy behind bittorrent technology, some deeper research could have been done about the reason those sites were disappearing. As other fellow slashdotters have commented, it's mainly due to the resources bittorrent takes in order to operate in good performance. The Python language could also be to blame, but since I know little about Python, I won't make an opinionated statement here.
I've noticed that some of the slashdotters mistook Bram Cohen for Ignorant Aardvark when they commented on disappearing sites. AFAIK, bitconjuer.org was the only site owned and operated by Mr. Cohen. Bram Cohen was certainly not the owner of torrentse.cx as that has already been pointed out.
-wolffenstein
If BitTorrent supposedly tries to equalize upload and download rates, why is it that whenever I try to get a file through it, I end up uploading to my modem's full capacity (16KB/s, Basic ADSL) and only downloading at about 4KB/s? Are there people out there who learned how to spoof a high upload rate and therefore freeload off the network, damaging its effectiveness? Also, does anyone know if there is anything contained in a .torrent file for copyrighted material that may, by the letter of the law, be considered illegal? Is running a torrent tracker for copyrighted material technically illegal?
Dear Bram,
How did you get such a damn cool name? No, seriously, I can only dream about having a name like that. "Bram Cohen" - geez, I didn't even know they gave out names like that in real life.
It'd be a great name for a comic book hero... or it'd work great in any number of novels I can think of... and it'd be a great name for a rock band.
signed,
Guy with a lame name
http://slashdot.org/~HELLO%2EJPG works okay... but not if you include it as an HREF link (it just turns into HELLO.JPG and 404s, perhaps it's an IE problem *shrug*
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
Try using a higher performance server than Apache then, like Tux or thttpd. Should help some.
but the end result is the same: having stuff people want helps you get better downloads.
It's not the message, but the package, that's flamebait, like:
You might not like it, but its fact!
As much as it is fact that people will mod you down for flamebaiting if you call 'em fucktards.
My advise: Get used to it, stop complaining, or learn how to write decently.