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.

Comments

Are you a target?

[dood]

Bram,

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=03/0 5/27/133822 3&mode=thread&tid=188&tid=97

It looks like the media companies are looking for someone to "drag over the coals." :)

Re:torrentse.cx

[Strepsil]

Being linked to from Slashdot every couple of days didn't exactly help with bandwidth costs.

Bandwidth minimisation?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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?