Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Community Running For Cover?
govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously. Then, you would just have to get a link to any one of the trackers and when you connect to that tracker it would forward you to a random tracker, or something like that. There's another advantage to this too: You can no longer "shut down" sites like the *AA's doing, if you make every bit torrent node a tracker!. I don't see any theoretical obstacle to implementing this: all you need to do is to send the info about who has which pieces of a file to all the nodes, apart from sending the pieces of the file itself. Any thoughts on this?
If pr0n is copyrighted, how come they don't put copy protection on the tapes/DVDs? :P
/. for things like the halflife 2 trailer and been amazed at the speed and ease of transfer. Bittorrent, like everything else, is what you make of it. I wasn't particularly aware of torrent sites that offered porn or warez (too bad for me) and in fact, had someone asked me a week ago, I would've said that bittorrent was a P2P system specifically designed to scale to "slashdot-effect" type traffic, not a system for grabbing porn.
While I'm at it, given the distribution systems and marketing that exsit for porn in the USA (i.e. largely aimed at video stores or serious junkies), do you think they care if someone steals some rather than buying a tape for $5 at the local video store?
OK, that aside, bittorrent seems to work great for high-demand files. I've followed torrent links of
So, um, in the interests of science, where's bittorrent-porn?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Back in the day, Slashdot linked to them (when they were still up) crushing their server... so, the admins used mod_rewrite to send any Slashdot referred folks to a different site (with a similar url).
It is a bit of a niche, but it serves that niche REALLY REALLY well. It's a shame all the illegal file sharing is wearing it down.
The past month I've been using bittorrent to distribute a 500 meg DivX of someone playing a game, basic jist of it was they ran around kicking ass with a VCR running, and they decided to edit it up and distribute it. I put it on my site.. in less than 12 hours I had run up about 20GB of outgoing traffic. Poor server was doing so much I/O working at a shell was almost impossible.
After panicing (thank someone I don't have bandwidth metering) I threw up a bittorrent tracker and told people what to do. I've been running it since then, maybe 3 weeks now. Been averaging about 100k/sec output since then (sometimes much higher, sometimes much lower). Bittorrent doesn't give me a way to look at how many completed downloads the file has had, but judging from the feedback I've recieved several hundred people have the movie.. who knows how many downloaded it that never said a word.
Bittorrent amazes me far more than napster ever did.
Just a question, the main problem with bittorrent is exactly the same as it used to be in the very early days of MP3, before most of you knew what the internet was and they shut down sites all the time that were just linking directly to the mp3s. You don't see that any now days, no one does directly linking, and the setup would not scale anyway. What do you see, we all use p2p search software. So why can I not use KaZaA to download the .torrent file and run it from there? Of Freenet? It still needs a tracker, but it decentralises the collection of .torrent files. How much work would it take to use KaZaA to get BT files?
Warez never truely dies, it just gets a good solid punch, you know the type where you can't breath for a few seconds, and then it catches its breath and comes back with a vengence.
Just to summarise it:
Warez started with BBS, when found they were easy to kill.
Moved to password and ratio BBS, a little harder, but not much.
On the internet it really came of age with FTP, often with ratio still, this was still trackable thou and sites got killed often.
Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that using centralised distribution methods was sorta the real problem leading to getting caught.
Along comes P2P, mp3's at first but it scaled well, and so moved quickly to anything.
So they started killing the search servers, ie napster, so we moved to P2P searches too.
Here is where it gets interesting, the problems with P2P were not created by the copyright holders as much as by the users. Leechers are a huge problem, and basically that leads to speed issues.
Now appears bittorrent, it attempts to resolve a lot of bandwidth issues, but it was not designed to be used in a obscured way. It tells the world everything and does not have search built in, but it is fast.
People come up with search engines for BT files, but those are like Napster servers, easy kills for the copyright holders.
That is where we stand now...
So the next step is to create, either as a hybrid of BT and something else, as P2P network that allows for distributed searches with content insertion abilities and BT style forced bandwidth sharing.
What is the attack that occures after that? The copyright holders have found it hard to kill KaZaA and the like, but they are too slow for a lot of people, and they can kill the fast BT. What happens when the two merge? No one has figured out how to DoS the P2P nets, and you cannot successfully sue everyone who uses it(there is more to the world then the US)...
Just some thoughts and ideas...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
Your kind words were too late for me, but I've never updated my hosts file faster.
Hey, look at it this way: I'm no longer interested in that unneeded late night snack now...
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
This in a non-US country without a DMCA-equivalent.
More than mere navel gazing.
Then we just need to setup more legit torrents. Why not prod the people at sourceforge to setup a bittorrent system?
If technologies begin to be judged "good" or "evil" based on the majority of its usage rather than its intent or capability, then all it takes is to spawn as many instances... no matter how trivial... that aren't "evil" as are necessary to win. If bittorrent's life is in the balance, a few bittorrent mirrors of sunsite, debian, and rpmfind should do the trick.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I, as the author of BitTorrent, would like to make it very clear than I have nothing to do with any of the BitTorrent sites, and that BitTorrent is not and never will be designed to be good for illegal distribution. In particular I'm not doing anything to decentralize the tracker or add anonymity. It is in fact quite anonymity-unfriendly. BitTorrent is also used for a lot more than just TV shows and movies, which people would find out if they bothered doing any web searching. I keep telling people that running warez sites is stupid, and they keep doing it. If you wanna brazenly run a massive warez site, that's your prerogative, but don't be surprised when the long arm of the law comes down on you.
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
Yep. I'd be happy to do a slashdot interview or write something for people to link to about this, either before or after defcon.
There is still hope for secure hosting -- I'm doing distributed hardware tamper-resistant location in a multiplicity of jurisdictions, which I think is ultimately a much better solution.
Sealand is still physically there, but I'd no longer consider HavenCo a "data haven" after the events in 2002 and 2003.
You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.
So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove and eTree provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.
More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy /. effect.
Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.
(Stepping down from my sagging soapbox.)
I've been thinking about a project like this for a while. Everyone who wants to help out, please see http://mod-torrent.sourceforge.net/ and get in touch with me.
If the seeding of files can be fully transparent (that's the easy part) and the tracking be made less resource intensive (the hard part) why would a company not want to distribute their own legal content with BitTorrent? Sure, the client must be installed first, but more and more sites are already requiring special download managers. The BitTorrent client is small and simple. It, or something like it, could easily become a standard requirement or the funtionality integrated into existing download mangers.
I have a T3 connection. Some might think that's fast but when you distribute content on even a moderate scale it won't cut it. With BitTorrent I've suddenly got a T3+whatever upload bandwith is not otherwise used by the people downloading from me. If even a couple of college kids with 10Mbit connections in their dorms download from me my effective serving capacity is multiplied. The base service, the T3, remains the same, the added capacity is pure free bandwith. Mini-Akamai networks for everyone!