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BitTorrent's Creator Bram Cohen Interviewed
Delta-9 writes "The New York Times
has this interview (free reg. req.) with Bram Cohen, the author/creator of the widely popular BitTorrent p2p application." Talks a bit about BitTorrent, its implications, but also a lot about Bram himself. Interesting piece.
Registration is for wussies! Go Google...
NY Times
Registration Free Site
Since I hate to register, here ya go.
Registration Free Link
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
He's made distribution of media and data much more cost effective.
...that just after a post that offers bittorrent to download isos, we interview its creater.
BitTorrent is a nice creative alternative solution to what has generally been a Napster knockoff syndrome among P2P services.
Slashdot also had an inteview with Bram Cohen back in June.
Mike
It's worth quoting from the article that he has been hired by Valve (upcoming Half Life 2) to use his expertise for their Steam content distributing system.
Please make a "no uploading" option button on BitTorrent, because I am a leech, signed the Kazaa masses.
Bittorrent is like the Athlon 64, other p2p apps are like a pentium 133.
Somebody needs to create a torrent of this interview in case it gets Slashdotted.
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Then what did he think it was going to be used for? The popularity of Napster should have taught him that this was going to happen. Anything that can allow someone to get something for free that they normally would have to pay for, will be used for that purpose. Maybe he didn't intend for this to happen...but the best of intentions oft go awry. I find it hard to believe though that someone smart enough to code Bit Torrent is naive enough to not realize how it would be utilized.
How was I to know someone else was doing the exact same thing.
A Google link to NYT on Slashdot? Yeah, what were the odds of that? <rollseyes>
Now I've seen it all.
The school I go to has already ended the party, limiting the crap out of BT connections, so my speeds dropped from 500-600k/sec to 3-4k/sec for each torrent. What's the speed something has to drop to so that driving to where the server is, burning a cd, and driving home is faster than the download itself?
Any other schools out there get a similar clampdown?
SecondPageMedia - Wha
I don't know, it can just sit on a popular torrent for a few days and not download anything, or something like kill bill (the day it was released) was crawling at 2-3 kBps :((
The article is very thin on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent. Just last night, I wanted to download the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo... and despite the fact there were literally hundreds of mirrors, I couldn't connect to many of them, and those I could connect to were utterly hosed. So, I looked for a torrent for the file, and a few minutes later, I was done downloading it.
Yes, you can use BitTorrent to steal stuff. But, all of the p2p programs are basically a mix of the roles of ftp and irc. BitTorrent is slightly different - it's a mix of p2p and the web, making a quick and easy means to find whatever you want. A great amount of content is completely legit, and BitTorrent is a dream come true for those times that everybody wants a certain file. I didn't expect NYT to focus on the good aspects of the program, but they didn't even mention how amazingly useful it actually is.
-agent oranje.
- Legal Torrents - net label mp3 releases
Enjoy.Request your free CD of my piano music.
as well he shouldn't berate people for their usage of his software. neither should you.
and what's this bit about the MPAA having BitTorrent on their radar screen??? give me a break! try the piracy and other infringement sources because the authors do not promote it, regardless of what they know is happening with their software.
Big files, probably. If he wanted it to be used chiefly for big illegal files, he wouldn't have made the system require a centralized tracker that can be shut down and it would've had at least some semblance of anonimity.
As it stands, BitTorrent is no better at distributing copyright infringing content than HTTP is when it comes to evading the copyright holder.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I believe (RTFA, please) that he wanted a good way to leverage unused bandwidth for large file distribution.
/. effect work for you, essentially.
Linux ISO's are a good example, and are probably the first place that I saw bittorrent used right here on slashdot. Make the
they immediately start uploading that piece to other users
Hmm, that would be "immediately start sending that piece to other users". "upload/download" are terms reserved for an asymmetric situation. How can the NYT get this wrong?
--
As I sit here, getting packages at a mightily slow 8 k/sec via Fedora's Red Hat Network, I wonder why this must be.
Why don't tools like yum, up2date, and apt incorporate BitTorrent concepts to download packages and files?
If there was an option when installing Fedora or Debian to "share XX Mbytes at YY kbps" I'd be perfectly happy to donate 50 MB of disk space and 5-10 Kbps of bandwidth to the cause. That's be anough to reliably provide a few packages for redistribution.
Multiply that by the number of Linux installs, and you have a lightning-quick package delivery system.
Imagine apt-get or up2date ALWAYS able to saturate your broadband connection when doing an update!
Why is nobody doing this? Security isn't an issue, since BT uses SHA1. Source isn't an issue since BT is open source. Isn't the RHN stuff already written in PYTHON?!?!?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think a problem in BT is the lack of compiled clients for linux. Phyton is big and an interpred code can eat a lot of cpu time specially when handlig several connections at a time. I've seen a c++ client for linux but it isn't developed anymore.
Another problem is bandwidth limitation not included in the software, you can use an external program like trickle (heavy) or the kernel, but that way it doesn't share bandwidth equally between users, it shares very bad indeed.
Other is that eventually I want to share my bandwidth but don't want to download the whole file (don't have time/space). I may use some trick (download a part of it and after that limit my download rate) but I don't think that's the best solution.
There's a difference between not intending something and not forseeing something. It's entirely possible he knew what people would do with it but still wasn't aiming for that market.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous [...]"
Ooh noo... anyone know a good lawyer?
The devil's in the details. I'm sure he knew very early on that BitTorrent would be used for illegal file trading, but by saying that he didn't intend for it to be used that way is a clever way of distancing himself from any potential lawsuits.
Plus, he mentions in the article that there is no claim of anonymity at all and that he's entirely surprised that websites that offer torrents for copyrighted files continue to be online.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
True, when BT came out I guess the RIAA hadn't made such a big stink yet. That makes sense then. Troll? :p
Since when has BitTorrent been a quality peer-to-peer application? Like most of the open source peer-to-peer applications and/or networks (Gnutella, BitTorrent, eMule), it doesn't scale. Out of all three I named, BitTorrent has to be the worse.
I gues IHBT but let us play pretend. I just made this ummm fork and its made of plastic .... and stainless steel. Here you can use it to help you get food into your mouth. It's other non-intended use might be get food into a container or perhaps even to stab our /. troll's eyes. Maybe I didn't intend for this to happen...but the best of intentions oft go awry. I find it hard to believe though that someone smart enough to eat with a fork m is naive enough to not realize how it would be utilized.
The article makes an interesting point that I'm sure a number of /. users are aware of that bittorrent is not anonymous at all. Many less technically savy users made that mistake when using Napster and Kazaa and got screwed by the RIAA. Now while you're uploading and downloading you have no control over who sees your IP but I'm curious to know if trackers hold on to this information after you disconnect, or if sites like suprnova.org keep track of who downloads what torrent. Does anyone have some insight into this?
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Why anyone would peg their bandwidth for 2 days to grab a flick when you can rent it and burn a copy is beyond me.
Bittorrent shines for grabbing stuff, sure, but I think most people just collect crap, then burn it to disk or throw it on a HD and equate that with penis size.
So, Movie Industry, I really can't see this costing you zillions, or hundreds of thousands for that matter.
The people who want to will go to the theater, buy it on DVD, or rent it. The ones who don't, won't.
Again, if you're going to hunt people down, go after the pressing plants making thousands of copies AND SELLING THEM!
I highly doubt there are more than a few dirty whores who are selling copies of stuff they download. You know who you are. You suck.
How perfect... I had just stumbled across this article which mentions BitTorrent and has some interesting insight on legally circumventing the RIAA.
It revolutianed the way Fansubs are swapped No more waiting in endless que lines in IRC and dealing with the annoying ops and no more waiting for some kind soul to post it to usenet. Also made it alot easyer to remove once something got liscened just yank it from your tracker and boom the torrent is dead.
We love bittorrent because:
1)love the anime
2)love the linux
3)I'm a deadhead, duh!
4)Shiver me timbers, arrr where's me movies?
5)i prefer bitforsale
no file sharing software can ever take off with out being easy to use, it just wont happen. most people(including myself) are lazy and dont want to have to learn how to use something, it should teach itself. bittorrent does not do this and for that 2 minutes after i installed it, i uninstalled it. for those that say screw me cause im lazy and stupid, try finding something on a network that has no users. thats all im saying
Whoever modded the parent as "troll" should be banned from slashdot. Agree with him or not, the parent posted has a valid point. Talk about a f***ing monoculture..
This read as a good article and I liked hearing more about the program's innerworkings instead of how the internet is evil in regards to copyright programs.
My question is what is the ratio of upload/download? Right now I'm uploading at about 13k and downloading around 82k. Supposing the seeders end is saturated to the point where my uploaded bits is throttling my downloaded bits, its around 1:8. I'm going to guess that this is pretty close since it's the UT2K4 Demo and hopefully there are a large number of seeders keeping their windows open after downloading it themselves. Anyone have a more accurate source of what the ratio actually is?
Also, is it possible to increase the upload speed allocated to this one program?
"/"Reality
"Last May, 29 percent of adult Internet users in the United States reported that they had engaged in file sharing; that figure dropped to 14 percent in a survey conducted in November and December."
So did 15 percent of people get their file sharing virginity back?
The evil genius of the whole BitTorrent idea is the lack of anonymity. Like the article points out, it's perfect for Linux distros and anime fansubs. But if you think nobody can know what you're sharing or who you are, you're a fool.
I use the Mac OS X version, so I don't get to see this, but a friend showed me his Windows version and you could not only see who was connected, but what their bandwidth use was too. Apparently some people know how to become super-leeches. They'll appear, and everybody else's download speed suddenly goes to zero while they suck up the whole file. Then they go away. That this is even visible to a regular client should be thought-provoking.
It took me months to find it (because nobody bothered to document it!), but fortunately I found the bandwidth limiter in the OS X version. (Click on that widget on the right side of the window title bar.) Now I can seed files without completely hosing my DSL connection.
The thing I think I like most about BitTorrent compared to other "forced sharing" models like Napster is that you get to choose what you want to share. You go to a tracker and see "hey there's no seeds on that one show I like", then share the file at 5K. That way even the leeches have to wait. Animesuki.com even has a "seeds needed" page for anything that's worse than about 10 or 15 to zero.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
neilcSD wrote:
>
> Not intended to be used for illegal distribution? Then what did he think it was
> going to be used for?
Bram's statements to this effect are what is known in the legal profession as "covering your ass". Of course anyone with half a brain seeing the surge of Napster's popularity for the explicit purpose to trading copyrighted music would know that a new P2P app would be used for exactly the same thing.
anyone else thing suprnova is going to get a huge jump in traffic now?
Q: Can I use PDTP now?
A: No, PDTP is still several months away from a beta release.
Doesn't look like it's better than BitTorrent for now. Good design though, looks promising.
Story text follows:
File Sharing's New Face
By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: February 12, 2004
EATTLE
AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.
"I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun," he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
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And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone,
suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
What Mr. Cohen has created, however, seems beyond his control. And when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind.
Rather, he was intrigued by a problem familiar to many Internet users and felt acutely by friends who were trading music online legally: the excruciating wait while files were being downloaded.
"Obviously their problem was not enough bandwidth to meet demand," Mr. Cohen said in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near his home in Seattle. "It seemed pretty clear to me that there is a lot of bandwidth out there, but it's not being used properly. There's all of this upload capacity that people aren't using."
That was the essential insight behind BitTorrent. Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance.
BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).
The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source. A separate file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar system.
For Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was always about exercising his brain rather than trying to fatten his wallet. Unlike many other file-sharing programs, BitTorrent is both free and open-source, which means that those with enough technical know-how can incorporate Mr. Cohen's code into their own programs.
While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said.
The first usable version of BitTorrent appeared in October 2002, but the system needed a lot of fine-tuning. Luckily for Mr. Cohen, he was living in the Bay Area at the time and his project had attracted the attention of John Gilmore, the free-software entrepreneur, who had also been one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gilmore ended up helping Mr. Cohen with some of
this article is bad news for suprnova.org, IMO
if any anti-piracy people didnt know about it before, they sure do now.
byebye tracker.
Even trackers are not doing anything illegal, as they are just collecting lists of people downloading the same file and provide this list to anyone who is interested (there's no illegal content there either).
The only illegal content comes from the users themselves, and its chopped in thousands of pieces, making them hard to identify.
...when it comes to evading the copyright holder.
Move to Hollywood...like all those east coast movie makers did to evade Edison's patents(or copyrights or whatever the hell he had)
What?
are fairly similar.. except that Bittorrent compels users to upload while downloading. Kazaa lets you search.. Bittorrent makes you find a seed file. Both let you download a single file from multiple users.
.torrent seeds.
I'm not sure if Kazaa allows uploading of a file if it isn't done downloading. Anywhoo... it'd be nice to see a fusion of Kazaa and Bittorrent. A frontend to search for seeds and it forces you to, at the very least, share the file that you're currently downloading. Later on, some jerks may remove it from their share directory so it won't upload anymore.
anyhow, I guess you can just use kazaa to share
p
But then a funny thing happened. I found a tracker for trading live shows from various bands in flac/shn format. Since then, my usage of blank CDs has increased dramatically. So I've decided to share the money and donated to Bram and the tracker.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Gee, when most people do work they get paid *once* and that's that. Why authors think they should get a lifetime entitlement to be paid over and over again for a job already done is beyond me. Authors could just not release a work till someone coughed up enough dough, but no way they'd rather sit on their lazy fat asses and collecting royalty payment.
I'm probably going to be -1 trolled into oblivion, but why don't all the people complaining about the NYT simply register and forget about it?? ;-)
I did that at least three years ago, and with cookies I only ever have to worry about it *once* each time I change browser. And if you are opposed on principle on giving personal info, just put false one.
The whole thing takes about as long as getting the Google link, and you only have to do it once. And I thought geeks were supposed to be efficient
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One big problem with BitTorrent is the opposite of normal client/server file sharing: if a file isn't popular, it downloads slower.
Why not extend the concept to a set of files? Who says that the file you download also has to be the file you upload? If a site is offering a set of torrents, maybe while a client is downloading the most popular file of the moment they can be serving portions of less popular files. (9 to 1, popular to unpopular maybe, if another client is uploading them, that is...) Sure, that would take some bandwidth from the popular files, but they have enough to spare.
For example, I just recently downloaded the Mandrake 9.2.1 power pack ISOs for club members. Download time sucked! If that torrent could share bandwith with the public Mandrake 9.2 ISOs, that'd be keen.
Bittorrent kindof sucks for me because I have DSL which has a limited upload capacity and a large download capacity. I'd like it a lot more if I had a different kind of broadband connection. The "how could he have not forseen" argument is ridiculous. Anything powerful can be used for legal or illegal means. Do you not think http and ftp have been used to infringe copyright? If you're going to criticize for that, let's go ahead and talk about what evil inventions the ink pen and printing press were. The interesting thing to me about the illegal uses of Bittorrent are how those prosecutions will be handled. Imagine a world in which every time you bought drugs, you had to sell some of them to someone else. Then the issue becomes: were you buying with intent? When you "download" (for that's what it will be to the layman regardless of technicality) with Bittorrent, are you intentionally redistributing or is the redistribution an unintended consequence of the lesser crime of simply partaking of the copyright protected work? Authority figures and courtrooms both tend to focus their efforts on the "sellers" rather than the "users." What do you do when every user is also a seller? I get the point that this isn't really anonymous, but neither was Kazaa. It's more a matter of civil disobedience. Speeding is illegal but I've been on many a highway in which you couldn't spot a soul driving under the limit. Most of them... most of the time don't get tickets. "Everybody's doing it," may not be a legal or moral defense, but it's much easier to hide in a crowd.
Let's take your hypothetical situation and modify it a bit. Let's say you publish out your novel in 1985 (long before WWW and P2P). Let's say I take your book to my local library, photocopy it, and distribute it to my church group. I've infringed on your right to control the distribution of your book, and on your right to receive royalties for the sale of the book, but I haven't stolen your book. Stealing would be if I took the manuscript before you published the book and locked it in my closet. Or if I walked into my local library and put your book under my jacket and walked out with it - then I have stolen it from the library (as they are no longer in posession of it).
For your book (or anything) to be stolen you have to no longer be in posession of it. If some distributes your work in a way you do not approve they have violated copyright laws and your right to compensation for your work, but they have NOT stolen from you. I'm not sure why this is such a difficult concept.
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
I think most people would agree it's not a good idea to use a bittorrent file that wasn't from a trusted source.
He has stolen my right to distribute my work on my terms.
It's not possible to 'steal' a right. You violate rights, you don't steal them. Even if the government said "you don't have that right anymore", it's still not stolen.
My novel is still there, but I have lost something
No, you haven't. You still have that right, even if some people are violating it. You also have the legal right to go after them in a court of law. They haven't 'stolen' that either.
Please put this "it's not stealing, it's infringement" argument to rest
Yes, let's. You should start by taking your troll elsewhere.
The Corps don't seem to care as long as there is some degree of difficulty in getting the content (Also bittorrent trackers don't tend to last very long, so it makes it hard to reliably get illegal content).
Bittorrent is a lot like IRC distribution methods, except with a P2P aspect built in.
It's kind of like pasv mode when your behind a firewall, and the other ftp is behind a firewall... Doesn't work very well.
1. What role do you think peer-to-peer encryption will play in the p2p sharing networks of the future?
2. Did you know that you have the same first name as Bram Stoker, the author of "Dracula"?
3. To what degree do you think having "identity verification" (that is, verification of the nodes on a p2p network) is valuable in building reliable networks?
4. Isn't Dracula cool?
5. Who do you think would win in a fight - Dracula or Wolfman?
I'm confused about Fansubs. The MPAA cannot govern their distribution (legal or otherwise) if they are not licensed in the US, correct? Would that mean someone in Japan isn't supposed to legally download Fansubs (although why would they need to right?) but we can?
There are many reasons why piracy is not necessarily as bad as you make out in this situation. I don't want to advocate piracy, but I don't think you're considering the flipside.
Piracy can help to spread the word. Many people who would never dream of buying the product would download it in binary form and read it.
My novel is still there, but I have lost something.
I'm not sure exactly what you think you have lost, perhaps the right to control distribution of the media exactly as you wish?
I wouldn't say you have lost out, since the people that downloaded your book would probably not have been willing to pay your book in the first case. Conversely, if they were willing to pay, they would probably do so regardless, since a set of html pages is a poor substitute for a physical entity. Bibliophiles will no doubt be willing to confirm this.
Imagine that the people who download the book tell their friends, who then go and buy the book in a bookstore. Are you still losing out?
Please put this "it's not stealing, it's infringement" argument to rest, folks. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers.
I don't see anything outstanding in your argument that would sway me one way or the other.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
He wanted to bite Swarmcast, of course!
-- atomly
For somethign to be stolen it has to no longer be in your posession.
This is not a troll. I really am interested in your logic.
How about this.
You bring your car to the garage. It gets fixed and the bills comes to some amoutn of money. You are expected to pay the mechanic this amount. Lets say it was all labor as well and no parts were replaced. You use your extra key and get your car back some night without paying the mechanic for the work he did. Did you just steal from him or did you just violate his right to collect the money you owe him. What is he no longer in posession of in this example. The car was always yours, you just took it back without paying the bill. If the answer is nothing then you did not steal from him although I think a court would disagree.
An interesting alternative over at Infolets - Collaborative Real-Time Content.
oh god please tell me he didn't use the word "leverage".
I hate the way stupid, insecure people constantly need to find long, pretentious words when "use" is perfectly adequate.
"utilise" is my no. 1 most hated word ever, but "leverage" seems to be trying to take its place.
Here is a great link for for BT have all 8 ports open up and your download/upload rate will sky rocket.
This worked for me a month ago
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
P.S. I know my above post was a generalization. There are other reasons why a person might not register, but the exists a group of slashdotters who belive that registartion should not be required to view the content.
While some might not register out of laziness, they will always be this group of "reg free" link posters whould believe that the system should be circumvented.
Life is too short to proofread.
A frontend to search for seeds and it forces you to, at the very least, share the file that you're currently downloading.
That's called eMule.
Later on, some jerks may remove it from their share directory so it won't upload anymore.
I can think of several ways to rationalize removing a big file from my eMule shared folder: 1. I'm running out of disk space and have already recorded the file I downloaded to a CD, or 2. I need the bandwidth in order to speed up the upload of another download that's running.
Well I don't think it matters at all what people will use something for, it's not the creator of the system's responsibility. It's like designing a car and worrying if it will be used for drive-by shootings or running over puppies. There's no point in caring about that from an engineering perspective (although i'm not saying those things are ok to do!) it's not the designers responsibility.
if you limit your upload rate, other peers will lower their upload rate to you.
What if I care more about the reliability of my residential cable Internet connection than about download rate? It seems that if I sustain more than about 20 KBytes/s for too long, Comcast interrupts my connection for a few minutes.
Actually, bittorrent is designed to permit serving of entire raw directory trees.
.torrent contains a description of the directory structure, individual checksums, and file sizes -- see the specification.)
(In the directory tree case, instead of just a filename+size, the
The official bt clients do support this.
DNA just wants to be free...
Python compiles to bytecode the first time it's run, so your Python bittorrent client is going to be just as fast as the Java equivalent (assuming similarly efficient processes).
> Please put this "it's not stealing, it's infringement" argument to rest, folks. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers
I haven't used filesharing in a few years, but I still believe this is true... because it is. Most rational people will admit that it is "wrong" either legally or morally, but it is still not theft. Just saying "It REALLY IS stealing" over & over may convince you, but not to the people who actually think about what words mean.
"upload/download" are terms reserved for an asymmetric situation.
Residential Internet access. 3000 Kbps down. 128 Kbps up. How is that not an "asymmetric situation"?
Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."
...I just remembered something I have to do right away. Sorry, gotta go!
!
WHAAAAATTTT???!!!??? Oh, sh*t.
Uh...
[*mumbling*] Dammit, computers should all come with a Pirate Manual!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
The bittorrent model is vulnerable but not nearly as bad as kazaa because most bittorent users are not sharing their whole collection at once and there is not an easy way to get a listing of everything they have.
Bittorrent is only really sharing chunks of a file. This is more of a question for the lawyers, but is it illegal to share a chunk of a file that has not completed downloading? How is a user suppose to know that a file in the process of downloading in copyrighted?
How would a site like suprnova be forced go offline? The site just links to mirrors, the mirrors link to the torrent, the torrent contains no copyrighted information just a guide for a bittorent app to use in order to download a file. Is there some kind of accessory to copyright infringement law, where a website detached by 4 levels separation can be held responsible?
Way Back When (around Nov 2002, IIRC), there used to be a ton of torrent sites, all serving up copyrighted torrents. Then all on the same day, they all died. Except for Suprnova.
The anti-piracy people definately know about Suprnova, but for some reason have so far been unable to take it down. I'm guessing it's based outside the USA.
Why anyone would peg their bandwidth for 2 days to grab a flick when you can rent it and burn a copy is beyond me.
Other than perhaps crappy selection at many local rental stores? What about movies that the studios are trying to suppress, such as Disney's Song of the South or Lucasfilm's The Phantom Edit?
I'm mystified. Any chance of having a follow up interview? I yearn for answers to questions like "What time is it?", "Where are you going?", and of course "What is the atomic weight of Strontium-14?".
Are there any good torrent porn trackers? Preferably with full-length dvds?
Right now I am downloading Knoppix, which is 700MB.
BitTorrent's Creator Bram Cohen Arrested...
fewf!
I have a pretty busy schedule (hentai porn, eating, sleeping, compiling Linux kernels) but I hope to be able to interview myself again in the near future.
The main problem will be getting our schedules to coincide!
My, what sheltered life you lead. You don't seem to grasp the complexities that the societal infrastructure has to overcome every quarter.
Ok we are venturing way off topic here into flame bait territory rokzy. Lets jump past your assumption that the poster is stupid and insecure, and look up the definitions of use and leverage. Quite different aren't they? I share your hatred for buzzwords and manager speak, but come on now. Now lets just cancel out 50% of the english language in favor of simpler shorter words. Oh what a wonderful world it would be. Those long books? Not so long now baby. Eloquence? What does that mean? Around here we say 'purdy words', and 'he talks good'. I hate the way stupid insecure people get offended when people use language that they can't quite comprehend.
yer sig link is dead. i clicked it in eager anticipation........
At first, when I found BT, I was thrilled (once I figured the damn thing out). But now, I'm noticing that more and more trackers are bogging down, so even with hundreds of "leechers" and several "seeds", speeds can hover anywhere from 1-5KBps. That, and frequent tracker errors point out that trackers are apparently very resource intensive and can get bogged down quickly. Does anybody know if BT trackers are due to be improved any time soon? Many, many, many links on suprnova.org, point to trackers that are already swamped or dead, making BT not much better (or worse) than straight FTP.
It works ok for me (and the server is on the other side of the atlantic, so this isn't as silly as it sounds). Try again?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
block the IP (available in Azureaus-written in Java, and works on a Mac)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
1. You put your car in the mechanics workshop, retaining ownership.
2. The mechanic puts money into the car, in the form of paid labor, which you knew he was going to put into the car.
3. You come into the workshop at night and take back your car
You stole his time and labor. You did not "violate his right to collect the money you owe him" (whatever that means).
The difference between infingment and stealing is clear-cut. Anybody who says otherwise is:
1. Misinformed
or
2. Lying
I did NOT learn everything I need to know in kindergarten.
This is OT and IANAL, but you haven't stolen from him. You haven't taken something of his. Instead, you've denied giving him something owed. You've broken a contract with him. A contract that stated you would pay him for his labor. A contract that you agreed to when he gave you the estimate, and you said "Go ahead and fix it."
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Folks are saying "BitTorrent is no more anonymous than HTTP". True. But HTTP was also used a lot for distributing MP3s, back in the day. The lawyers were faced by the "whack-a-mile" problem: take down one, and the traffic shifts to another.
Still nowadays nobody uses HTTP to post pirated stuff. Why? Not lawyers, bandwidth. Get even remotely popular and your upload line will wedge solid. Not so with BT.
In effect BT, like HTTP, is more anonymous than any of the other file sharing systems: there's no centralized controlling entity, and not everybody is interconnected. Only those downloading a specific file actually interconnect.
I love it, and it works great for the OSS community.
Personally when I've finished a download, I leave my machine on for a few hours or overnight just to give back plenty o' bandwidth.
BTW I prefer Azureus over Bram's client.
PS If you get a BSOD using BT in Windows, it could be your network card. I had to get new drivers. Search for 'Bittorrent blue screen' on google.
So when are we going to USE the 11th edition dictionary of newspeak?
So Kazza [and the clones] are all about being marginally legal by hiding in a "private companies" VPN & TOS...bittorrent is a way to make a better FTP type protocol--along with the responsibilites that come with it.
Since the only notable difference between FTP and Bittorrent is that downloaders share their bandwidth, and in particular, since it's easy to identify and trace people using the system (much like FTP), I expect that he probably though only idiots would use BT for illegal distribution. And frankly, I think he's right. :)
Doesn't Valve currently distribute updates by FTP? And would that mean that it would also be ironic if you had used FTP to download UT2004 (instead of Torrent)?
why do we need words like bad and evil when good- and good-- will work just fine?
awaken and inhale the fragrance of a well defined lexicon before news speak contaminates you too.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
What would it take to make a distrubuted client for /.? I'm sure the copyright holders would scream foul, but that's a great idea...if each user could cache just 10MB of web pages, the /.effect would be nil. it would work as a mozilla/fire[thing] plugin combine with a /. server as host. Of course we could have shared browsing added to the comment section too!!! then we could comment WHILE RTFA!!!
I doubt you'll find many of these buzzwords in art /literature, they are a marketing device intended only to make the writer seem more important/intelligent.
my claim of stupid and insecure was general, not intended to be taken personally by anyone.
I don't hate these words because of comprehension. since I work in science there are plenty of opportunities for obfuscation and things are often complicated enough.
eloquence is about persuasive discourse, and in my experience people who use long words when smaller ones will suffice are usually covering up for something.
I am already seeing an influx of newbs in BT groups now because of this article... I get to answer the same questions with "read the FAQ" a million more times...
..... just great.
And... now that it is getting well known because of this article, we will be seeing alot more news about 'piracy' and the evil known as 'bittorrent'
-=-
um... yeah....
A) Some people have a larger vocabulary - why should they restrict themselves for your benefit?
B) Maybe saying "use unused" didn't sound and/or look proper, and so the poster used an alternative word?
Considering "leverage" has less syllables than what I just used above, stop your whining. I personally would love a language that flows and utilizes different sounding words to fit with a specific sounding phrase, context or emotion, then have a language that is robotic and harsh sounding, simply because no other words exist that would fit in the sentence.
What pisses the lawyers off about Kazzaa is that Sherman networks KNOWS who you are, KNOWS exactly what is being shared...they even SELL market results based on that data...while trying to hide the identies of the illegal shares crying "fair use"
how about "use spare bandwidth" instead of "leverage unused bandwidth"?
I find "utilise" far more robotic and sterile than "use".
Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."
Program Name: The Promiscuous Rebel Hippie
Tagline: SETI@home for social/Internet activists
Purpose: Protest against big brother, censorship, monitoring. Show solidarity with the common man. Freedom. World peace.
Overview: Every day, thousands of people freely exchange data over the Internet. As always, the Man is watching, and he will hunt down people involved in questionable activity -- like exchanging subversive documentaries, sex-education films, or cryptographic software. The Promiscuous Rebel Hippie uses your idle bandwidth and excess disk space to spoof questionable activity and send a big "FUCK YOU" to the man.
How It Works: BitTorrent is a file transfer technology in which a crowd share pieces of large data files -- an exchange called a "torrent". A BitTorrent tracker advertises the list of people in the torrent, and these people repeatedly ask each other if they can trade small pieces of the data. Each tracker can manage several torrents, and each tracker has different rules about what it will accept. ("We trade cryptographic or patent-encumbered software but nothing political", "We trade politically sensitive material but not child pornography", "We trade TV shows but not movies", and so on). The problem with this open, public exchange is that the Man might read the list and punish traders that he doesn't like.
After you install the Promiscuous Rebel Hippie, you will identify trackers which are acceptable to you and declare the amount of bandwidth/disk space you can spare. Your computer will quietly download small fragments of data which the BT tracker is monitoring.
When the Man tries to find out who is trading anti-Man data files, he'll be overwhelmed. His small number of secret police will be overrun by crazies. He will be unable to tell who is really
attacking his corrupt regime and who is just a loud-mouthed Promiscuous Rebel Hippy.
Why It Works: File traders are interested in sharing lots of data with each other, but the man only wants to know who's up to mischief. The Promiscuous Rebel Hippies lack the interest or dedication to get involved in sharing lots of data, so they have little affect (positive or negative) on the efficiency experienced by actual traders, and they spend little of their own resources. But their participation is enough to make the Man think, "Wow! I can't possibly persecute all of them!" The Promiscuous Rebel Hippies make the Man seem weak and insecure, and he'll realize that he needs to stop oppressing people.
Open source may be the bane of all existance according to sco, but it appears to in this case help the job market :-p
More specifically, leeching is only possible when there is an excess of upload bandwidth. When the total upload suply of all clients connected to a tracker for a specific file exceeds the total download demand, the client does not do tit-for-tat.
In other words, you can only leech when it doesn't hurt.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Napster had servers that directly matched up people for transfers, torrents are just files, a torrent is not a service.
..that youre a hacker and just need to get in to save the world. The one I used previously didnt work anymore (took about 3 tries to figure out), so I had to try again. This time they had learned something, it was much harder to crack. Took 4 guesses, but now I'm in da mainframe. Changing their profile makes it even funnier. A minute ago this guy made "more than $150k" a year. Now under 20k. Mwahahaha! B)
Something I only noticed a few days ago, if when downloading you click on the button at the top right , a nice little toolbar pops down that lets you set the max uploads and max upload speed. It's not perfect, but serves well for my purposes (previously I used carrafix, which while it did the job, was far from ideal)
I think many people here are taking an exceptionally negative view of what BitTorrent is. You're not all from the RIAA, are you? ;-> ("We're from the RIAA. We're here to help")
There's many valid reasons why a lot of users might want to download big files simultaneously. Linux ISOs, Windows service packs, software distribution in general are just three that come to mind straight away. I'm sure Mandrake, RedHat, Knopper, SuSE, and even MS would be very glad they can (potentially) reduce their bandwidth costs by making a BitTorrent download available.
As far as the potential of being used for "bad things" goes - well, I don't exactly put Bram Cohen in the same class as Smith & Wesson, or even the manufacturers of plastic forks. It's obvious to me that illegal download sites using BitTorrent were going to spring up, and equally obvious that both these sites and their users would be easily trackable via their IP addresses at the very least.
I'm gonna have a quiet chuckle to myself if/when people using these sites start getting prosecured, since they obviously didn't think through the ramifications before they started using the service - I'd call it a Darwinian selection process in action.
I'm a bit fan of computer games. So I download a game demo or so a week. Modern games are big, and so are their demos. Sucking down a 500MB demo from various download mirrors sucks. Because of the huge bandwidth costs to serve the files the various mirrors force me to sign in, view ads, wait in queues, use Windows only spyware filled download programs (I often download in Linux in the background while doing Real World). Software publishers themselves generally don't release the demos themselves (because of the cost), they offload it onto one of these icky download sites. This entire process sucks.
Then came BitTorrent. If I can find a good source all is well. The software works great under Linux, it's open source, no spyware, and if the file is popular instead of waiting in line the download actually goes faster. BitTorrent is just about the only thing I do that saturates my cable modem bandwidth. Pulling down a huge demo in less than an hour is great. No longer do I fire off a download, then let my computer work on it for the rest of the night.
Now if software publishers would realize the joy of BitTorrent and release the torrents themselves everything would be better.
As a way to illegally share content BitTorrent isn't so good. But as a way to acquire legal but big content there is nothing like it.
It's damn good software. It was worth a donation to Bram.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
--Check out the Knoppix tracker, the numbers will amaze you:
http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/
--Over FOUR TERABYTES worth of data transferred for the previous rev (2003-11-19.) That's pretty impressive, to me.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Sometime over winter break, my university (University of Maryland at College Park), decided to effectively block all bittorrent traffic. It's exceptionally frustrating that they refuse to respond to inquiries about the decision. Their action, IMHO, also contradicts the Acceptable Use Policy which clearly states that "The University does not limit access to information due to its content when it meets the standard of legality." Sadly, this trend is only going to get worse at my school, in view of the recent news coverage.
"I wouldn't say you have lost out, since the people that downloaded your book would probably not have been willing to pay your book in the first case."
I think this is too large an assumption to make. It really depends on the person and the media.
Analyst firms -- folks who are paid to research these things -- are quick to make statements like "the [insert media here] industry loses [insert dollar amount here] annually to piracy." On the opposite side, many slashdotters believe, and would have you believe, that piracy actually helps media creators and they're just too dumb to see this. And then I have overheard conversations in Best Buy like "Dude, don't buy that! I'll just burn you a copy!". In these instances, the addressee didn't reply "Great idea, and if I like your burned copy, I'll come back here and buy it." To be clear, the point was to save money by not buying it, and not to do a "try before you buy" sort of deal or otherwise engage in something that would end up helping to pay the artist's rent. And I'm pretty sure the artist's landlord could not be paid with the assurance that some Kazaa users really liked their work but had opted not to pay for it.
The bottom line is that if the absolute size of your market is x, if subset y people use piracy as a "try before you buy" method and end up contributing to your market size, and subset z of your potential market uses piracy as a "save money" method and do not pay you, if z exceeds y then you're losing. x, y and z are variables in the best sense, as nobody can predict what they'll be for any given piece of work.
"I'm not sure exactly what you think you have lost, perhaps the right to control distribution of the media exactly as you wish?"
Being able to control how one's works are distributed is a luxury that shouldn't be understated. In many cases it makes the difference between being able to eat and pay the rent, or not. In a perfect world, artists should just concentrate on creating, yadda yadda, but there's something to be said for having an income. If making money is important to you and me, we shouldn't assume it isn't important to anybody else.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Thinking I could get some free (as in beer) stuff, I surfed out to supernova.org only to find the following when displaying the search page:
c hive.jar-27b6d965-34a57383.zip
Scan type: Realtime Protection Scan
Event: Virus Found!
Virus name: Trojan.ByteVerify
File: C:\Documents and Settings\..\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\javapi\v1.0\jar\ar
Location: Quarantine
Action taken: Clean failed : Quarantine succeeded : Access denied
Date found: Thu Feb 12 15:15:40 2004
Perhaps there is some sort of moral lesson here about honor amongst thieves.
Did the person conducting the interview give Mr. Cohen a standing ovation afterward?
/.ing.
It isn't like he doesn't deserve it, bittorrent is one of the few, if not the only, internet service that benefits from a healthy
Learn something new.
As usually, the slashdot crowd forgets about existence of a superior alternative. Mozilla vs. Opera, BitTorrent vs. ED2K, people here are so entrenched in their sympathies as to abandon the last shreds of objectivity.
eDonkey network, together with Overnet are technically every bit as good as BT is. Add to that some things done and thought out significantly better, add to that a thriving open-source development community with several different clients, with many people activily working on the code, and you will see a solution which is hands down better than BT.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
But more than Napster, Gnutella, or any of the other central-server / uniform-network file sharing and searching apps.
Quite a flamewar you've started there. I'd just like to show you this, perhaps as an example of when short words complicate the text.
Maybe he did realize it would. But he's pretty smart by not coming out and saying it in public.
Don't listen to these damn fools, you are correct. It may interest you to read some of George Orwell's writing on the subject. He proposed that one should *never* user a more complex word or phrase when a more straightforward one would express the meaning sufficiently. This does not necessarily lead to 'simplistic' writing; on the contrary, it leads to a direct, readable style (I believe his success as an author is probably greater than that of the other posters deriding your views here).
e .txt to read an excellent essay by Orwell on the subject. His central hypothesis is that by clouding the clarity of writing with unneccessary or hackneyed words, it is actually possible to affect the ability of the reader and writer to think clearly and in certain ways, and therefore it is possible to use bad writing to exert political 'thought control.' It sounds a little wacky, but if you read it you will see what he means.
FYI, visit http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-languag
Especially disturbing is that his examples of terrible English, which to him are hideously exaggerated, seem perfectly normal to us because we are so swamped in marketing-management-media quasi-English swill today. I think I'm going to go and utilise my leverage for synergistic outcomes elsewhere now...
Read Pynchon.
And people who make guns know some of them will be used for bank raids, murders and the like.
BitTorrent is a very good tool. Its a pretty dumb way to throw pirate stuff around as the tracker knows everyone who is involved.
Plenty:
e.g.
a 2.2 GB collection of high-quality classical music, released under the EFF Open Audio License.
From Pandora Records. see pan.zipcon.net for more info.
Luke Stodola
www.dxdt.org/archive/
Freenet then went through a bad patch, due to being chronically overloaded, and its performance got pretty bad - but with recent improvements it seems to be back, and by most reports it is better than ever.
I have often wondered about why BitTorrent is so popular when Freenet is about as easy to install (it isn't easy, but either is BitTorrent), completely anonymous, totally decentralized, and better in many other ways too.
Not only do you have an interesting personality, but your live seems full of fascinating items.
I'm tingly with anticipation. And not just in my special place.
BitTorrent is used extensively for distribution of new game demos and game/movie trailers. It is perfect for anything that has high first day demand. It is no more suited to illegal file trading than ftp, http or any other protocol.
They mention Suprnova in the article but not Filerush or any of the other hundreds of sites offering torrents of legally shared content. I mean torrents of media are posted all the time on /. after hosting servers buckle under the strain.
Why do people always jump on the infringing uses of software and try and make out like that is the whole story.
What users are resisting, sir, is the potential future scenario in which you have to register for every single website that you "use".
You don't mind logging in to view NYT content (which exists not to inform, but to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, their real customers)? That's fine. Think about how many different websites you visit in a day--would you mind setting up an account for every single one? Every time you want to visit a new site, you have to complete a registration, false or not. Geeks inherently bristle at artificial, useless impediments to information flow on the net.
As far as efficiency goes, it is much more efficient to avoid mandatory logins altogether--one way is to prove that such data is basically worthless, or refuse to use the offending site at all.
It's fine that you don't care, but frankly--for those of us that care--you are part of the problem.
He's already gotten a job at Valve, and continues to get several hundred dollars a day in donations from other people. That's enough.
Nice troll--besides large files like Linux distros, this has massive potential usefulness for any large file that is prone to a sharp spike in download requests: game demos and fan-films come to mind.
.torrent, the people who want the film help other people who want the film to get it, who in turn help OTHER people, and so forth.
/. all day.
It also prevents small sites who host such things from beings victims of their own popularity--if you make a small film that gets mentioned on slashdot, or memepool, etc., you'd quickly run up a huge bandwidth bill serving it directly.
If you just seed and distribute a
The argument that it can be (and is) used for illegal purposes is irrelevant--your computer could be used to help find new cancer drugs or search for extraterrestrials, but on the other hand, it could be used for hoarding vast quantities of pornography and idling on
Think about it a little: if the actual intended purpose was for illegal file distribution, then wouldn't he have built in some sort of anonymity into it? You can look and see the IPs you are connected to, for crying out loud!
by your logic... anything intangible like ideas cannot be stolen.. only copied. yet the phrase "stealing ideas" is generally accepted when one person takes (copy) an idea from another. If you look up the definition of the word steal in dictionary.com..
steal ( P ) Pronunciation Key (stl)
v. stole, (stl) stolen, (stln) stealing, steals
v. tr.
To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
To get or effect surreptitiously or artfully: steal a kiss; stole the ball from an opponent.
To move, carry, or place surreptitiously.
To draw attention unexpectedly in (an entertainment), especially by being the outstanding performer: The magician's assistant stole the show with her comic antics.
Baseball. To advance safely to (another base) during the delivery of a pitch, without the aid of a base hit, walk, passed ball, or wild pitch.
there is nothing that says explictly about loss of possession being a requirement for stealing to take place... While i do agree with your logic given your definition of the word steal.. but what i'm not sure about is whether your defintion of the word is really the generally accepted definition. languages are defined by the people who use them. if there are enough ppl who interpret the word steal w/o the association of loss of possession being a requirement then copying a book might as well be the same as stealing one... just my 2 cents.
I live in Tokyo, and many of the Tv shows and movies that BT carries (illegally of course) are simply not available here. In the case of TV shows, there is no cable channel carrying them.
.
Perhaps some of them i could track down in DVD releases, which would of course be several seasons behind. If there is a local release, they are often dubbed into japanese (like the simpsons), which is not a problem for me to understand, but if you've ever watched one of these you'd understand why they suck.
So the issue is - if there is a minority market existing in a given territory (ie english speakers in Japan), which a given media company is not interested in releasing products for, because they figure its not profitable, then if their product is pirated there, they are losing $0.
And if it is an obscure 1976 john carpenter film (ie Assault on Precinct 13) that i cannot track down here in any format unless i had the time to dig through 1000 second hand VHS stores, then why shouldn't it be made available as a torrent ? If i was the director i'd be happy people cared enough to watch it. And yes it is probably available on amazon as a DVD that if i'm lucky will play in my region, but i dont know whether it blows or not, so do i really want to buy it on DVD ? No. i want to watch it first, then maybe buy a keeper copy if i really like it.
I would happily pay for this stuff if someone made it available for download!!! But the fools in the media companies are still acting like the RIAA.
MOVIE INDUSTRY TAKE NOTE!! HERE IS THE MODEL FOR YOUR FUTURE:
Bittorrent as the backbone of a massive world-wide video store, a la amazon but for download media ONLY. Popular and new releases are $2, delivered by bittorrent, so when 5 million people from around the planet hit the servers simultaneously to download the latest Big Wave/Sword Epic/Tearjerker they stay up and with BT mark II, scale amazingly and everyone gets it in 10 minutes. Thats a lot better than getting on your bike to go to the video store.
2nd tier releases and more obscure films would be delivered thru a combination of bittorrent and a content delivery system like Akamai. This would obviously cost a lot more to deliver than latest releases, but the stores would need to carry this stuff to satisfy those (like me) who dont want just the new releases. These releases should be 99c.
DRM the files, despite many slashdotters viewing DRM as the devil, theres no way we are going to get really cool things like this unless we pay for it. So if i rent one for $2 and i really like it, i pay an extra $2 and i get an unlock code that keeps it from self-destructing. AND i get to download (a) a cd/DVD label template to print on the CD/DVD-R and (b) a file to print for cover/ insert art.
There are many problems to be solved, of course, language, DRM, payment methods etc, but lets face it, THIS WILL HAPPEN. its a cause of when, not if. And the first group who gets it right will clean house
lmao
Brian Cohen is Duncan Mclaud of the Clan Mclaud!
Slightly OT, but has something happened to mobilefrenzy.com? Sometime in the past month it stopped being reachable by me. DNS still resolves the name, but the site itself isn't talking. Any guesses or knowledge?
Hmmm... let's clarify for a moment exactally what was lost.
Copyright is a (supposed to be anyway) temporary, exclusive priviledge to distribute a work, granted to you by the government.
And how does the government give you the exclusive part of that priveledge? By taking away, by force, some of the inherant rights of property from any and all other people who happen to own a copy of your work (regardless how they obtained this copy)
The government does not, and indeed cannot give you (or anyone else) the right to copy and distribute anything. That right is inherant in the possetion of that thing. All that a government can do is take away that right.
So, you didn't lose anything, all that really happened is other people took back their rights to copy the novel.
This means that your right to copy and distribute is no longer exclusive. That is all.
just wonder who gets more donations .. sloncek at suprnova.org or Bram ?
I always though it was a bit sad that Swarmcast didn't take off as quickly. It was out a year or so before Bittorrent, and it does some things better than BT. I'm not sure how the server side worked with SC though, that may have been why it didn't take off. (That it was more work to put up a SC server than a BT one that is.)
As a law student just having taking quite a few classes on the concepts of 'guild' and 'causality', this is, from a legal point of view, not true. Even when you *should* have foreseen that something could have happened from your actions you can be legally accountable, even if you didn't 'intend' it to happen. Let's say I shoot you in the stomach (in itself not letal wound), you're taken to hospital and the surgeon there fucks up and you die. There is jurisprudence that would still qualify me for having committed murder (or manslaughter, depending on whether or not I planned it before)
"Anything that can allow someone to get something for free that they normally would have to pay for, will be used for that purpose."
Guns enable some people to get items for free which they otherwise would have to pay for. I don't recall seeing my father holding up gas stations with his Reuger 9mm.
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
Sir/ma'am, you just used "robotic" and "sterile" (in the same thread, no less) in a conversation on Slashdot which basically amounts to petty squabbling over which of two words is more aesthetically pleasing.
I put forth the proposition that *this* is truly what BitTorrent is designed for: leveraging the power of the Internet to allow individuals to use their keyboards to contribute to the ever-increasing glut of meaningless dribble in cyberspace. :).
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
Even your ISP couldn't help the RIAA/MPAA out, as the person using your proxy might be connected to your machine via a tunnel, or over a connection from another provider (wireless, GPRS, neighbour's DSL, whatever). They'd have so much to prove before they could even fire up the lawyers (eg that no-one was connected to your machine at that time, and that all the traffic to your box stayed there - nigh-on impossible to do off-site). We know these guys are lazy - they rely on sell-out developers sitting in comfy chairs to track down sharers. The minute it starts costing them more than $0.00001 per sharer found, their new-found revenue stream starts biting them in the ass. They either lose face by stopping prosecutions, or drive themselves into the ground spending $2,000 per sharer they find.
Just having the ability to be a proxy gives you a great argument in court - it's impossible for anyone to prove what you were doing. And the best thing is, you don't have to be a proxy to use it as a defense :)
How about "utilize" instead.
Imagine if your web browser had this stuff (or something similar) built in, so it would not necessarily download a web page from the server, but just as easily might download from somebody else that had just looked at the same page - no more /. effect!
Has no one here ever heard of eMule or its closed-source predecessor, eDonkey2000?
/. where everybody loves to harp on the Microsoft/Apple/Xerox relationship, nobody says a word about ed2k when praising BT.
It's really interesting to see all this press and to read all these gushing posts saying "oh Bram, thank you so much for changing p2p forever" when in fact there are other swarming download p2p apps out there that work in a very similar fashion. I'm sure there are a couple more apps like this that I haven't heard of, too. But let's all pretend that BT is unique and write some more articles about how totally new this idea is.
I don't know which came first, and I like both, but I just think that on a site like
why do we need words like bad and evil when good- and good-- will work just fine?
I think the proper NewSpeak terms are "!good" and "++!good".
Read, L
"leverage" os a "long, pretentious word"? Where did you go to school, American?