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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
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.
- Legal Torrents - net label mp3 releases
Enjoy.Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
Done
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
Of course, it's open source, so feel free to add the button yourself.
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
It seems there are protocols which are working to overcome these limitations.
Check out Azureus, a cross-platform graphical BitTorrent client written in Java. It's highly configurable and works well on this Linux box.
I think most people would agree it's not a good idea to use a bittorrent file that wasn't from a trusted source.
What like the Open Source Awards?
BitTorrent has not yet been nominated.
John.
You and the parent should try reading the bloody article, in particular where it says:
"Part of what matters to me about this is that it makes it possible for people with limited bandwidth to supply very popular files," Mr. Gilmore said in a telephone interview. "It means that if you are a small software developer you can put up a package, and if it turns out that millions of people want it, they can get it from each other in an automated way."
It is utmost hyprocrisy to complain that journalists are lazy and ignorant in the writing of articles, when you can't even be bothered to pay attention to the actual words on the page.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
IIRC, Bittorrent is tit-for-tat, and if you limit your upload rate, other peers will lower their upload rate to you. Leeching isn't possible.
Remember this:
/. when someone had posted a NYT article, and it's now in my Wand list (I use Opera), and the cookie is on the HDD.
User: slashdot124
Pass: slashdot
I saw this one on
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.
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
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
NYTimes sells the information given when registering. Some people object to having their e-mail and demographic details sold on to anyone who asks. Yes they could just fill in junk details but then no-one wins as it is as much hassle as registering but NYTimes end up with a useless database, and not everyone is that malicious.
When it isn't ideological it is about hassle, internet users take the path of least resistance. If a site requires registration read it somewhere else, there is no reason to register when content is available elsewhere. Why jump through hoops when you don't have to.
That's not true, otherwise ADSL users would not even bother. I must cap my upload speeds to 5k/sec, yet I routinely download at my max speed (150k/sec.) BitTorrent does have a swapping system that rewards you for uploading, but it by no means stops leeching.
No, not necessarily. The person with low upload speed has the potential of getting good download transfer rates as soon as there are enough providers of complete file chunks. Obviously, this will be a disadvantage in the early stages of distributing a file, but later on (or if there are enough participants who continue sharing after they got a complete download) it's not a problem.
The problem is bittorent cannot be used for small files like html and associated graphics. The overhead makes it an unattractive option. Also the random peer policy for downloading, does not make it a good option for small files.
Wait for 2 months when p2pbridge will be released. Its a network overlay (JXTA) based delivery system which if possible retrives data from the nearest cache within a time limit, else gets it from the server.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/