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.

Comments

Free Reg... blah.. blah...

[trp642]

Registration is for wussies! Go Google...
NY Times

let us not forget

[sweeney37]

Slashdot also had an inteview with Bram Cohen back in June.

Mike

Works for Valve now

[S. Bolle]

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.

Here's some torrents of legal MP3s

[MichaelCrawford]

• Legal Torrents - net label mp3 releases

Enjoy.

Re:Not intended to be used for illegal distributio

[tuffy]

Then what did he think it was going to be used for?

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.

Re:Awesome idea #1425:

[gooberguy]

Done

Re:Dear Bram,

[dougmc]

Please make a "no uploading" option button on BitTorrent, because I am a leech, signed the Kazaa masses.

It's already there. It's just not in button form --

--max_upload_rate <arg>
maximum kB/s to upload at, 0 means no limit (defaults to 0)

Setting that to 1 kB/s should be slow enough even for a modem user ...

Of course, it's open source, so feel free to add the button yourself.

Re:Should be used for Linux Distributions

[ikewillis]

The problems seems to be with the inability of BitTorrent to serve directory heirarchies, and the difficulty of generating .torrent files for a large repository of 10,000 files or more, plus the resource usage of running a BitTorrent tracker for each file.

It seems there are protocols which are working to overcome these limitations.

Re:Compiled client for linux

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Check out Azureus, a cross-platform graphical BitTorrent client written in Java. It's highly configurable and works well on this Linux box.

That's what's so great about bittorrent

[Azureflare]

It has the checksums checker built in. Of course, if you were a member of mandrakeclub.com as I am (silver member, shameless plug), there are bittorrents available on mandrakeclub.com through a secure connection to mandrakesoft's website. Also I have md5sums to compare to if I'm ultra paranoid. But I do trust Mandrake's distribution methods, just as much as I trust ftp mirrors (if not more).

I think most people would agree it's not a good idea to use a bittorrent file that wasn't from a trusted source.

Re:If there are software awards...

[JohnGrahamCumming]

What like the Open Source Awards?

BitTorrent has not yet been nominated.

John.

Re:Dear Bram,

[goon america]

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.

Re:What about... registering?

[bhtooefr]

Remember this:

User: slashdot124
Pass: slashdot

I saw this one on /. 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.

max upload rate / leeching

[yppiz]

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