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

Pretty Cool

[pmaccabe]

BitTorrent is a nice creative alternative solution to what has generally been a Napster knockoff syndrome among P2P services.

Amazing...

[blorg]

"...when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind [...] BitTorrent really started to take off in early 2003 when it was used to distribute a new version of Linux [...] 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."

...a *balanced* article, in the mainstream media, about a p2p app, which concentrates on the technology behind the app, and the possibility of non-infringing uses.

Now I've seen it all.

Good Days Already Gone

[aerojad]

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?

Should be used for Linux Distributions

[mcrbids]

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?!?!?

Interesting point

[mwheeler01]

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?

Re:Interesting point

[swilver]

None of the file sharing tools currently available provide any kind of anonymity. You may be anonymous while browsing for files and doing searches as these usually flow through somekind of distributed network, but once the downloading (or uploading) starts the other side will know who you are as they have your IP address.

The main reason for this is lack of bandwidth. If you want anonymity even while downloading, someone else will have to act as an intermediary (preferably more than one). Those intermediaries though will have to download some data, and then upload it again to you which gains them nothing (in other words, it wastes a lot of bandwidth). Everyone will need to provide some bandwidth for this purpose to make this even remotely feasible.

Only Freenet currently does this that I'm aware of, and it's a lot slower for that very reason. Bandwidth however seems to be subject to Moore's law; soon there should be plenty of it, and then you can have real anonymity.

Evil genius

[b1t r0t]

For his part, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent users are not anonymous and that their numeric Internet addresses are easily viewable by anyone who cares.

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.