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BitTorrent Gains Corporate Support
BitWarrior writes "Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard, the creator of many legendary games such as the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft. BitTorrent is becoming a hit among companies required to distribute large quantities of data to their customers. Valve also jumped on the BitTorrent bandwagon last month(NYTimes, first born required, blah blah), hiring its creator, Bram Cohen. The one downside to Blizzards move is that BitTorrent has been added to many Universities black lists of clients to allow through their networks. Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?
NO.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Bram Cohen, author of Bittorrent, and Adrian Paul, star of Highlander the Series.
Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
Some of us are hoping that Lionshare will help a little with that also.
Finkployd
Its good to see that someone sees the legal side of file-sharing comunities. Im getting fed up by people who say things like "Direct Connect/Kazaa/many other things is illegal!". No... it depends on what you use it for. This may open people's eyes, and make them see the posibilities of filesharing networks. In my opinion, using it for distributing demos and such is a great way to take advantages of such technologies.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
I think p2p is here to stay, and there are still features that need to be put in place univerally before it's mature, and all the various p2p flavors are comparable. Acceptance by corporations will only speed the spread.
The various bits are there scattered across different p2p networks. IMNSHO, all p2p networks/clients ought to have:
-Swarming (as defined/used in BitTorrent)
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
-Open-source clients with no ads/spyware
-Decentralized/self-organizing networks (no central point of failure, or at least minimal)
-Browser/web server hooks to autoswarm web content (there ought to be bittorrent:// links)
All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.
No.
Many universities (my own alma mater being an exception) tend not particularly progressive in any area but instruction. IT departments at universities often have very limited staff and budget, and block P2P services as much due to the hassle or threat of lawsuits as to cut down on bandwidth (the nerve of people to actually use the network connection!)
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
This is exactly what we need, as it makes companies like FilePlanet, FileFront, etc all less required while at the same time letting the users still get their files.
.rar, I'm not going to keep the rar and the actual movie around (2x diskspace), and since I can't directly play the rar, the file won't get seeded nearly as long.)
If all of those annoying webbased 'portal' like downloads would just start seeding torrents, we'd all get great download speeds and they would have users helping them share the files.
Now if only I could show people why its a stupid idea to zip a large file before torrenting it.. (Hint: if I've got a 300meg movie(for this example, I'll say something off of csflicks.net), and the torrent is for a
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
When is /. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
The day that Linus Torvalds joins the board of directors at SCO.
john/john
Information wants to be free.
Would be nice if they made the .torrent file available, so you can download it with any BitTorrent client, instead of their proprietary downloader. Not that Blizzard isn't a reliable company, but I just don't trust downloaders in general.
That being said, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to back-engineer the Blizzard downloader and turn it into a regular BitTorrent client =)
Look, defenseless babies!
It's very ironic, since bittorrent is a big (and growing) way of distributing these companies products warezed!
Bit Torrent's a lifesaver for companies that need help in distributing their content. Game downloads are a perfect example, as game publishers release huge files that everybody wants at the same moment. In order to have bandwidth that can burst up to that kind of speed, the costs would be huge. Bit Torrent is a way for fans who were lucky enough to get their copies first to help out the company by lending their most of their upstream bandwidth, which generally goes unused for the day to the company.
But universities still fell a bit awkward about this. See, in the university's opinion, a student's dormroom bandwidth isn't really their property, it's an educational tool. So, even though the copyright concern is waived off on this kind of P2P sharing, they've still got a problem with it.
When it comes down to it, a student's dormroom Internet conection leads to the big fat Internet pipe that is being paid for by the school, and in the case of a state school that's mostly government money. Every school has a rarely enforced clause in their terms of service for their Internet access that says its intended for educational use. There's defintely a clause that says that commercial use is strictly prohibited. Students can't run a a for-profit web hosting service out of their doomroom computers for example.
So, actually, the commerical embrace of Bit Torrent is going to clear up one complaint universities have about P2P, but it's going to drive them straight into another. Now, instead of hurting a company's copyrights, it's going to be used to help a for-profit company avoid costs. That's another thing that gives universities that "maybe we should block this..." feeling.
Wow.
A company a distribution method that is both smart and approved by the target audience?
Doesn't that violate some kind of business "decision making" law?
--
The last digit of pi is four.
But torrents do inherently suck lots of bandwidth and that is expensive. Hence why they (and P2P) will continue to be blacklisted even if it is legitimate usage.
But this isn't news really...except blizzard is adopting BT.
3dgamers.com has been using BT to distribute their files for a while now.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard, the creator of many legendary games such as the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft.
Not only that, but Kalisto today announced they, too, would be distributing both the beta and the final product of World of Warcraft via BitTorrent.
We actually shape the traffic and give it maybe 5 mbps which pretty much blocks it as you can't upload at all really so you cant download the file you want. When we werent shaping it people were able to download blazingly fast off bittorrent files but this also took up an immense amount of bandwidth.
"...you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion"
Funny, but I seem to recall some torrents being placed here to lessen the load on some Slashdotted sites, so people could view the videos, docs, etc from those buried sites - without adding to the source's pain.
As an attorney, perhaps you should read up on the benefits before opening your yap. Perhaps this will make sense: There are other uses for it than just piracy, just as there's more use for electricity than executing murderers.
When the day comes that the RIAA / MPAA try to kill off BitTorrent legally, all these valid commercial examples of use will provide a good counterargument.
... you get the idea.
Yeah, a gun can be used to kill, but it is the user of the gun to blame for the crime. If a gun is allowed to be owned by law (a device designed to kill!), then a mere device to enable efficient publish/subscribe file distribution
Yes, this is a use of bitTorrent for something other then 'ripping off' content owners. But there have always been such uses: downloading linux and bsd ISO's for instance. Don't forget a big reason that universities block p2p is to save on bandwith costs. They won't necessarily decide to reverse policy just to allow downloading of a legit demo.
The main concern Universities have is not IP rights, it is bandwidth costs. Corparate acceptance will not change that.
- swarming a la BitTorrent - open source, check
- anonymity a la Freenet - open source, check
- browser support, Mozilla - open source, check
- server-side support (setting correct content type for bittorrent links), Apache - open source, check
It's all at our fingertips- now we just need to put it all together in an elegant way (do I smell a new sourceforge project!), and we will be in P2P heaven.--
Using GNU/Linux - Windows-free zone!
n/t
'night all
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Ergo...if we would enable/promote p2p, it would rapidly increase our costs to supply Internet to our public.
Unfortunate, really, but when you have to pay for something, sometimes it changes how you look at it.
As many comments have pointed out, it also has the potential to drain huge amounts of bandwidth.
Furthermore, I'm not a BT expert, but I've heard murmers about huge issues regarding Windows users and hard disk fragmentation brought on by extended use of BT. I ran defrag the other day for the first time since installing BT and I did notice the fragmentation percentage was unusally high. Although it's not really any business of post-secondary network administrators, maybe they're just saving themselves from another headache. Can anyone more knowledgable comment on this?
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Something like emule would be great, but the last time I tried bittorrent it wasn't at all clear to me how to set it up.
:P
I'm too embarrassed to put my name, so I'll be A.C. for now
It's been six months since this story, and since then Kazaa:
might be sued by the US government for facilitating IP infringement,
is being sued in Australia for IP infringement, and
is being sued for possible IP infringement of the Kazaa software itself.
BitTorrent *is* cast in the same light as Kazaa, Morpheus etc. according to the media, and as such it will not (in the near future) be seen as legitimate, no matter how Atari or Blizzard uses p2p. Yes, p2p has legitimate uses, but until the world wakes up and realises that you can do more than download Britney_Spears_L33T-N3w-S0ng!.mp3, it will remain as shady as Napster 1.0.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I have a lot of hope for PDTP to provide BitTorrent-like load distribution for roles typically filled by FTP servers. It's designed to be scalable into server clusters, while BitTorrent seems to have trouble with tracker overload for popular transfers.
Universities aren't going to change their firewall policies because some of their students are unable to download game betas. Blizzard is a reputable company, yes, but their product is not something that university administrators care about.
If instead legal business and/or education software was being distributed through BitTorrent, then you would soon see a reversal of firewall policy.
Speaking of universitys banning torrent
The university I go to disabled bittorrent because they say thats where the MSBLASTER and MYDOOM viruses came from (this was said in a newsletter sent to all students in the dorms)
I'm not sure how they got this idea, but, crazy isn't it?
Unfortunately, PDTP seems a bit far from completion
Is using BitTorrent a form of support?
Is paying Bram to work on something that isn't BitTorrent a form of support?
"Hey John, look, our network is being flooded!"
"Really, Joe? Must be those new worms."
"Yeah, and it's caused by this BitTorrent thingy!"
*pause*
*in unison*
"Ban it!"
(it's actually that leaked DOOM 3 alpha...)
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Let me just say that you are totally mistaken - BitTorrent is nothing but a file distributing tool that is especially well suited for large files. I'm not sure how you think this is in any way comparable to a Denial of Service attack. It actually prevents bottlenecks by distributing content cleverly among peers.
For a company that chooses to distribute files that way, it means that (after an initial period until there are a few seeds) an immense amount of load will be taken off their servers. Furthermore none of this has to do with someone intentionally trying to flood a server with packets. If you choose to download or seed a torrent this is entirely your choice.
As for the copyright issue, even though BitTorrent is quite commonly used to shade DVD rips, many people like yours truly use it in a legal fashion to download Linux ISOs or the like.
Instead of condemning this I would actually encourage the legal use of such a great tool as it is being displayed here.
University webservers are directing downloaders to use BitTorrent:
/extra directory."
"If you're reading this, you will find that the ISO images here cannot be downloaded. This is because we simply don't have the bandwidth at ftp.slackware.com to provide ISO images. ISO downloads take a long time, and block people from retrieving small updates."
"If you're looking to download the ISO, consider using BitTorrent. If there are active torrents available, information may be found on on http://slackware.com. BitTorrent is available as a package for Slackware in the
The thing about BitTorrent compared to traditional "one-way" downloads is that BT likes to suck up as much available network bandwidth as it can.
Just about 30 or so users on a T3 network using BT could bring it to dial-up speeds.
Block it on the way out, but *encourage* its use internally. Therefore, someone gets the file from a BT source off campus, but no external clients will ever find it- but local ones will! These local clients will then save bandwidth by taking much less costly LAN bandwidth rather than expensive WAN bandwidth to get what they need.
Remember that the most proximate reason for universities to ban p2p is the fact that it clogs their feed to the outside world.
Close that outward feed, and then all is better than it was before!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The problem is not bittorrents. The problem is lack of morals among today's youth. If young people are given the opportunity to use bittorrtents, they will steal music, movies, "anime", and so forth, because they have no respect for private intellectual property.
Well, as someone once said, if you can't get respect, you settle for fear. If the makers of Bittorrents, the Kazaa, WebDonkey, etc., want to see their products used for legitimate purposes, they'd best hope the lawsuits by the RIAA and others serve to scare off those who would use their products for stealing intellectual properties. It seems they are not going to cease and desist pirating out of their own sense of right and wrong.
Why is the answer always to lock things down totally?
Why not just block outgoing transfers, and encourage people to leave their torrent clients open with their files, so that if people want the newest demo or movie trailer or whatever, they can find it via LAN bandwidth. Let the earliest finders take the brunt of it and then work from there. A system like BT is perfectly suited to this and I am shocked that no one does it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
not all P2P distribution is inherently bad
That depends on what you mean by bad... in my experience, not all BitTorrents are illegal, but most will require you to reset your router a bunch of times... (Yeah, I still think it's worth it for a protocol that makes you give back while you take, but just saying...)
When you begin a BitTorrent download, at least with any client I've ever used, the client allocates the space for the entire file right up front, essentially writing out a big empty file to your drive. Figuring out where to put that data is the job of the filesystem, not the application. As the download progresses, the client seeks to the right position in the file and writes out the "correct" bytes.
It's not BitTorrent's fault if a 640 MB file is fragmented across a huge portion of your disk. Any other program writing that file to disk would have resulted in the same fragmented file.
So, what's wrong with standard mirrors?
if the major ISP's each hosted a mirror that can only be read by their clients, if would save everyone a lot of bandwidth, wouldn't it?
or how about Multicasting?
the server could send the file in a paced loop, so if you start reciving at 50%, you get the end of the file, then catch the first half on the next cycle...
with Peer to Peer, you're clogging the pipes in two directions.
Just a clarification - Freenet supports swarming.
Big files (>1 meg) are broken into several blocks (of 1 meg size each), with redundant blocks added to decrease the chance of one missing block making the whole file useless, and these block are treated as independent files by the network, allowing them to be up- and downloaded separately.
This technology is called splitfiles, or FEC splitfiles, where FEC stands for Forward Error Correction (redundancy).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I am insulted that trolls are being mentioned in the same paragraph as an attorney.
In my experience, colleges that would have already filtered or blocked a P2P protocol don't care remotely about whether it is actually legit or not. The question is whether it is academically justified. UDP was disabled at my college for computers arriving with Blaster, but remains disabled because there is nothing academic that requires the dorms to use UDP traffic. UDP has plenty of practical, legit uses, such as online games or video conferencing, but lacks any important academic use. For the same reason that UDP is still disabled at my college, one or two game companies using P2P will not change its overall academic value. The academic value, of course, will take something subtantial to make it more than nothing.
On my university's network, all connections are grouped into various priority classes. Stuff used for research is high priority, general campus computer labs are medium priority, and connections to dorms are low priority. As a result, the impact of allowing P2P traffic through is quite low, since it only ever uses what's left over of the available bandwidth after the most important users are served.
The only downside to this is that during the day (when there is a lot of on-campus activity), the connections to the dorm rooms slow down. It's still a decent speed though, and it's the time when most students aren't in their rooms anyway.
Here at Boston College I frequently hit around 10mbps on .iso downloads, especially from other internet2 sources. We do, however, use traffic shaping to throttle p2p apps, including bittorrent, to a tiny fraction of bandwidth such that it can take longer for people to get a song than on dialup. I'm rather in favor of this since nearly all legitimate sharing can be accomplished over the campus network at lightning speed.
Too bad RIAA smashed the lanscan/flatlan tool for localized samba search (flatlan.com now points to riaa stooge site musicunited.com), as those tools were amazing for finding anything on our network, not just mp3s, without sucking any external bandwidth. The university seems pretty fair, neither encouraging nor discouraging filesharing at an active level, merely taking the expected steps to protect their bandwidth, so that we have fast access with no caps. I'm a satisfied user!
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
I'm starting to like 3dgamers.com because almost all of the newest game demos are available there not only as traditional ftp/http mirrors (which either make you wait in line or reject you outright) but also as bittorrent links, which always are available, and are almost always ridiculously quick.
And I'm thinking that the demand for the upcoming Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 demos will be a great showcase for bittorrent. I suspect that most people trying to get these demos from traditional mirrors will have little luck, while bittorrent users will be pleased as punch.
Universities are a different matter in this regard. But I doubt if they could sustain the whole system and make P2P work this way.
This sig is empty.
The RIAA/MPAA/BSA have made sure that P2P is already automatically associated with piracy. As long as this though connection exists, no university in the right mind would openly endorse P2P software...the *AA would be all over them in a flash.
Additionally, even if you were to increase the amount of legitimate P2P use to over 50% of the total use, the "takedown" notices for the illegal uses would make the university change their mind.
Last year, the university I work for spent about $100 in staff time dealing with EACH copyright takedown notice.
And I haven't even talked about bandwidth yet...
Great website
Slashdot:
slashdot2004 / slashdot2004
I think part of the reason you see an open source product able to gain so much corporate support so fast is that it was release under the MIT license instead of the GPL.
Not having to release the source code I think is a huge draw to large corporations who like to keep things proprietary.
Although many would consider that releasing the source code being optional is the downfall of the MIT license, it is in some ways also its major strength.
The eDonkey network is so much less useful without ShareReactor as a trusted source of hashes, so it's a Good Thing(TM) that SuprNova + BitTorrent is around to pick up the slack!
I posted this anonymously, but I know that a whole hell of a lot of people in the "underground p2p circle" share the exact same sentiment.
Its good to see that someone sees the legal side of file-sharing comunities. Im getting fed up by people who say things like "Direct Connect/Kazaa/many other things is illegal!". No.... it depends on what you use it for. This may open people's eyes, and make them see the posibilities of filesharing networks. In my opinion, using it for distributing demos and such is a great way to take advantages of such technologies.
No, I disagree strongly.
Companies are not out modifying BitTorrent. They have no reason to favor MIT over GPL.
The reason BitTorrent is a big deal is:
* It doesn't necessarily easily expose you to tons of pirated content. With Kazaa, pirated copies of Blizzard's games are only a search away.
* It doesn't have spyware/adware/whatnot.
* It integrates nicely with websites. You click, program works.
* Because the interface is from a website, which is effectively a trusted source of information, one doesn't have to worry about having someone search for "World of Warcraft Demo" and finding a hacked bogus copy.
May we never see th
This is flamebait, people. Feel free to look at flopsy's posting history if you don't think he posts a solid and rich set of flamebait.
May we never see th
It's been a long time since I was at university, so bear with me if I'm totally out of touch...
Why doesn't a university block *all* outside P2P altogether, and provide a facility whereby people can request a single download of legally-clear files via e.g. BitTorrent? An admin could download the requested, legally-clear files when they had time available, put them on a ftp server, and then anyone within the campus could just download from that server. The types of legally-clear files I'm thinking of would be Linux kernels & distributions, maybe non-RIAA music and that sort of thing.
There doesn't seem to be any need for 500 students on a single campus to simultaneously have BT downloading the same file, and that's gotta be expensive for the university; why not have some central person do it once then put it on some well-known spot within the campus for everyone else to grab?
It seems a very simple solution to the problem, but there could be some blindingly obvious reason why it wouldn't work. Could anyone in the know provide any feedback?
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
???
There's no "privacy", "anonymity" or "searching" when transfering files over HTTP.
If BitTorrent is to be promoted for its legal purposes (e.g. downloading movie trailers), then search can be web-based (on the movie trailer web page), and you don't expect privacy (since you're already clicking stuff on the movie trailer web page).
So exactly which needs are you trying to address with these "features"?
More BT fandom: last night Bram Cohen won Wired Mag's Rave award for software designer of the year. Here's one of the news reports. He was in SF to receive the award.
BitTorrent is not blocked at our universisty, but surely someone is keeping a close eye on the traffic. When I downloaded Fedora Core 1, I got an email from the staff asking for an explanation of this BitTorrent traffic. Of course my explanation was accepted. AFAIK they are actually going to install Fedora Core 1 on our workstations some time soon.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
First of all, thanks to the clever design of BT, 500 users on campus all downloading the same thing by it will use far less bandwidth than 500 independent downloads. Probably two orders of magnitude less. Which is only marginally more than a single download by the "campus download operator" you propose.
The bigger problem is just reality. Having to rely on a third party to initiate your downloads would be a major hassle.
But your suggestion leads directly to a better idea: whenever a BT stream gets started, have an automatic server at the school join the swarm and stay on as a seed for a few days or weeks. This way, if more students on campus also want whatever the first student downloaded (which is somewhat likely), then it would get leeched from the uni seed rather than an external one. Bandwidth problem solved, faster downloads for all, and no hassle for anyone.
Yes I noticed that, at first i thought it was the router or some silly setting i screwed up, but now i'm glad to know it's not just me.
Slackware used BitTorrent to distribute Slackware 9.1 ISOs.
Freenet supports multi-source downloads. But while in BT download speeds are directly linked to upload speeds, creating swarming effects, Freenet doesn't directly do that.
Downloaders on Freenet are not the same people as uploaders (which again are different from inserters) - the nodes uploading doesn't care about demand, as long as it is requested enough to remains in cache.
Indirectly, it provides some of the same benfits because popular files will be distributed to more nodes, giving a better statistical chance of hitting a good source.
Rather than a gathered swarm, it acts more like a contagion - given enough popularity (contagiousness) it'll be at nodes "close" to you. The results may seem similar, but there are quite different effects at work.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What I don't understand is why everybody keeps referring to the registration requirement on the New York Times website when everybody seems to hate it so much ("blah, blah"). If people don't already know they will find out when they follow the link.
These days, your lucky if your college internet access doesn't have you running through an http proxy. It's really that bad. Most of the Universities I know of (in the dorms at least) block all incoming tcp/ip ports, and do not let UDP nor icmp traffic at all. Basically, all you can do is browse the web. At one College when students called to complain they couldn't play certain multiplayer games anymore they were basically told UDP and ICMP are depreceated protocols and they should call the game developers to have them change to tcp.
1. To allocate the space all at once.
Pros:
Very little fragmentation
Cons:
Takes up all the space at once
Constant need to reposition HDD heads
2. To allocate as needed
Pros:
Takes up no more space than necessary
Can dump data to disk sequentially
Cons:
Fragments disk. Badly.
Either way, people will complain it's not the other way around.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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If you block it all that happens is the p2p client finds another way to connect. There are some that transfer over http now. Can't exactly block http! The best way to go about the problem is to allow a very small portion of traffic for p2p. Maybe 5mbps. Otherwise you are just in an arms race. Students will just find another way if you completely block it. It doesn't solve the problem of lawsuits, but you do also lesson the chance because students are tansfering a lot less data.
Linux ISOs? One of the original purposes of BT... still the best way to get them. Totally legit.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
Why, indeed, could BitTorrent and FreeNet not be combined.
It seems that BitTorrent's way of distributing the files would provide plausible deniability for anyone hosting fragments of files on their computer, and FreeNet could be used to distribute links/addresses anonymously. This would also prevent anyone from getting a list of the files in one's shared directory.
All that is really needed is a client app to combine the two, and there are probably tons that could do this with a reasonably small amount of modification like a plugin.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
as all applications using BitTorrent must bundle a Python runtime.
Gee, let's think about this for a second.
1. All new versions of the MacOS have the python interpreter included
2. Many, if not most, modern Linux distributions install python by default
Who does that leave? Windows users. Sure, that's a whopping 90% ++ share of the market, but think about it: installing python on just a fraction of those machines mitgates, in some small way, the vendor-language lock-in that MS has been hammering in for years.
Next, let's consider how you (or anyone else) would write an app like BitTorrent. You start your project, outline your goals, and realize:
1. You'd rather spend time coding new features and advanced capabilities than dealing with memory allocation and type-casting
2. Your application is primarily IO bound, meaning that processor utilization is almost a non-issue
3. Requiring some users to download an additional megabyte or two isn't that big of a deal
Given all of those reasons, I choose solutions like Python in every case possible.
Thanks for playing, tho.
... Universities really *need* to download World of Warcraft...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
However, it's fairly good for letting universities and other fast-internal limited-external environments limit the amount of material they need to download from outside - and it's even better at letting them distribute software to the outside without burning infinite amounts of bandwidth, and serve files to internal users somewhat less server capacity, so it's a tool that makes sense for them to encourage.
There's still Research to be done in how to maximize clustering and localization of clients, so that most of the uploading and downloading stays within the fast LANs compared to the amount that uses the wide area network. BitTorrent has a certain amount of tuning in this direction that's driven by overall performance characteristics (obviously it makes sense to use fast links when you have them, but to do some balancing so that slow and isolated users get some content also and so rarer file segments get found if they're available), but most of the design work went into maximizing performance for the cloud as a whole and for end-users (more for non-leaching end-users) rather than for intermediate groupings of users.
Napster, while it was alive, did some work on this to avoid (ok, delay :-) getting thrown out of universities. Since it had centralized databases handling the indexing function, it was able to take identified groups of users and let them do most of their downloading within the group instead of outside. This was a Good Thing, particularly because Napster's client software (and therefore users) mainly knew peer performance by interface bandwidth, and sometimes by ping time, so they were more likely to grab a song from somebody on a 100 Mbps LAN, not knowing that there was an overloaded T1 in between until their ping times got ugly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It doesn't seem that hard to create one.
.torrent coming through a http proxy. When a .torrent is found, have the proxy start a btdownloadheadless and save the file locally, on the proxy.
Just look for a
But now that some pieces have been done, putting them back together might make sense.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
However, I'm slightly uncomfortable with the fact that commercial software companies now seem to have this expectation that the general public will be used to distribute demos of their software - the very same people that have to pay for their Internet access and bandwidth - yet it's the games companies that reap the profits of that distribution method themselves.
I will certainly start getting very annoyed if contention rates get higher on my own ISP to the point where my connection slows down - it'll be interesting to see what happens when the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 demos get released.
Perhaps I'd feel more comfortable with this if I actually felt that the games companies were acting more with the interests of the general public rather than simply filling the company coffers. Unfortunately, as things stand today, games are overpriced, the majority of PC games are very poor quality but sell because of pretty boxes and advertising and it's now the accepted norm for a PC user to download endless patches and updates to games because they are released far too early and have not been fully tested.
I therefore see no reason why I personally should do the games companies any favours - particularly bearing in mind that as a primarily Linux user, they do no favours for me.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I, and the hundreds of thousands of others, who signed up for this beta test and are eagerly awaiting our chance to download the beta whole-heartedly thank you.
I know whenever I'm anxiously waiting to download a file from someone, I think to myself "I hope this site gets Slashdotted."
On behalf of everyone who signed up for the beta, and whoever provides Blizzard with their bandwidth, "Thanks Slashdot!"
good one!
The Internet 2 project provides gimongous amounts of bandwidth between Major Research Universities in the US and Canada. If you've got a gigabit outbound connection and decent file sharing, you quickly run out of stuff to pirate :-) After all, Hollywood and Bollywood together don't put out more than a few movies per day, and they take about 5 minutes per DVD at those speeds - IF there's an application that can use the bandwidth effectively. Add in a hundred new audio CDs per day, and you're still done with piracy by 1am. The Internet2 front page currently references the Bittorrent article...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On the surface, if you don't pay for your bandwidth as you use it, Bittorrent seems like a great idea. In reality, though, its merely a way for the software companies to quit having to pay for all the bandwidth to serve the files that they insist on having centralized control over.
Now -- not only can they maintain positive control over the distribution (guaranteeing advertising as people come to their sites to get the demos) but also can get the people downloading to help foot the bill for the bandwidth. Again, great if you don't pay for the bandwidth -- but pretty damned sucky if you're a college who has to pay for all the bandwidth your customers use.
"Exclusive" demos and restrictive distribution are the causes of this. If any enthusiast site that wanted to could pick up the binary for a new demo and serve it from their server, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Let the old shareware model return -- like back in the days where every BBS around had Commander Keen and Wolf3d demos available for download.
Don't screw the end user.
At least over here in the UK, I suspect that the reason it went on the blacklist of universities would be that it is now a commercial product and if people use University bandwidth for BitTorrent, then that's a commercial use of University bandwidth (on the part of Valve or Blizzard). They seem to dislike that a lot.
Posters recognized by their sig,
The other is more fundamental, which is that swarming protocols work because every peer is pumping out traffic, rather than only the central server, so on the average, you can only download at about the same as your upload rate unless there are generous users who are uploading for longer periods of time after they've finished their own downloads to make up for leeches like you who want to download 20 times as fast as their upstream bandwidth (or 3-10 times as fast, for us DSL users.) You can make that work a bit better by building BT clients that automate the process of handling multiple uploads of files you're finished downloading, but it's still fundamentally awkward. Asymmetry is basically lame stuff, more useful for couch potatoes than full peers, but it's what we've got at home.
Or you can cheat, like I sometimes do - use the 1 Mbps SDSL in the lab at work to download your Linux distros fast, and then FTP from there or burn them onto CDs in the morning :-) After all, that spare Pentium-133 wasn't doing anything else useful when you're not there to use it as a traffic generator for real projects, and it's also nice to the (pick-your-favorite-distro) community to leave it there seeding the recent distros overnight.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This whole thing reagarding 'p2p' is almost ludicrous from a technical point of view, when taking into account the social impact that this new relativly new breed of software products has triggered(it has been done for decades, its just stupid simple now).
Maybe the internet does not work around problems, but people certainly do. You cannot kill file sharing, and you may not regulate it, face it, your downloading a file everytime you hit slashdot. File sharing has never been illegal, but the files people tend to share really is illegal, and it never slowed me ^H^H^H them down from the beginning. Exactly how much more illegal can it be? No regulation will change that, and neither will technology. This is a social issue only.
Just my own irritation speaking here: blocking ports at the ISP level only pisses people off. It does not prevent illegal file sharing, and we can only dream that it has mitigated spam. You can even block all inbound TCP/SYN packets and it wont slow people down much, MS has already proven that the three way handshake can be effectivly ignored, you just start sending data and hope for the ACKs (not that I am recommending it, only that it can be done.)
I could easily be wrong. Maybe the new regulations and technical solutions for preventing illegal file sharing will go to eleven.
Thanks for allowing me my rant, even though I am agreeing with you.
So what was the method described for killing the popular file sharing applications?
Or would it be illegal to say?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
BT is hardly anony.. Trust me. I found out the hard way.. and ... One network card with a different MAC address later ...
Also, completely distributed systems are very hard to write well and a lot of things are even proven impossible (such a basic thing as the peers voting and coming up with a decision safely is in fact impossible with packet loss and peer failures, it is extremely likely to work but impossible to guarantee). If one can't decide something among themselves it is impossible to have any client that has a unique responsibility (for example knowing who are in the network) which means everyone has to know everything, also no smaller group of peers can decide anything for everyone else since there is no way to elect the group. This means you will be forced to multicast largely all information to everyone. For a wonderful example of the efficiency of distributed systems one can take the quite popular ISIS algorithm for making sure everyone agrees on the order of some type of events, it goes like this:
1. Send the event to be ordered to everyone
2. Everyone sends a vote on an unique ordering id to you
3. You select the one who voted for the highest id and send this id to everyone
This is a horrible overhead for one single event that would be ordered automatically if a central server were used, plus that only the central server would need the bandwidth to be able to message all the clients. Also worth considering is, how do you know when you have gotten the votes from everyone? If someone crashes after the sending of the message but before the vote? How long to wait? The only safe way would be two internet roundtrip times, which is several minutes. And even if all this is solved, what happens if a peer does not behave as it should? To try to make a complex thing like that work if clients can crash whenever they like and arent trusted is insanely hard.
Is it just me, or does the blase nature with which bullshit in the articles are posted remind you of a coked out movie sta... ahem.. coked out nerds: "NYTimes, first born required, blah blah)"
jeez
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
university networks are built and intended to support studying and not for online gaming/downloading porn/movies/warez, so no, they won't allow p2p traffic just because some company decides to use it as delivery method
You know it reallt isn't that easy, since they have to NAT the public IP to your private one first, so you would place an infernal load on the NAT:ing firewall, e.g. and old 200MHz PIX we had was rated at a 100Mbps throughput. That wont leave much for internal->Interal Nat:ing if you have a 4Mbps connection. What should be done in BT (what I interpreted "internal peers" as) is support for connecting to clients behind the same firewall as yourself. I'm on a NAT:ed City network, we have 5000 clients, now that would be nice to use.
I heard that RSS and Bit Torrent are coming together as well:
6 26 51,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/4574
Also mute-net is searchable anonymous p2p, it would be good for trackers.
1. If the company's connection can only handle so much, you'll probably find out it's faster to download over BT than say ftp or http.
Call me impatient, but I call that a benefit.
2. If the company has to pay for a 100 mbit connection (which wouldn't exactly be free) for pure http download, but could suffice with a 10 mbit connection with BT, that would save them money. Maybe they'd even cut in some slack for you as well, who knows?
But as far as BT goes, your main benefit is speed.
We all say "P2P is the future.", "Distributed ditribution is such a good idea" and so on.. Well, now we got it. We got out way, at least with Blizzard.
So now what's this moaning i hear about "my bandwidth"? Did you guys forget to mention that you didn't want to participate when you said P2P was the future?
Like most of you ever need the upstream bandwidth anyway.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
You should know the world doesn't stop at US borders.
There are other ways to prevent that kind of abuse.
As long as you have a broadband flatrate you might add some kind of scheduler that manages the bandwith to your backbone router, I have "stochastic fairness queueing" enabled for example on my home router which gives every connection the same bandwith if the bandwith is fully utilized.
This required just a kernel module and two lines of additional code, and there are many other options which are able to limit ports/protocols to a maximum bandwith per connection and even in total. Some german DSL providers (like Tiscali AFAIK) limit P2P traffic during the working hours this (or in a similar) way.
Imagine such a scheduler at work. As a positive side effect, if there are for example 500 normal and 1500 P2P connections and the speed is very slow for every connection many of the P2P people will stop their downloads and either go wardriving and searching for another, faster WLAN hotspot or use their own connections at home - and websurfing would still possible for all users at all time.
So now Blizzard likes open source software, since it's going to save them some costs. I say they can go fuck themselves. I'll think I'll pirate their software over BitTorrent just to balance out the cosmos.
They are the ones who shut down FreeCraft and Bnetd, two software projects I was using regularly! Up until that point I had purchased WarCraft II, the WCII expansion, StarCraft and it's expansion and Diablo II. I think they should pay for their own hosting costs to hock their games. Sure, cease & desist whatever you don't like and embrace what will further your profits.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
I wonder....
If you changed bittorrent to use SSL like encryption and made the key exchange EXACTLY like SSH and used port 22, would packet shapers at universities be able to constrict it without killing SSH?
If we were to develop a new p2p-app that could be used effectivily and seamlessly, I would suggest that it would be universal. Not just for open-source.
Im sorry, but making it open-source only seems like pure zealotry to me. But to stay somewhat on topic, I think BitTorrent is probably a good step towards this "universal" p2p.
The application interface of todays clients may leave some things to be desired, but if this were to be a standard mass-communication protocol, it might work out better. Say, it could be implemented in web-browsers just like http and ftp are today.
Not to say BitTorrent specificly is the future, but the BitTorrent system is ingenious.
If the users never ever even was to see a underlying system, this would catch on like nothing you've ever seen. And centralized databases... This would have to require someone (big) to start a p2p-service and have it marketed as the "new" place to get stuff.
Kinda like suprnova, but legal :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Um... you need to try Shareaza. It's currently the king of P2P clients (but Windows only):
* Swarming - Yes.
* Privacy/anonymity - No (you're going to make performance sacrifices if you do that).
* Good searching - Yes.
* Open-source - No.
* No ads/spyware - Yes. No adds, no spyware.
* Decentralized/self-organizing networks - Yes.
* Browser/web server hooks - Yes. They're 'magnet:' links.
So close.
Anyway, there's a list of the bleeding-edge P2P applications over on Bitzi. My favorite (besides Shareaza) would have to be Mutella simply because it's open source, cross platform - and has an absolutely badass logo. The UI being command-line based also means I can easily search and download files via a SSH shell (and the screen utility) when I'm not at home. But it doesn't have swarming or support 'magnet:' links, so it's kind of limited at the moment.
The BBC are proposing to make recent scheduled programs available using their own p2p client.
Also, although supposedly a community project, Fedora is still run by RedHat who make bittorrents available for their ISO releases. I'm sure other distros are available this way too, although I don't know if the torrents are actually seeded by the distro compilers themselves. Can anyone shed any light?
Lindows CD (a live CD version a la Knoppix) is also officially distributed under BitTorrent, and even other "non-reputable" p2p nets like Kazza.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
The answer to that is to install trojan horses onto a whole bunch of machines and raise the mean...
...it would have read "Blizzard uses your bandwidth to subsidize beta costs". But hey... I didn't write the article.
What Future?
Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?
"So you see chancellor, there's no reason for the University to not use Bittorrent since reputable companies such as Blizzard and Valve are now on the bandwagon."
"What's that? What is it used for? Why downloading games software of course."
"Educational? Oh ho ho, hell no! I mean, Blizzard is releasing a MMORPG that will, in all likelyhood, cause your students to ignore their studies entirely and ultimately fail their... uh... can we start again?"
We do know. We just don't care.
"Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
Go steal bandwidth from someone else.
And that was one of finest examples of the sloppy use of language I've seen in awhile, even here on slashdot.
Arguments of legality aside, I've fonud that BitTorrent is a great way to get files - when I managed to download a 700 meg linux ISO through torrent, it took just about 90 minutes as opposed to the eight plus hours it would have taken to get the file from the site distributing the file. The system itself has flaws, to be certain - the fact that working a .torrent can be a lot like DDOSing yourself (I can't get to anything else when it's running) is a drawback to say the least. However, I get my file quicker, so I'm not going to complain.
As for companies using bittorrent to distribute thier software - more power to them! I'm happy to see blizzard deciding to do this.
DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs hijack an open source protocol for their business ends. Guess it's a good thing they didn't think anyone was sharing copies of Whorecraft using Bittorrent, or they would have shut them down like they did another open source project, bnetd.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Azureus can prewrite the whole file with zeros, then fill blocks into that file. As compared to the more usual approach of continuously appending, then sorting them into order on completion. This should help prevent fragmentation.
...Because most universities have firewalled internet access. BitTorrent was meant to operate with open server ports; clients who are stuck behind a firewall wind up having to upload a lot more in exchange for their download.
Everyone keep in mind that this is the same Blizzard that shut down bnetd and freecraft, and now they're just trying to use your bandwidth to pay for thier beta release.
Avoid these morons and stop giving them money until they drop the suits and make resitution over the projects they tried to destroy.
A large number of the popular BitTorrent downloads have around 2000 total peers (summing up seeders and leechers) during peak time. For files distributed by corporations, the sky is the limit (400,000 is possible for the WoW beta). The current generation of trackers do NOT prioritize IPs by location, and thus if I connect to this tracker and there are 10 other people on campus downloading it, the chances of any of us even finding each other is very slim, since the average client gets around 30 random ips from the tracker in one shot.
It would be nice if you could specify to the tracker a range of IPs to always give, but I doubt many tracker operators would want to suck up the extra bandwidth to recieve those requests.
Libtorrent (a c++ implementation of a BT client, currently in pre-beta stages) supports trying to connect to an IP directly, but you'd still have to know about someone else on campus downloading the torrent.
The only solutions I can think of put even more strain on the trackers, which go down more often than most porn stars.
Just my two cents.
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
edonkey/emule supports swarming, good searching, and browser hooks. It's decentralized. There are open source clients. The only thing it lacks is that anonymity feature.
.torrent files in the bittorrent client if it's configured correctly.
Besides, bittorrent already hooks into the browser. The browser will autolaunch
You are correct to say that Freenet doesn't do direct "tit-for-tat" with uploading and downloading, because they don't think its a good idea for the newest users to have a bad experience of the software.
To be honest, Freenet is better than Bit Torrent in almost every way, its main problem being that until recently it was really overloaded by requests - this problem is now almost completely solved. Its core benefits are:
- Decentralized - BitTorrent requires a central server, this creates legal liability for the operator of that server, and means it is harder to distribute content via BitTorrent.
- Anonymous - Freenet is, BT isn't
- Flexible - Freenet not-only supports distribution of large files, it also supports publication of websites, and even usenet-style discussion groups.
If they can continue to make progress on the overloading issues (and they are 95% of the way there), I don't think there will be any good reason to use BitTorrent instead of Freenet."Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
I'm sad to say that I think not. If these major players want "WhassaMatta U" to support Bit Torrent, then they will have to fork over some cash. In the form of donations to some school program of course. I think the recent string of college lawsuits concering P2P networks has stymied something that has truely revolutionized the web. The one always spoils it for the rest of us. Perhaps more strict guidelines regarding P2P is the solution, but I think that banning them altogether is the wrong choice. I mean there is still FTP to trade music.
RIAA be damned, for they are tearing down the web.
"RCA don't you have enough money? I'm sorry, how could I be so insensitive. I hadn't realized that you were driving last years model Rolls Royce?"
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
There was a BT setup for the demo's release and everyone was very eager to use it. However when the time came to use it people realized it was still slower than ftping the demo. It doesn't work for online games... because as soon as it's downloaded the BT will get shutdown so that they can immediately go online...
This sort of "big picture in one paragraph and then apply it to everything" summary of human civilization has been tried before and falls apart because you end up making false generalizations.
You make a good point about people who control the content industries being threatened by P2P and the decentralization of creative efforts, but this has nothing to do with the development of agrarian or industrialized cultures. There are always similar courses of behavior when humans are confronted with great change, but drawing any tighter parallel is really an exercise in sophistry.
It depends--I was recently in the dorms at the University of Washington, and there was a huge amount of P2P activity. I still got
Their rules for residence hall use even state that bandwidth off campus is limited to 100 megabits/sec, while P2P is limited to 20 megabits/sec in and 1 megabit/sec out.
Those are the limitations placed on student computing; the strain was always at the other end of the line.
...using electricity to execute murderers is a *good* thing.
Why not just copy the recently downloaded fragmented file onto a new partition? The copied file won't have any fragmentation if the new partition is defraged. I have a 'download' partition, and several 'archive' partitions. Once any one of my downloads is complete, I just move the file from the 'download' partition, to one of the 'archive' partitions. Copying the file can remove its fragmentation...
it's blocked because it's *BAD*. I honestly could care less what you're uploading or downloading, so long as we don't get a legal letter from someone (then we have to respond).
Recent popular p2p apps have a serious problem: they general thousands of flows (source:destination connections) to and from your host, as people connect and disconnect. Modern appliance firewalls, rate limiters, and other pieces of networking hardware all are built arround tracking and mapping flows to permit lists, rate lists, or just routing table entries.
Rates of 400-1000 flows/second are not uncommon for the most popular apps, and these cause the firewalls, etc, to simply fall over and die, shutting down the network for everyone.
That's bad, and then we networking types have to block or limit a port, and then you get mad at us "network nazis". Keeping the wan up when it's hundreds of Mb/s is *hard*.
Use a filesystem that doesn't have fragmentation in the first place. Oh wait, you windows guys don't have one yet. *snigger*
At my school, everything runs through priority queues. All of the servers and important research computers are highest priority, and are guaranteed bandwidth. Open computer labs are medium priority. Dorm rooms are low priority. P2P traffic is never a problem because those connections are only getting allocated what's left of the bandwidth after the more important users get their share.
I believe they also use a similar method to bump the priority of P2P ports down relative to the rest. They also cut off anyone using P2P over port 80 and block P2P from the public computers.
Lawsuits are another matter, but schools should be willing to put up a fight for their students. In some cases here, the school has given warnings to people they've gotten complaints about, without revealing their identities. That was a classy decision in my opinion, and something that doesn't take a lot of effort.
BitTorrent is designed to encourage fair sharing by basing the choice of which peer you should upload to on how fast you have downloaded from them. Thus if you run a node that only leeches and doesn't upload, other peers will choose to upload to peers other than you, since you're not contibuting back.
As another poster mentioned, there is also the fact that there is no guarentee that peers on the same network will find one another, since the tracker simply returns a random set of peers, with no attempt to optimize the groupings.
You could jack up the number of connections to increase your change of finding local peers. I've also thought a bit about the idea of running a local BT proxy tracker at the network edge that would return local peers first, and then fetch peers from the real tracker as needed. I'm not convinced, though, that (even at a large school) the number of local users dling the same torrents at the same time would be large enough to be worth the hassle.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I guess then they can block port 53 as well - all domain queries for their university should be using TCP anyway right?
All DNS queries should be going through the university's DNS server. Students sign terms of service as a condition of access to the school's network. Some schools' terms ban popular low-latency applications such as video gaming between university and Internet hosts; the IT department grants exceptions for strictly academic purposes (for example, for students completing assignments in an approved computer networking course). If the contract bans users from using popular low-latency apps across the university's connection to the Internet without the IT department's express written consent, then why not block UDP?
I have been reading all the comments about how p2p apps place a "huge strain" on their networks. Here is the dilema.
Uni's usually have big pipes. They have big expensive Cisco routers. They have gigabit. They have fibre. Generally they have all the cool stuff.
What's the point of having all that cool/powerfull/expensive equipment if you are not going to use it?
Seriosuly, if I bought all that stuff only to find out that it was sitting mostly idle, I would be seriously pissed off that I wasted money on stuff I don't use.
Because of the way technology gets better and cheaper, if your kit not sitting at 75% utilisation 24/7, you pretty much wasted your money.
or better yet, do as the university where i work does: every computer on campus gets X GB / month free, and anything beyond that gets charged at $Y/GB. it caused quite an uproar when this policy was instated, but having quite libertarian views on taxation issues anyway (use fees instead of income/propery taxes, etc.), i love it. sure wish my cable modem at home charged by the usage, and not a flat monthly rate.
Universities are mostly funded by government. Most students are also partially funded by government backed loans and grants.
Some universities are private. Most students do not qualify for government grants in aid. The only government aid that most students at private universities get is a slight discount on loan interest.
It is not in the citizens interests to expend additional resources to facilitate even one byte of illegal data transfer.
Citizens', or state's? (In political science, a "state" is the entity that successfully claims a monopoly on the use of lethal force in a given territory.) In the United States, the Congress has every right to enact, and the FBI has every right to enforce, laws that citizens would not find just. For instance, look at Eldred v. Ashcroft, which demolished the effect of the words "for limited Times" in the copyright clause of the Constitution of the United States, and look at the United States government's attempts to force such monopoly terms on other countries through trade treaties. If your government were to discover the identity of (the firstborn son of)+ the caveman who invented the wheel, would it be just to grant him a monopoly on wheeled vehicles? And would it be just to grant the heir of the prophet Moses a monopoly on reproducing the Torah, the first five books of the Tanach? (The Tanach is the Bible of Judaism and forms part of the Bible of Christianity.)
Commerical ISPs are largely covered by laws that make them a "common carrier" - meaning they are not generally liable for the content their users consume or provide. Universities are not presently generally protected in this manner.
Then refactor the university's IT department into a separate organization.
Even if you throttle users to 5 kb/s upstream (which makes many legitimate applications unsuitable for serious use)
Then throttle users to however many Kbits per second given the user's average throughput over the previous 24 hours. Non-users of P2P would be able to burst at a high rate; P2P users could sustain a lower rate.
Blizzard did not shut down freecraft but only forced it to change its name.
Kazaa, good searching?
God, that's so unusable that i don't know how someone bares it...
Seems, to me anyway, that BitTorrent is more or less a new means of distributing illegal pirated software. I've heard of at least 3 piracy "rings" or what not who use BitTorrent as their primary means of transport.
... 1) Close BitTorrent
... 2) Delete the installer
I'm happy to hear companies like Id and Blizzard are embracing the new protocol. But by the same token, I'm concerned that promoting its use even more will expose even more people to the darker side of BitTorrent.
Of course one could argue that HTTP and FTP are also protocols used for software piracy, however, files coming over those protocols are from a SINGLE source (or potentially a mirror, but not the multitude of "mirrors" you get with a P2P protocol). It's much easier to shut those down than it is to find every single user who's sending chunks of a particular file on a P2P network.
Also, I'm not really sure BitTorrent will succede for online MMORPG BETA distribution. The problem I see is mostly, when people are done downloading their BETA installer and install the BETA they'll typically do two things...
In that scenerio, you're running low on peers to actually distribute the file after the initial surge of download activity. Anyone who misses the initial hyped download will have a hard time finding any peers to fetch from.
Oh boy, now I can waste 2 Gigs of upload bandwidth to get 1 MB in return! This is really good news for those of us with bandwidth limits, I wounder if it will also ignore my upload rate setting like all the other BT clients! They get our bandwidth for free, and we get nothing in return, what a deal!
If they go with bittorrshit then I will stop buying their crap. These companies keep getting cheaper and cheaper, it was nice when they had ftps/websites, then they started directing you to download sites like file planet("you have 1 minute out of 70 left in the wait, oops, we craped out for the 100101094th time, back to 70 minutes") and now they want us to use up our bandwidth.
Wahh Wahh Wahh I wanted to download warze and mp3z Wahh Wahh Wahh our university decited to do something about our illegal activites Wahh Wahh Wahh it isn't fair Wahh Wahh Wahh.
I think I have the solution to all of these P2P copyright issues.
Simply require users to register every file they want to share to the server. If it isn't registered, it doesn't show up in their shared files list, regardless of which directory it's in.
If they are sharing something on bit torrent, they have nothing to hide. If they have nothing to hide, there shouldn't be a problem, filling out a web form with their username, and browsing their hard drive for the file they are sharing.
The FBI, MPAA, and RIAA will know where any file originates from, and if there is a copyright issue, they have their "man".
I don't know why no one has thought of this. Simply print my idea, tell all the p2p software companies about it. Anyone who isn't interested isn't above board. If they aren't above board, they intend the thing for piracy. If the thing is intended for piracy, then DMCA applies.
I'm tired of the debate. If you don't like this, you are a pirate.
Any file on the internet will be able to be traced back to the first person who shared it. You add up the number of copies, and that's how many counts of copyright violation they are guilty of.
Done, problem solved, everybody starts getting sleep. Better pick a good password.
The p2p companies will be liable for security and be fined if they get hacked and don't report it to the FBI immediately.
l8,
AC
You forgot RTFM
Did Blizzard actually give them permission to go forward with the new name, or are they just assuming it'll be okay now?
Google fails to help me find a copy of the cease and desist letter online, but I don't recall that the allegations in the Fr**Cr*ft issue went very far beyond mere trademark infringement. And I'm pretty sure Blizzard's marketing department knows about Stratagus.
Well, that'll happen when students use bandwidth reasonably. It's not fair to the guy who periodically wants to upload files to his ftp when some guy in the room down the hall does 10gb upstream in 10 hours cause he's seeding half the mgm catalog (yes it's happened). The universities are in a worse position than commercial vendors too; you can't adjust prices the same way and you have a non-profit purpose. Educate users and it won't be an issue. Otherwise somepeople are going to get their way and push usage based charging with some ridiculous caps on what's "acceptable".
It has sort of been discussed, but I did not see anyone mention the most devastating effect BitTorrent has on my university. In our system we have a PacketShaper that prioritizes bandwidth so our internet and chat and games go really fast and our file sharing is really slow. There is also the 4 Mb allotment solely for file sharing, and BitTorrent is in that allotment. Not blocked, just on a low priority. The problem lies with the number of connections each user has with just 1 Torrent. Go ahead and check for yourself, open a Torrent and then open up the command prompt and type in "netstat". The normal user may have several connections open, 1 per website and maybe another few for ICQ or something. With BitTorrent, each of our 3000 people on campus are capable of having 11,000 connections at the same time. It doesn't matter how little bandwidth is going through, the PacketShaper is unable to cope with such a large load, which is when our higher priorities slow down to a crawl.
With BitTorent and all other sharing programs that I know, have no way of dealing with asymetric bandwidths. I live in a rural area. I have wireless internet to my house with a telephone return. My house cannot get cable, and the telephone central office is about 15 miles away. My maximum bit rate on the return is about 1800 bits/sec often slower. Most of the time, my use of the internet is limited by the time to do the acknowlegements of the packets. Sharing anything make any access of the internet almost impossible.
Filerush hasn't grown to the size of fileplanet by any means, but they offer BT downloads of their files.
Universities are blocking BitTorrent because it's consuming gigantic quantities of bandwidth. 13% of Internet2 bandwidth is P2P traffic, for example--and more than half that is BitTorrent (32 terabytes). And this is on an academic, educational network. Somehow I doubt all those data are DNA sequences and radiotelemetry :) Let's be completely unrealistic for a moment and posit those are all legal, noninfringing file transfers. It's still not in my university's charter to finance me downloading the latest Moe show of etree. It's just not. And given I go to the University of California (currently broke), it's one of the first things they should be cutting down on.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
...except edonkey/emule relies on 3rd-party-run servers. Also, (last time i used it at least (a year or so ago)) swarming is quite limited, and nowhere near as positive-feedback-regulated as bittorrent.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
True, there'll be a low rate of people re-seeding. But even peers can boost each other somewhat. And I'm sure Blizzard will continue to run seeders on their own servers for as long as they offer the beta, so latecomers should still have no trouble finding a seed.
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
The vast majority of those who signed up for the World of Warcraft Beta would see it as a privilege to test. I'm aware of at least one MMORPG that ran a pay-to-Beta, so Blizzard is a step up here.
"The short of it is that universities are/will become useless as connectivity providers for their students, and one can only hope to be refunded the cost to acquire alternative service from an external provider."
Actually I hope this does happen. Why? Because it will place responsability upon the shoulders it should have been on all along.
"Our rationale is that trying to do application policing is a losing strategy. It will not be long until the kazaas of the world are port hopping and encrypting their data, or encrypting the data and sending it over port 443. It is a losing game."
And if the student community loses it's Internet connection, because of these "games"? Then who really loses? Certainly not the university, they still have Internet for the people who really want it, and can monitor it. People can sometimes "outwit" themselves right out of a privilage.
Yes, all peers are logically equal. But the way BitTorrent works is that your client shops around for the peers that give you the fastest download, and then you assign them most of you upload. Since a university LAN will be faster than any external connection, after a little initial scanning, all the clients on the LAN will find each other, and use very little external bandwidth.
is why no one sees this as companies trying to save money. Big deal that Blizzard makes popular games, I loved all of their games. But the fact of the matter is that they are now using consumer resources to do this. Are they going to reimburse someone for the bandwidth that was used? If I had to guess I'd say NO.
See if this was Microsoft or another "evil" company doing this, everyone would be saying something similar.