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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?"
john/john
Information wants to be free.
Incidently its not ALL peachy and well. They use a proprietary client to kick off the download and do not directly give out links to the .torrents.
They tested this method over the last month by distributing two movies with their custom client. Someone did apparently extract the .torrent location fairly quickly though.
Especially if you are getting a 50% compression ratio on a DivX/MPEG/MPEG2 movie - something is wrong with the encoder! There is no point in raring up this type of data, if you are lucky you'll get a 5% file size reduction.
Exactly. The only redeeming factor is you can add additional files (.nfo/.txt, maybe the demos used if its a game movie, that kind of stuff), but thats not at all relevant on bittorrent because one torrent can have multiple files in it, and clients can even prioritize what files they want first.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
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...)
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 believe that Bram Cohen released bitTorrent under a MIT styled license. An MIT license you don't have to "give" the source code away if you distribute a binary.
you can use other clients that let you limit your upload so you dont kill your connection.
http://www.bittornado.com/
The official BT (and others too, as far as i know) client actually first writes out a file on disk the size of the intended download. The random chunks are then inserted into this empty-yet-allocated space.
The official BT client no longer does this. It now only uses as much disk space as has been downloaded rather than allocating the whole file at once.
Have you seen Blizzards client? They won't even release a .torrent file. They make you download thier downloader in order to get the file. Trust me, they made changes. They want to restrict who has access to download -- and you do that by modifying the client and not releasing the new source.
This is situation precisely what multicasting was designed for. It is FAR more bandwidth-efficient than BitTorrent. Blizzard's servers would send out the file at a constant speed (say, 3 Mbps) continuously. Each time the packet reaches a router, the router duplicates it and sends it precisely all the routers that are the next hops in order to reach everyone currently downloading the game. This continues at each router along the paths. It is a perfectly efficient tree of distribution with no duplication and maximum utilization of the available resources.
BitTorrent, by contast, uses everyone's incoming and outgoing bandwidth, and doesn't optimize paths like multicasting. So even if a hundred people at your University are downloading the file, you won't all be downloading from each other, but instead downloading from people all over the world, while producing traffic sending parts of the file back out to them. Quite bad.
The problem with multicasting is that ISPS are too idiotic to get their systems configured properly to allow it. Half the world can't receive multicasts. Most firewalls don't support multicasting, because the programmers designing the firewall software were oblivious. And, to top it all off, nobody has figured out how to bill for it. Who pays for the bandwidth? That 3 Mbps can turn into 1 Gbps a few hops away from Blizzard--and someone needs to be billed.
No, I disagree strongly.
Companies are not out modifying BitTorrent. They have no reason to favor MIT over GPL.
That would have been a good point, IF you were right about companies not modifying BitTorrent. Check out Blizzard!
Just setup a VPN server on your home PC on Port 80. At the very least setup a web server on your home PC that you can use for file transfer and determining if it's alive.
Slackware used BitTorrent to distribute Slackware 9.1 ISOs.
Is there a program you can use to play a DVD on a PC while adding subtitles from a nominated file? Then you could buy the Japanese discs and only have to download a little zipped text file.
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
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
Yup and the Azureus bittorrent client has this option disabled by default to prevent massive fragmentation. Allocating only for what has been downloaded is only and advantage when you only want a few files from a multi-file torrent.
For Universities, the problem is not necessarily just copyrights, although that is a consideration too. What is more important to them is the high cost of using so much bandwidth from all the downloading/uploading.
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.
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
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.
It's a reference to this original joke, now approaching meme status...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.