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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.
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.
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.
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
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.