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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?"
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
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
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!
Most consumer services are asynchonus by design to prevent people from putting heavy-traffic servers of any kind on consumer bandwidth.
When you're a college student, your dormroom computer usually has the ability to push out five or six megabits of data per second onto the Internet presuming you can find an off-campus host that's able to keep up with that kind of traffic to be on the other end.
Yes, there is a "How dare you use the bandwidth we gave you access to?" factor to that... if everybody on campus ran servers the school's outbound bandwidth pipe would clog. So, they'd rather students not be filesharing anything even if it is all copyright cleared.
- 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!
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
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.
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?
Is using BitTorrent a form of support?
Is paying Bram to work on something that isn't BitTorrent a form of support?
Moreover, most universities will consider that games are not a good reason to allow P2P to go through to university dorm. Moreover, univ admin already often download and make local mirrors of linux distribs, which is the other main "legit" source of P2P. Please note that I do not fully accept those reasons, but pragmatic compromises (clogged Internet pipes) certainly have to be taken into account.
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
Why not just block the few sucking in and sending out terabytes of information, rather than cut off everyone?
I know there are many programs out there with the explicit purpose of either throttling, or cutting off completely, ip addresses that suck up a given value of data in a given value of time.
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
My uni has cracked down bigtime and just decided it would be best if ALL traffic aside from web browsing is firewalled, and I'm talking everything, ftp, ssh, telnet, PING everything. As you can probebly tell this pisses everyone off. Want to upload your files to your home computer? Can't do it sorry. Want to see if your computer is still online, Can't do it sorry. Want to stream real... buffering... media? Can't do it sorry.
I should write a letter
Many of my friends at other universities agree with you. However, I've found that that isn't the case. My school's network a few years ago was barely creeping along. They upgraded, made a few changes and actually INCREASED the usage limits. Now we get ~2.5-3 gigs a day combined up/down (well, from one connection, in the dorms. If you use the wireless network add another 2.5-3 gigs and I believe it's limitless in some if not all of the computer labs, and if it is limited, switch to another network and transfer to your home computer. All intranet transfers don't count towards the limit).
So usage has increased. The number of users has increased. But the actual speed of the network has increased greatly. I frequently reach download speeds of 800kB/s (yes bytes) if the servers I'm connecting to can handle it. This is at a major US university whose peers are capping and blocking everything in sight. It is very possible to offer students an amazing connection, even in today's environment. Most schools, however, are not willing to make the commitment.
If someone points out that they can rate limit the upstream bittorrent into a bittrickle(sic) without user intervention and that this combined with the current choking algorithm should push clients towards other internal peers if they exist. So in the long run, it could save them bandwidth costs.
Of course, this does rely upon them also accepting that bittorrent is used for linux ISO's and other "educationally legitimate" purposes.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
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.
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...
Also Sigames (makers of Championship Manager) have released patches and video content via BT.
No, they never will. Why?
Ask my lab's sysadmin, who cut off BT's ports when we got a cease 'n desist order from a movie company. No, not the MPAA, a SPECIFIC MOVIE STUDIO. Not even a MAJOR one. Because someone was putting a 100k up pipe on a movie torrent. Because he/she was a SLOW human being.
University networks are tricky to control (what're you gonna do, place controlled profiles in the dorm room users' computers?!) and only seen as one entity. If P2P program X has ONE pirate, the whole app goes down on the network. This isn't like ftp where someone's password account can be traced, this is P2P where getting the IP of the one P2Ping is just a bit trickier, to the point where it's not worth the effort when you can just kill the ports and any enusing lawsuits that'd possibly follow.
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?
Here's the skinny on the situation...
To everyone in the ed2k community
As everyone is probably aware of now, ShareReactor has been taken down by the Swiss authorities. This was done at the request of several big Multimedia companies, who filed a complaint. SimonMoon has been detained and questioned by the authorities. His house has been raided and searched for evidence. The SR servers and some personal hardware have been confiscated.
We will address some basic things now.
Is SR dead forever now?
We don't know. This is a serious situation, not only for SimonMoon, but for everyone who has something to do with SR. If imonMoon prevails in this case, we think he will continue SR. ShareReactor has been his hobby (not his job) for the past 3 ears. Through all the setbacks and complaints he never gave up. One and a half years ago his house was searched as well, he has received threats, phonecalls and cease and desist letters on a weekly basis, and he never cut and ran. So if he makes it through this, chances are SR will continue in some form. However, if he loses this case, he is in serious trouble, and SR will most likely be history.
Why doesn't SimonMoon tell us this himself?
SimonMoon is under official investigations. It is very likely that he has been told not to communicate with anyone, in order not to hinder the investigation. Or maybe because he is seen as a suspect and cannot talk because of that. Or perhaps they want to stop him from telling other people what they should do. Who knows.
So now what?
Now we do what we have been doing. We wait for more information. And hope it all works out.
What else can we do??
People on various forums have suggested donating money for SimonMoon's legal expenses. We like that idea, because we want to do something to help SimonMoon through this. The problem is that for that to happen we need to be sure that he wants it, that his lawyer is ok with it, and that we have someone trustworthy to collect the money. We will post updates if we worked out a way to do this. Before people start complaining about asking for donations again, SimonMoon did spend the money on a new line, but the SDSL company is a bit crappy. And that was the best Switzerland had to offer. As for the forum server, ironically it was finally assembled and ready for testing early last week. Let's hope we'll see it working someday. Thanks to everyone who suggested donating money for a lawyer. This is not only about SR, this is about the future of many p2p sites. If SR wins this, then things look a lot brighter than if SR loses and dies. This case will set a precedent for the future.
Some general notes:
To everyone who said that SimonMoon ran with the money, it may be nice to know that so far SR has only cost SimonMoon a lot of money. But it was his project so he accepted that. But the kind of hardware needed for the forum required a fundraiser. We can only hope that an official press release will stop the ridiculous conspiracy theories about SimonMoon. It has been very hard to stay calm and quiet while people publicly trash your friend like that. He didn't deserve to be treated like that. People even posted his address and phone number publicly. How low can you go? Imagine how you would like it if suddenly everybody with an Internet connection can find your home and can call you in the middle of the night? Also, imagine how it must have been for him to read all that, after he was detained and questioned, after his house was raided and emptied by the police. We want to show SimonMoon our full support, and we truly hope this will all end well.
If you want to talk about all this, join SR IRC at gogi.tv, #sharereactor.
Kind regards,
The ShareReactor Crew
From here
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.
But at my university, Oklahoma State, the NAT is set up so that any user can get their own public IP, but it's mapped to their private IP, so the NIC binds to a 10.x IP, but the off-campus sites see the public IP assigned to that computer. However, the stupid admins did not make the public addresses routable on campus. Bittorrent does not show the tracker a private IP, so internal peers cannot be connected to. This also wrecks Valve's Steam if I want to set up a dedicated server on my other box, I cannot play on it since the authorization server sees my public IP, but the dedicated server cannot be connected to with the public IP, therefore it denies connection due to an 'invalid ticket'. The thread about this on steampowered.com forums is at 26 pages from 9/30/2003, and Valve *still* hasn't fixed it even though it'd be so easy to fix. Fucking bastards!
Because "everyone else" is still in principle doing the same thing as the absuers, but just less. Trading 10 bandwidth tryants for 10,000 isn't progress.
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.
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
As a University network administrator I thought I might answer this...
Universities already know that Bittorrent is not inherently bad. The problem is that there is a no way of distinguishing between a legitimate torrent (of say, a Linux distro) and a torrent of "unauthorised copyright material". If there were a way to easily differentiate between the two then I'm sure that many Universities would be quite willing to lift restrictions on bittorrents. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
I can guarantee, that if we altered our Bittorrent bandwidth restrictions to allow unfettered download/upload, our pipe would be saturated within a day.
brilliant.
I think that's the way to do it, except rather than simply saving it locally, have it rewrite the torrents and point clients at a tracker on the proxy. With a little thought, you could have the tracker dynamically adjust WAN traffic based on the number of local clients asking for the file.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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
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.
But with talk about Valve hiring the creator of BT (likely for Steam integration), it seems that BT is being steered towards capitalist purposes.
I installed Valve's steam on another machine last night and I got a popup that said "Preorder new game now! Please note that unless you explicitly disable it, we'll download a locked copy of the game for you anyway."
So they want everyone to be able to pay and instantly play, and they're probably using bittorrent technology to get the locked copies to them. But that's likely the extent of what they can do with it.
In terms of in-game content distribution, though (new maps, custom decals, etc.) the bittorrent model is ideal.
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.
I have actually given a presentation on this at last summers Internet2 Joint Techs meeting.
At Carnegie Mellon, all students get globally routable IP addresses in the dorms. There are no filters on the traffic (except bogon filters that an respectable ISP should have to keep spoofed traffic from leaving a subnet).
We have a probe on our egress router that tracks daily inbound and outbound traffic sums per IP address. We have a policy that if a student exceeds more than 7.5 Gigabytes of traffic in either direction (calculated separately) over a 5 day period (1.5 GBs/day) they will get a warning message that reminds them of the policy. If after 3 days, they exceed 1.5GBs in one day, they get a warning, then 3 days later, if they keep on exceeding, we yank their machine off the network (block their ip on the router and take them out of the dhcp server config).
We used to do the message sending and yanking by hand. It would take about 2 hours per week of my time. Now it is all automated and takes no time.
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.
Here is a link to the presentation material:
http://www.net.cmu.edu/pres/jt0803/
And that was one of finest examples of the sloppy use of language I've seen in awhile, even here on slashdot.
Packet shapers at least my linux one that I admin for a ISP could care less what the traffic is or even if it is encrypted. It works only on packets and will restrict packets across port 22 no matter what application is using that port. At the isp we totally block torrent traffic because of the hideous load it puts on the network. Besides it is technically running a server on our network which is
against the terms of service. As a matter of fact we explicitly state that torrent is banned as well as most other p2p software. Now we do not police the network 24/7 but if someone gets our attention they can and will be terminated.
Got Code?
I also work at a college IT department (ASU), and I too, am affected by a traffic shaping policy--but I wouldn't say it's reasonable.
.25% of students from using 97% of the bandwith is the case at all. Nowhere on campus do games work, as they require low latency, and they regularly time out when some students get on and download (higher priority) pr0n or iso's. In effect, no filesharing applications nor any games work on the ethernet. Those games which are more forgiving (MMORPGS, as opposed to FPS), sometimes work very BADLY on the ethernet, with lag in excess of 3 seconds being commonplace.
Basically, they have a packeteer unit, which implements a leaky bucket algorithm over the network. I'm not sure if they also put other restrictions on the network, as I've heard there is only 5 MB/sec allowed on the resnet for any "junk" traffic (see also: anything BUT HTTP, FTP, and IRC). They're quite secretive about their actual algorithms, my theory being that either no one really knows, or those who do know don't want to say because then they might actually have to change an unjust policy.
In any case, the net result isn't that stopping
The claim, is of course, for budgetary reasons. Games (which require little bandwidth), are considered junk traffic because they are not directly educationally related, and have been lumped with filesharing applications (which, if not restricted, can take an incredible amount of bandwidth).
Personally, I think if the administration really wants to do something about the alcohol epidemic on campus (rated #1 for the best party school by Playboy in 2001), as they say they do constantly, I think that the administration should allow for other hobbies other than drinking. After all, boredom is the #1 cause for college-age drinking. It would be easier for an underage student to get alcohol at my school than a connection for internet gaming.
So perhaps the administration of the IT at your college was motivated by reasonable motives, but I do not believe the administation here at mine is reasonable--and I believe my school is probably indicative of many larger campuses. Blocking student computer (and XBOX/PS2) gaming on the ethernet is one of the dumbest things I think a college can do... and that's not even the start of the things they block (SSH, VNC, PcAnywhere, anything but HTTP/FTP/IRC).
-=Lothsahn=-
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.
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.
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.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?