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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?"
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!
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.
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
- 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!
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
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?
"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.
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
While what you're saying is probably true, in many Otaku's defense I'd like to point out that most anime bit torrents out there are for fansub releases for series that are unlicensed in North America. These fansubbing groups obtain original Japanese versions of programs, write English subtitles themselves and release it to the community often with a message requesting that distribution be ceased when the title becomes licensed. This allows many anime fans around the world to appreciate and experience these shows almost as soon as they come out in Japan, as licensing can take quite some time. Furthermore, there are still many series that have never recieved licenses for any English format, and may never, and programs like Bit Torrent are may be the only way for the English speaking anime fan to enjoy a series without spending many years learning Japanese.
While many young people do indeed use Bit Torrent for piracy, I don't think it's fair to generalize that a lack of morality for intellectual property rights is at heart. But many of the arguments have already been presented by people far more eloquent than I am. My point is merely that Peer-To-Peer services like Bit Torrent have plenty of potential for good, and I think it's a great thing that Blizzard is demonstrating how it can be used legally and effectively. Peer to Peer file trading has been incorrectly stigmatized before it has been completely understood, it seems. Let's not forget the birth of the videocassette (and I know this has been mentioned countless times before). People still do use it for piracy, but I think the benefits that we've gotten out of it far outweigh the few bad seeds.
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.
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.
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.
What I'd like to know is will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility that all companies will use our bandwidth to distribute their final product for them? Why should I have to offset the bandwidth costs of these companies just to play their game? I would expect some kind of incentive, for example giving me the option to download the game directly from their servers or download via BT and they slash a few dollars off the price. If the download is free, great, I won't complain. 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 see little benefit for us, the consumers, to download via BT as opposed to the company's servers unless there is some compensation.
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!
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
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.
Forgive my anonymous posting, but I wish to speak my mind. The first hand experience I have with this presently is that those making the decisions have two and only two factors on their mind.
Legal damages/responsibilities/eccetera from users on their networks violating copyright. There's a bit of a catch 22 in terms of policing this, ironically. Basically it's let it all through and say, "Sorry, we aren't a *publisher* and therefore lack editorial whatever." or shut it down completely because one illegal download through a filter puts indemnity (?) on their heads. So, which has fewer headaches.. practically no net, or uncensored net?
Cost of bandwidth. Don't even bother being reasonable here. We have had a throttling system here, preventing the "long distance phonebill of doom". You go over your reasonable amount? No net for the week. Nonetheless, the disabling of network resources (er, the installation of a firewall) was touted as a fantastic way to reduce network traffic (and thus costs, in an increasingly underfunded arena).
Apparently noone has thought to the point of just whiting out all the text in the libriray, because it may save them from lawsuits...
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.
Yes, this is all a bit off topic, but I've just recently been denied my beloved Bittorrent, so hopefully I'll get a little mod slack.
I don't think universities care if its legit use or not, they care about strain on their network. And since I was living in a dorm when Napster first became popular, I can attest that P2P is a *huge* strain on a campus network.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Sounds like my ISP.
seriously, 2GB a month? I use that on just slashdot.
How Now Brown Cow
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.