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RSS And BitTorrent, Together At Last
eoyount writes "Wired has an interesting story about a really simple idea I wish I had thought of. Transferring large files across the Internet isn't easy for your average joe, but a combination of RSS and BitTorrent technology might just make it easier - Slashdot ran a previous story on the theoretical blending last year." (LegalTorrents is run by the strangely familiar simoniker, who wrote a short piece on the O'Reilly Network about how it was set up, and offers observations on how well the combination fares.) Update: 03/17 21:45 GMT by T : Ernest Miller submits two related postings he's written on RSS+BitTorrent, a combination he calls "broadcatching."
I've been writing extensively on Corante about RSS + BitTorrent, which I call "Broadcatching" here: Broadcatching Archives See, for example, RSS + BitTorrent Roundup - Broadcatching Isn't MS Active Channels and First Broadcatching App Available! (And Related News).
BitTorrent is basically another p2p service, except it's different (yes, i'm trying to be very specific here)
It allows for people to take advantage of bandwith by downloding bits of a large file from different users hosting a 'torrent.' At the end, all these pieces are put together. Yes, it is pretty good.
...combining RSS and torrents is not going to solve the problem. This is the most complicated solution to a non-problem that I've seen since someone paid me to design something.
where can I find clear info regarding what is RSS exactly ? Isn't it somehow like what microsoft tried to do a couple years ago with their "Active Desktop" (c) TM concept ? Or am I completely way off ?
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Now, how do we aim that at the web in general (and automagically) to avoid the slashdot effect?
A new browser protocol? Aim your browser at
bthttp://www.victim.com
and let it rip?
Although it's cool that companies are finding legit uses for BT (I believe the Worlds of Warcraft beta is being distributed this way), I'm not sure the legal departments are up to speed yet. To quote one of the fellows in my IRC chat:
"Hrm, WoW is bing distributed by Bittorrent. Meanwhile, I get angry phonecalls from Vivendi to shut down Bittorrent."
Yay for technical advances, but can commercial interests fully embrace it without killing the "evils" of it?
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
The problem with bittorrent is that a lot of users disconnect as soon as their download is finished. Won't this be an even bigger problem with game downloads (specifically multiplayer games) since even if the users knows they should stay connected afterwards, they might not since it would lag their game?
Many ISPs and college campuses block P2P ports, BitTorrent included. I'm not sure that 'news' is a compelling enough reason to have many (or any) of them change their policies.
Trolling is a art,
This sounds like exactly what SuprNova.org needs. It would relieve some of the server load on their main pages and would enable them to serve more .torrent files.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
People keep trying to make BitTorrent something it isn't. And really, we should be fighting its corporate adoption in any form, as it's simply an attempt to shift server bandwidth costs to the client. ISPs eat that right now, but we're going to metered access if this keeps up.
Which is effectively getting us to pay for website access/services, but instead of giving the money to the content creators we'll be giving it to ISPs instead and paying in bandwidth besides. So this is a bad idea.
They are WHACK.
Sounds like an OK idea, but is it just me or does anyone else think that there is just a bit too much hype in the *media* about this. They don't usually pick up on good ideas and try to make them critical mass and the "next big thing".
Syndication is a great idea, I like RSS, (does BitTorrent even work under Linux?)--but why on earth all the *orchestrated* hype?
Enough to make me try Freenet again. Harrumph
In this Slashdot article, Yahoo reported that things might be starting to come together. Looks like it's happened!
However, I'm a little concerned - BitTorrent has a lot of initial overhead (setting up trackers, and all the protocol stuff). I'm not sure if it would be wise for small files?
This sounds like a wonderful melding of two current technologies...
However, remember when cable gained enough steam to warrant not one but many 24hr cable news networks? We are now blessed with an overabundance of crappy sensationalist "reporting". I do NOT want cnn/msnbc/fuxnews/etc. landing on my HD.
If an individual set up a feed for say, a favorite game or movie alone, I would subscribe. But most webpages I read, I gloss over quickly then am done with.
If I, and everyone else had subscribtions to all of the media content of their favorite websites delivered autonomously, the majority of it getting thrown out quickly...
think of the bandwith, the poor helpless bandwith, won't somebody please think of the child., er bandwidth!?
...but in that case, you're no worse off than before. And realistically, if there's some huge download I'll usually just start it before I head to bed. Of course, if you're sitting there counting down the seconds until it's done, that's different...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have you got a reference for BitTorrent being based on Kazaa? I presume you mean actual code (which is being sued over) not just the general p2p concept.
Huh? That's news to me...
Check out this page made of RSS feeds...
Say... that wouldn't happen to be a site that you run, Mr. DealSites, would it?
I'm not against self promotion, but at least label it as such.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
I am pretty sure that while you are downloading content, you are also uploading what you have so far - so the sharing still works to some extent even if people disconnect right away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is bittorrent open to the same legal prying as Kazaa/fasttrack and gnutella by the RIAA? I would assume so. Just curious.
Nice attempt at a troll, but by using BitTorrent at all, you are uploading. (Either that, or you want us to believe that you use a hacked client that will download at a screaming rate of 0.1k per second, max.) P.S. You take a greater risk of death every time you step in a car than you run a risk of being sued when you upload a file in Kazaa.
BitTorrent's weak spot has always been thedistribution of the torrent files in the first place. If there isn't a torrent file on the conent provider's page, where do you look?
RSS+BitTorrent, is a step closer to a better web. It almost answers the problem of pointing your client at an actively downloaded torrent by steering users twoard a slimmer and more flexible protocol.
IMO, maybe some kind of 'standard' torrent directory/lookup that is guarnteed to be traded by all torrent clients is the right ticket; kind of like a DNS for media. The RSS+Torrent scheme is good, but all it does is displace the complexity of the matter onto a new protocol and rely on everyone hitting the same feed to begin (the problem Torrent is trying to eliminate).
It does however, make it easy to make distributing torrents a lot more dynamic. Neat stuff.
Isn't this just Konspire2b? Konspire2b was designed specifically for this purpose:
Konspire2b
Essentially you subscribe to channels which push content instead of pulling.
Compared to Bittorrent
This is an exhaustive analysis (with pretty charts) why under the above scenario (pushing content, as opposed to pulling), Konspire2b is much more efficient.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"P.S. You take a greater risk of death every time you step in a car than you run a risk of being sued when you upload a file in Kazaa."
Yes, but you're talking about 2 entirely different things.... Stepping in a car is a requirement for many people to get things done on a day to day basis. People take this risk because the benefits outweigh the costs. On the other hand, most people can get by without sharing files on Kazaa (therefore allowing upload,) hence they can reduce their chances of being sued to ZERO.
Karnal
Please provide proof that BitTorrent is 'based' on KaZaA sourcecode. Of course, you can't.
:)
:)
I do know that Bram talked with the authors of Furthur, an open-source JAVA P2P for legal content. A few members of the Furthur dev team also work for a company that once did buisness with Sharman Networks, so if anything, KaZaA source may be based on already GPL-ed software... but don't tell anyone that
Of course, all modern P2P is 'based' on Napster or Gnutella (take your pick), so it's all a mute point anyway
The previous poster is incorrect. BitTorrent has nothing to do with Kazaa (0 lines of code in common).
BitTorrent is open source (MIT license) and written in Python.
Kazaa is closed source, spyware-ridden dreck that was probably written in C++.
plenty of others that do the same thing. edonkey for example. Or overnet, which doesn't even require a tracker.
But i never have time to implement.
I wanted on demand television that you could find from mirc downloads and then eventually BitTorrent. The idea would be for a really nice multimedia center attached to your TV that would download shows that you missed or if you couldn't record it (conflicts). Updates for popular programs could be downloaded and installed when the user attempts to update (as opposed to a live update). Harddrive sizes are definitely big enough to handle. The only challenge in my last implementation (which includes HTTP, MiRC XDCC, FTP downloads) was the average joe creating Torrent files so they could share their favourites with their friends. There would need to be some sort of authentication security to prevent everyone from downloading as well.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Bittorrent protocol has nothing in common with the protocol used by Kazaa (FastTrack). Even their basic P2P topologies are different.
Also, Kazaa is in trouble not for it's protocol, but for running servers that allow piracy, it's just in Kazaa's case one automatically means the other, since the protocol is closed source. Of course, Bittorrent trackers that host pirated material are also susceptable to such troubles - but this has nothing to do with Bittorrent protocol itself.
???
Sorry if I seem like I'm trolling but these questions will be asked at some point
-Phil
Shoot questions, first ask later...
moo.
Thanks for the reference. One comment made there I thought immediately too--Syndication over IM is far more interesting. Every kid I know under 16 has given up email and uses IM file transfer instead.
Email and Browsers are probably dead technology for the next generation. HTTP/HTML will survive as a backwater because it is so useful for behavioral engineering. If you write a user interface, you can't use blue underlines because users will try to click them--very Pavlovian.
We will have to go back to what the various messaging protocols are for and re-engineer them. Projects like Jabber (or even Atom) have much more promise than a thin metadata protocol like RSS.
I bet this is just a media flash in the pan. Dave Winer and pals are trying to drum up business.
The best thing about this idea is that it plays right into the strength of bittorrent - namely, having a large number of people trying to get the same content at the same time. Since everyone will get the RSS feed at roughly the same time, there will be a large number of peers to share the load for bittorrent.
The funny thing is, I ran into Andrew the other day, and he was just gushing about this new idea he had! I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Guess I missed my chance to post a story on slashdot.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
The risk is damn near zero anyway. Worrying disproportionately about incredibly unlikely events is a stupid human trait. Plus, whenever you upload, you have the knowledge that (1) you are spreading whatever film, music, or game (which increases the total audience for something that you like, which is valuable to you if you're invested in its subculture), and (2) you're "sticking it to the man." Today, you can be a rebel from the comfort of your own home.
right now we've got a 90's-style ol' skool web interface for distributing our media, teamed up with ol' skool ftp/http mirrors distributing things around the globe.
... we are prime users for free, open, public, easy-to-use media sharing technologies, and if the big-guns aren't using it, we share are happy to!
but, we'll definitely use an rss-fronted bittorrent network, if and when it can actually be smoothly integrated with our existing setup.
ampfea stands for 'a meeting place for electronic artists' and its a community-supported media hosting/community service for a bunch of muso's
check out some of our files sometime. its all home-made music...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You're still a spammer, taking advantage of a shared resource to force your advertising in front of people who don't want to see it.
Look at the GNUGK project (Gnu Gatekeeper). Think DNS-like routing of audio calls. BitTorrent Phone Home.
This site has been offering RSS feed of links to BitTorrent animes for couple of months. Firefox and RSS reader extension are great for pulling down all BitTorrent links.
One step closer to Nirvana. Bittorrent + RSS + gentoo emerge --update world. Or how about something that uses software-suspend to automagically hot-swap in the latest bleeding edge kernel? Maybe the Hurd allows on-the-fly kernel upgrades.
Since data sent equals data recieved within a BT swarm, and some people will act as seeders and continue to send more data than they recieved, you will always have people who will simply not have the opportunity to contribute to the swarm, mostly at the tail end. And of course many folks have their uploads limited or even completely cut off.
The real problem with bittorrent is that by enabling efficient transfer of large files, people are transferring larger files. And the service providers simply do not have the capacity for everyone to be sending those large files. They may advertise unlimited access but kids they really aren't set up for it. To say nothing of the fact that the way the internet is structured now is no longer geared towards everyone being as able to send as well as they are to recieve.
Really, the internet and its billing structure should be geared towards billing by amount received, and not amount served, and widespread implementation of load-sharing protocols like bittorrent. It would be far more efficient and fair, and would encourage people to limit their consumption rather than penalizing inadvertently popular unsupported sites.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
YABT.
Moron.
A big problem I have with d/ling BT stuff is that it'll stop or get real slow at about 98%. I assume this is because most people close it after it's downloaded, and the number of people who have the bit you're on gets progressively smaller as you near the end of the download. So why not make BT download a random percentage of each file? So it might do the fifth percentile, then the 96th, then the 48th, etc... This way, there's an equal chance getting the part you still need.
I imagine this would make it less bad when people don't leave the window open, but for all I know, they're already doing it, and it still isn't working...
c-hack.com |
This problem is easily addressed with multicasting. All a server need do is send a multicast datagram to notify all RSS syndicators that the RSS document has been updated, at which time the syndicators can fetch the new document.
Really? I was not trolling, BTW.
So, there goes BitTorrent from my computer... at least in Kazaa I can deny downloads completely.
It may seem complicated but its not really.
The main problem people have using bittorrent is regressive internet connections. (Until IPv6 becomes ubiquitous this is going to be a problem for many of the internet's designed uses, not just swarming media.)
Im not so hot about RSS, but for things such a multicast or bittorrent- it really helps to get the content when everyone else is. So having a running subscription to a show you like, then have the download automatically kick-in as soon as it becomes available would be the ideal setup for using your computer as a media center.
Getting this working right could make even tivo seem quaint...
True multicast could help, too. But seeing as cable companies cleverly bought the routers you use (unless you're in academia or the military or both), they're just NOT going to turn on multicast routing any time soon, unless more people are aware of the possibilities and start leaning on them HARD.
you would think BT was the only OSS p2p application out there
bandwidth is increasing everyday and you want to save [insert commercial company] money ? you think they will pass the savings on to the consumer ?
In the right hand corner: Hackers Embrace P2P
"I could wake up in the morning and find the latest recordings from my favorite band loaded into my portable MP3 player, and just pick it up and go."
I don't understand where they are coming from here. If I am going to pay to download music, which consists of relatively small files, I am not going to run a BT to help out an online music store.
When they start mentioning uses so far off the base of reality, the whole article starts to smell of BS. Especially since the slowest part of the MP3 experience tends to be copying music from the PC to the player.
Typically, I load new tracks on my ipod before leaving in the morning. I'll tag the stuff, then transfer it before I hop into the shower. As far as downloading goes, I can download a whole CD of music in ~10 minutes. The only way the article's method would be worth doing would be if you invested in huge libraries of online music purchases daily.
On that note: Please quit looking to solve problems that don't exist.
lets call a spade a spade
Sounds just like spyware.
I did not know about this. When I installed the software, I never gave my permission for it to upload stuff!
A million years ago (1998?) Wired published a whole edition on Push as the Next Big Thing. It was the first time I was really aware of them being totally wrong. Or perhaps just a bit ahead of their time.
While I think this is a neater solution, there is another product that does exactly the same thing, allow you to subscribe to channels and received pushed content via incentive compatible (you get faster speeds if you upload more) swarms.
It's called kast.
But does BitTorrent suck as much as Overnet does? Does everybody have the beginning of a file but nobody has the end?
Clarification: By "The .torrent file is distributed in the RSS file", I should have said "a URL to the .torrent file is distributed in the RSS file". See this example RSS+BitTorrent file to see what I mean.
What I believe is that the proposed trend of shifting upstream bandwidth expenditures to the client is a fundamentally inefficient strategy in the long term. For example, cable modems are ill-equipped to return as much as they take, and if a sizeable number of individuals actually attempted to do so the response time for everybody goes down the tubes and ultimately ISP rates get hiked or accounts pulled. I for one do not intend to get a T1 line simply because you do not feel like paying directly for the bandwidth you use on your favorite websites.
The way I figure it, with this bittorrent-RSS combination and a slight modification of torrent watching sites like animesuki we will essentially have a fansubbed anime online tivo at our disposal. Actually, you could have probably done that even without RSS, though it does simplify matters. The only limitations are our bandwidth and hard drives. Which actually are pretty limiting these days, especially with p2p being frequently capped.
Hell, you could modify an actual TiVo with broadband for exactly this sort of thing, and it needn't be limited solely to anime either. I'm sure it'll be popular with overseas watchers of American TV as well.
The international media and internet companies need to face facts and realize that Video On Demand is a reality and is already extremely popular - but that the shows people are demanding are not the ones the companies have been providing through their own limited, misfocused, and (most importantly) redundant services. Until we see simultaneous worldwide release of all media (including DVDs released simultaneously with the theatrical release) they will find themselves losing what should have been their easiest sales - those to impatiently eager fans.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
When the user is connected to a multiplayer server, the game acts like a throttled BT client for patches. It could even do a little speed test when connecting to the server to get a feel for the speed of the pipe, then subtract what the game should take, and throttle the BT activity to some percentage of that. Even a trickle adds up over the length of a typical on-line session, and for people with bigger pipes, it's a big win that doesn't affect the gamer at all.
Doug
That's quite amusing considering the amount of advertising on Slashdot that gets posted as ARTICLES. It's usually something shit too.
Realistically speaking, the biggest problem with Bittorrent is seeding. I think this is how bittorrent works:
.torrent file generated .torrent file is uploaded to a tracker .torrent from the tracker .torrent file, which causes the the bittorrent client asks the tracker for the machines/locations of the seeds and people downloading the file(s) pointed to by the .torrent
.torrent goes missing, the file is inaccessible. If the tracker goes away, the file is inaccessible.
* a file is seeded, and a
* that
* clients who want to download the file download the
* the user opens the
* the client downloads various chunks of the files from both the seeds and the other downloaders
The more people download a file, the better bittorrent is able to spread the bandwidth.
The downside is that if a file isn't seeded, it's no longer available. If a
Bittorrent's main problem right now, which is a client problem, is its upstream usage can easily swamp a home connection. That's just dumb client design.
Upload limiting works, but limits your download speed. The client develoeprs have to recognize that yes, sharing is nice and leeching is bad, but disrupting the users' connection is a Very Bad Thing.
Ill wait for the suprnova RSS service......
Don't you mean YHBT?
Well, since the reply post WAS informative, and anyone who hadn't heard of BitTorrent just got a nice quick write-up about what it does, it was a dumb troll in the first place.
HAND, AC. Or maybe FOAD is more appropriate, take your pick.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
It's a shame they're using RSS, as it's a good idea with a bad implementation. There are currently 9 different versions of RSS, and all of them incompatible with one another. It ought to be replaced with a better technology like Atom. However, this does look like an interesting project, nonetheless.
-- Rob
Y'a jamais des choses qu'on peut pas se débrouiller ; juste laisse-moi t'aider!
Just write a script to do it.
Think of BitTorrent as an updated version of ftp that utilizes the clients upload bandwidth as well as the servers download bandwidth. That's all it is. (Yes, clients become servers even before the download process is complete.)
If the author of BitTorrent could be sued the authors of ftp and apache could be sued as well.
I hope this helps, your misconception of how BT functions is fairly common. It's not the same type of p2p network as Kazaa at all.
bt.etree.org
dottorrent.org
musicfreaks.net
Wow, a piracy site complaining about losing ad revenue, and they threaten the RSS feds.
We need more sites hosting SuperNova RSS feeds.
Encryption. It should generate a unique key pair for each socket it opens.
Gives me hope that corporations actually think before they make IT decisions and actually consider an open standard/protocol important.
I've been staring at this RJ45 plug all morning and haven't been able to see any TV, just snow.
Try Efisto for sending big files.
Bingo! I built a tracker plugin for the php smarty base bblog system. I think the possibilities for this can be pretty damn cool. My .org is currently working on a media sharing platform for raw captured video for digital journalists. why restrict yourself to copying the crap from h(b)ollywood when you can hack it yourself on an imac? for info about the plugin (based on DEhacked)) and the super flexible bblog: http://bblog.com/viewtopic.php?t=392
you can use the bulit in rss of the blog to sync to your tracker...
If I take a knife and I cut someone up with it. Does that mean that somehow you are now going to be unable to go use the knife for something you want/need to?
Honestly, if the only thing on this planet that anyone used bittorrent for was "warez", *GASP* you could still set up torrents for legal files and have all your buddies download them.
If BT becomes illegal at some point, then we all are going to have a lot more to worry about then the fact that we can't get ahold of our warez.
./revolution
This actually isn't a troll... it's an attempt at British humor. (humour?)
This is what the well-known (well, in the UK) comic/rapper/(vj?) Ali G. (iirc) says about everything. In the US, he is mostly known as the annoying driver from the Madonna video for the song "Music".
The format is as such:
"$Thing. What's it all about? Is it good, or is it whack?"
OK, that's my cross-cultural contribution for the day.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
While it may be true most downloads are pr0n and mp3s there is plenty of legitamate use for BT in the OSS world...for a matter of fact it's necessary to have something like this because the corp sponserships are drying up left and right...its soon going to be primarily up to THE PEOPLE to support OSS...and if you can't code BT's a great way to share the cost of distribution!
BT is one person making their file downloadable but the downloaders all share the load rather than hammering the originator. It makes it more benifitial to be a creator. IT DOES NOT hide anybodies identity so they can download movies or MP3s...You still have to host the file and advertize it thru normal means!!!
What is the big fuss about BitTorrent? It's got the good parts from eDonkey, but has a centralised seed so it's more easily shut down.
... stay fixed, mostly.
People constantly go on about how your upload speed affects your download. This is mostly talk, however. Cap your upload and watch your download
I do this all the time.
Wow, haven't see a penis bird reference in a long time. Have we already reached the point of slashdot nostalgia?
The problem is the Trackers can't handle so many people downloading and you must get another torrent file to change tracker. So often now, I've seen trackers respond with bandwidth limit exceeded. Someone write a new version of bittorrent that can handle multiple trackers for redundancy please!
Homer: "Nuts & Gum, together at last..."
edit... preferences... Navigator... Helper Applications... New Type...
/home/dkr/bin/btlaunch
/home/dkr/bin/btlaunch script: /usr/bin/btdownloadcurses.py --max_uploads 4 --max_upload_rate 20 --responsefile "$*"
MIME Type: application/x-bittorrent
Description: torrent
Extension: torrent
Open it with:
my
#!/bin/sh
cd ~/dl
/usr/bin/btdownloadgui.py --max_uploads 4 --max_upload_rate 20 "$*"
#xterm -e
xterm with curses version was old way I did it, but newer tk gui app is nicer(although I did tweak the code a bit to make it less annoying)
The curses way had no confirmation, which is why I cd to my download dir first.
note that this method doesn't always work since some folks don't use the correct mime type for their torrent files.
How about a web browser with bittorent on top of it? this way, slashdot effect is a thing of the past
So what's the difference between this and the "push technologies" MS invented and failed? I personally would not like things downloaded without me know what is being downloaded. I prefer _real_ content on demand, as in I finding what I want and download those and only those.
.torrent files, that's a valid point. I have suggested to the BT mail list in support of a torrent-less hash linking protocol, but was pretty much turned down due to technical difficulties and lack of interest. But this is just a interface problem, and doesn't have to solved by using RSS. I see RSS more suited to delivering text news, which is what it was created for.
If you want something, you search for it (in the web domain at least). This is why I made the search engine in my sig.
As for an RSS interface so you don't have to micomanage all the little
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Generally trackers do not "host pirated material", or any content beyond the torrents themselves and related web-based statistics reporting, etc. The content is usually served from elsewhere.
It would be possible to use the same server to host both, but it probably doesn't happen often with "pirated material" because it would draw undue attention to someone who might be engaged in the act of copyright infringement.
[pet peeve]
Ships are not raided on the high-seas via sharing of copyrighted material, so why refer to copyright infringement as piracy?
Headline: BitTorrent Attacks Exxon Valdez! Huge Losses Incurred. Details at 11:00...
[/pet peeve]
Sadly multicast probably will never work as intended because there is nearly no end user connectivity. There are some ISPs which can provide multicast enabled connections but these are usually for business level connections out of the price range of average consumers.
Personally I really can't understand the reluctance to spread the availability of this. It would save many people LOTS of bandwidth. It just makes SENSE!
Maybe we'll get it when IPv6 is common. HA!
Have you ever lived out in the country? Tell me you don't need a car when the closest place to get any sort of food is >25 miles away.
Karnal
Here's a gentle introduction to the BT/RSS concept that I wrote in December:
(from http://scottraymond.net/archive/4745)
- RSS meets BitTorrent meets TiVo.
Steve Gillmor wrote about BitTorrent and RSS and how they could be combined to create a "disruptive revolution." He's half right. RSS and BT are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, but Gillmor's vision is upside down: we shouldn't use BitTorrent to carry RSS, we should use RSS to carry BitTorrent. Let me explain.
But first, some background.
RSS (RDF Site Summary) is a simple format for syndicating content on the web. These days, the most common application of RSS is subscribing to weblogs: you tell your computer to check an RSS file for changes every so often, and then it notifies you when there's something new to read. If you're like me and you read one metric shitload of news every day, this is a life-saver.
BitTorrent, the brainchild of Bram Cohen, is the current cool-kids' P2P program. It works sort of like Kazaa, but at a lower level. It doesn't handle searching for new files, it doesn't have a media player, it just concentrates on downloading big files efficiently.
Okay. Two solutions in search of a problem. Here's a problem:
- I have a weakness.
I am addicted to the show Alias. I watched the first couple episodes of season two as it aired, and I was hooked. In my honest moments, I'll admit that the show's appeal is mostly due to the callipygian Jennifer Garner. It's a weakness; we deal.
But it gets worse. I go out on Sunday nights, when Alias airs, and I don't want to give that up. That's why God created the VCR, I know, but to compound the problem, I don't have TV. I don't want to have TV, because I love the feeling of superiority that I get by not having it.
This system is at tension, it has no rest, its forces are unbalanced, it wants to be resolved.
A partial answer.
The internet, it turns out, is great at resolving different kinds of tensions, and this is one of them. After a few weeks of missed episodes, I realized that with a little patience, a P2P program like Kazaa was able to fetch back-episodes with aplomb. Each file is around 450 megs, fairly high-quality video, with commercials cut out. I start a few episodes downloading, and by the next evening, they're ready to watch, whenever I have the time.
After a few weeks of enjoying this, a new tension emerged: I had caught up with all of the old episodes, and I had to wait a week for each new one. The problem is that the Kazaa protocol isn't especially well-tuned for getting brand new files: first someone has to record the show as it airs, cut out the commercials, and compress it to a reasonable size, then seed it on the network. Then, it has to slowly propagate to its peers, each transfer taking hours. It might take three days before it's available on enough peers that I'm able to even find it, let alone download it.
BitTorrent to the rescue.
The solution is BitTorrent. BitTorrent operates on similar principles to Kazaa, but it's tuned differently: it excels at downloading files that are new or currently in high demand. It breaks large files into many small chunks, and coordinates their assemblage, so that users can tap into a swarm and distribute the load evenly. At the same time that you're downloading a chunk, another user is downloading an earlier chunk from you -- no one server is overwhelmed, and the more popular a file, the higher its availability is. It's perfect for large files that are most interesting when they're fresh -- in other words, it's perfect for TV shows.
In many cases, I have been able to use BitTorrent to completely download a new TV show mere hours after the show airs. Like a TiVo user, I'm no longer bound to a specific time to watch my shows. I'm free to go out on Sunday night and still watch my show while it's brand new. TV is now asynchronous.
- Life is good.
But it could be bet