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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."
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.
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.
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.
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???
Sorry if I seem like I'm trolling but these questions will be asked at some point
-Phil
Shoot questions, first ask later...
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?
Hey, quit bitching and open your mind a little bit.
Let's say your favorite band just went on tour and as part of a promotion they decided to post a few songs and videos "bootlegged" from each concert.
Now, it might get kinda anoying to load up their page every couple of days and click on each link to download the media. However, they could post an RSS feed with BitTorrent links that you subscribe to just once. Everytime a new bootleg goes online, the RSS feed gets updated, and the content gets downloaded to your computer automatically.
Where would we be if everytime the Internet was mentioned 50 years ago, people ranted and raved about how the postal service already solved the problem of distributing content?
This is seriously cool stuff, you are just too closed minded to realise it.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I think that ideally, the most a user should see is bt://sitename.domain/file.zip, or something similar. The OS/browser should be able to handle that sort of protocol, and send it to the right application or use an integrated bit torrent client to get the file.
Correct me if I'm really wrong on this, or if it already exists. This would also be a welcome addition to Mozilla, I think.
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