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BitTorrent Beats Kazaa In Traffic Numbers
prostoalex writes "CacheLogic attempted to measure the peer-to-peer network traffic by installing their network monitoring tools in data centers of large ISPs. The results are in, and Bram Cohen's BitTorrent overtook Kazaa's FastTrack network. BitTorrent traffic amounted to 53% of all peer-to-peer traffic, according to CacheLogic. It's worth noting, though, that Kazaa traffic is highly seasonal, as a lot of high-schoolers and college students are simply on vacation this time of year."
Well that's by no means a good thing.
Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle
Funny, I used to work for a porn site back in the bubble. Same thing, our numbers plummeted in the summer due to college students being off.
Heh About Damn Time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I file trading is peer-to-peer (decentralized) how can some central "authority" know what's going on?
...if someone could plot legit traffic against "illegal" traffic. My guess is that BitTorrent would account for a much higher percentage of legitimate file traffic as pretty much anyone who has a large file (e.g. Linux Distros) uses BitTorrent to distribute it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
We all know copyright infringement is a full time job. When I was a kid, we didn't have high speed internet... heck, we didn't even have any peer to peer programs. We had a BBS and Zmodem (or worse!) and we traded what we could! And we we liked it! 0 day all the way.
... all traffic on the Internet is peer-to-peer.
Theres just some porn I just can't find on BT that I can on eDonkey or Kazaa.
I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction. There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
"only" 8,800,000 GB on kazaa, I think the DC network is catching up on them too...
1st and 2nd place announced in the Who Really Cares? Contest
These results are a bit misleading, simply because how BitTorrent will d/l from multiple sources. The causes a lot of traffic for a smaller amount of files. It is still pretty sweet to see the 'Torrent take off, though, even if it isn't as big as this implies.
Doesn't the very fact that it's seasonal make BitTorrent a better option, since more files will be available more often? And BitTorrent is an open solution, so there's more development of the clients going on, rather than the closed KaZaa, who's development stopped at Lite, as far as I'm concerened.
Call me crazy, but BitTorrent seems to have been more widely accepted than other P2P technologies. The programmer of BitTorrent was hired by Valve recently and sites like FileRush are pretty commonly visited by the masses.
....keep on screwing us by pointing the man in the direction of the next big thing. If you guys would keep your mouths shut, we could have the man chasing after Kazaa for years to come....just like he's still bitching about Doom as the game those kids play that cause 'em to go postal (no pun intended).
I vote for this "Anonymous Coward" guy. He always gets on my nerves! ;~)
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
"It's worth noting, though, that Kazaa traffic is highly seasonal, as a lot of high-schoolers and college students are simply on vacation this time of year."
And BitTorrent traffic isn't seasonal?
Well? Does this mean that more people are using BitTorrent, or that BitTorrent traffic is simply higher? The second wouldn't necessarily mean popularity, as files on BitTorrent are usually larger, and so one BitTorrent user will count for a hell of a lot more traffic than a KaZaA user.
No surprises here, bit torrent is far supperior to Kazaa in almost every way.
The only thing that needs to be improved with bit torrent is a merger of all the small tracker sites into one big site where you can hook on to any torrent out there. Suprnova.org is getting there but still, more momentum needs to be developed.
That being said, the best thing about the bit torrent technology is that it's almost impossible for the RIAA to control it. The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Shouldn't it work against both Kazaa and BT similarly? If kids are on vacation, they download less as a whole, so the decrease should be similar for both programs by my reckoning. Would a statistics scholar please set me straight?
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
This reminded me that I should... damn, Suprnova is down again!
Seeing as Bittorrent forces your download rate to be tied to your upload rate.
Also, I think Bittorrent is far more suitable for large files, such as large ISOs, films & games, so I would of thought most people would use Bittorrent for large files, whereas Kazaa is probably still used more generally, just for smaller files, such as individual music tracks and the like.
Not really surprising.
...that BitTorrent was designed for using as much capacity as possible to get the file(s) to everybody simultaneously, whereas Kazaa has the "fetch from multiple sources" as a bonus feature.
Does Kazaa also upload sections of a file that hasn't totally downloaded yet? If not, then you can account for approximately half of the traffic right there.
Also, Torrents are announced, creating a traffic rush, whereas there isn't really a notification mechanism (last time I checked) for Kazaa that would cause a similar rush.
Most annoying slashdot poster?
Saeed al-Sahaf
Kenja
NineNine
nanogator
You forgot: Anonymous Coward, I vote for that one!
Does this also mean that there has been some kind of demographic shift too, along with the 'generational shift' from movies to music?
Also is this some kind of silent protest against gator style spyware embedded in Kazaa?
Or as RIAA tactics target one section of users using a particular P2P network (sic), they shift alleigances to another?
CNET article is nice but typically lacking on details...
shooting is not too good for my enemies
While the MPAA and RIAA will want to trumpet this as evidence of illegla trading, let's not forget that more and more users are relying upon it for legitimate purposes. I downloaded all of the Slackware discs using bittorrent this time.
Eh, +Interesting?
:-P
*gets mental image of mod thinking "Oooh! Ahaaa! I see..."
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
MPAA monitors bittorent traffic from sites such as suprnova.org. They constantly send out letters to ISPs that explains which movie was donwloaded, and how the ISP should proceed with the client. So, downloading several movies from suprnova.org is not a good idea, because MPAA sees what everyone downloads. BitTorrent is in no way an anonymous download.
there is some revelation about kids being out of school during summer months...
seasonal...oh...I guess that's just seasonal for those who live NORTH of the equator eh?
Ignorance is maintaining it's blissfulness!
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
One of the problems with .torrents is diversity. I use suprnova.org to get my .torrents.
Does anyone else know of a good database of torrents? RSS Feeds? Websites?
*gets mental image of mod thinking "Oooh! Aaah! Fhqwhgads!!"
If CacheLogic, then why not the RIAA?
If monitoring, then why not outright blocking?
Is that a slope, or a Slip-and-Slide[tm], ahead of me?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Shhh!!
keep it on the dl
I would think that because most files shared with Bittorrent are huge, where, most things on Kazaa aren't that big, or if they are big, it takes way too long to download so people give up. Still, with all the multi-GB files on Bittorrent, of course it's going to generate more traffic.
And do what to "BitTorrent," exactly? The beauty of bittorrent is that there is no company _making money_ off of that software. If you are given a link to a BitTorrent file, you download the end product from a multitude of people, without having your username pop up on screen, a list of your other files, etc. Even KazaaLite K++ still has links (and options) to make you visible to the whole world. Unlike the distributors of Kazaa, there's no entity to sue if someone is BitTorrenting files.
SMTP is inherently a peer-to-peer protocol (MTAs act as either clients or servers in mail transactions) -- being as common as it is, shouldn't SMTP account for the majority of peer to peer traffic on the Internet?
If you don't think that SMTP is P2P, why is that? Because there's no content theft (FUD) going on?
Tried the download page link on the FAQ page? It's getting raped by a bunch of college kids who saw the "BT > Kazaa" headline and are now using BT to feed their MP3 jones.
People, people, people... The RIAA and MPAA look to slashdot to find out which file sharing systems to target next.
I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction. There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.
Which is precisely why BT stands to legitimize open-structure p2p networks forever.
Napster really had no legitimate use. I mean, did you *ever* download a song from Napster that wasn't a bootleg? Neither did anybody else.
Kazaa also has very limited legitimate use. Other than renaming an encrypted tar file "Wild Donkeys do hot chicks.mpg" and using it as a backup vehicle, its use as a bona-fide legal distribution channel is pretty limited.
However, BT is different. There are plenty of BT users distributing bootleg movies, songs, and pr0n, but there are also plenty of sites using it to distribute legitimate demos, patches, ISO images, and other large files.
To think that BT allows somebody on a T1 to serve near an OC3 worth of bandwidth by distributing the load is just incredible. I don't think the industry would be willing to give up that advantage without a fight.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
New installations of spyware have dropped by 53%.
"We just don't know what is going on" said the CEO of Claria.
Who needs P2P software when people leave movies unprotected on their websites all the time? Click on any website on this google search, see what movies they have, and leech em.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
I've never seen direct connect mentioned on any of these studies or warnings. Even when my school, RIT, got warned and passed the warnings on to the students, they only complained about Kazaa and not direct connect, despite the fact that it is much larger on campus. Is there some big thing about Kazaa that I'm missing? No matter how rare the item is that I'm looking for, I'm sure to find several people that have it. I've never seen a reason to use anything else (yet).
That's like saying the majority of Kazaa's traffic just might be legit.
Just because some Linux distros use it doesn't mean anything. I guarantee there is a lot more illegimate traffic going on than legit Linux distro traffic. Linux distros are not THAT widespread. There are a hell of a lot more people pirating music and movies than sharing the latest Slackware. Just saying.
BitTorrent was used more than eDonkey. And in a related story, Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" is heard more than Queen's "Under Pressure".
Coincidence? People fooled by hype? You decide!
I downloaded all of my Fedora Core 2 ISOs with Bittorrent.
;)
Like a good lad, I kept my client open for a further 12 hours to help the torrent reach more users.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
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.
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)
Pardon my BitTorrent bias. I moderate the bittorrent_help mailing list, so I have more exposure to that.
All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.
I got a cease and desist letter from my ISP about two months ago seeding a CD. I've been running PeerGuardian since then. I'm amazed to see how many peers try to connect from banned IP addresses.
I was not touched there by an angel.
Kazaa has atleast some of these weaknesses ,
,let's c..
1.Operating Cost:::Annoying ads , i dont understand how CMEsys.exe constantly runs even if Altnet and kazaa are shut down.Basically kazaa gives us files at the cost of Eating selfishly some RAM and Consuming RAM to operate.Besides , most of the pain comes when we by mistake click an ad which screws up entire operating experience.
2.Service Quality:::Search capacity is patheticallly limited in free versions.Yu dont observe more than 3 sub searches now a days.So I would think Kazaa's service quality has degraded.
3.Security Risk:::And i hear that someone is spying to check illegal file sharing.So it comes with a security risk too.
4.Kazaa runs only on WIndows..How selfish..Im sure it would get big popularity if used in linux..
Well
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
They do go after FTP servers. So does the MPAA. I know, I got a letter from them. They log in, grab a directory listing of things they believe are copyrighted and send the ISP a letter. Whole process probably takes 5 minutes. And for the record, their logging into sites listed on Oth.net. I'm sure their are others but I know Oth is being spyed on for sure.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
empornium.us
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
PDTP usage surpasses BitTorrent...
Where else do you think they'd find their answers? Usenet??
Breakfast served all day!
I only get about 5 to 6 kBps with Star Downloader. Granted that is twice what I get with either the default IE or the default Mozilla downloader. But still, with a 50 kBps connection, I feel cheated...
Mathematics is not a crime.
I have never used Bit Torrent. How do I use it? Is it like other P2P apps out there, or no? What is a good client (windows and linux) that I can use?
Am I the only individual here on Slashdot that isn't using a P2P client on a regular basis????????
I've never been unable to get a demo I wanted from a legitimate source.
I don't download pirate videos or music.
I've d/l linux distros direct or at distro sites with no problem.
So, in a short answer, why is using a P2P client sooo much better? From the consumer side that is?
I've read the info at the Bittorrent site.
And just to ask my fellow Sd folks...how safe is it?
Thanks and be well!
And this article is bound to switch people from kazaa to bittorrent who already hadn't done so (like me :) ). Considering half the world visits slashdot regularly so bittorrent will leave kazaa way way behind as a result of this article.
"The only thing that needs to be improved with bit torrent is a merger of all the small tracker sites into one big site"
1 sentence later
"the best thing about the bit torrent technology is that it's almost impossible for the RIAA to control it."
(smacks forehead)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because I'd bet over half the bandwidth on kazaa is people trying to re-download something. As opposed to bittorrent, where the quality of files is almost guaranteed.
"+1, Funny" is karma-neutral, so some moderators hand out others in lieu.
And they take a hit if I metamod them.
I'm a typical college student. I come from a middle class home, a middle class home with broadband. My school has filtered p2p file sharing. I did NOT run a single p2p program last semester (I swear). I'm back home with broadband now. Do the math.
While I am probably in the minority, keep your eye on this as more schools bend towards the will of the people giving them funding.
Hah! I always liked that line from LotR, but out of context it is absolutely hilarious.
down with software patents! boycott bearshare
...one by one, it is getting them all at once.
Swarming is fairly trivial - but to do proper swarming, you need one large network. Not hubs like e.g. Direct Connect. To directly connect hosts for swarming go directly against anonymity.
Privacy and anonymity is difficult. In many cases it goes directly against speed and searching. In addition, it requires great care in the entire network design to not reveal sources and consumers of information.
Searching is always difficult in a decentralized or self-organizing network. There is little sense of "direction", as in "where should I go to find results for this". Fumbling in blindness has little value.
Organizing a large net with relatively few connections between hosts is, and will be inefficient. Peers come and go, there is no order, no authority, at least not that can be considered trusted.
Browser hooks again go towards anonymity. A good anonymous system should be self-contained, providing the necessary ways to find the information itself.
Open or closed source doesn't say anything about the features of the network. And I would be very careful to speak of "ought to" as in "you OSS developers should build this software for me" as if they were yours to command.
If you can create a network design, that even in theory can provide ALL of these properties to be true at the same time, it is brilliant. You draw examples but you don't see that they have made choices - either/or. If you can find a way we can eat our cake and have it too, by all means tell us.
BitTorrent is no different here, it has made its choices. In order to achieve all these properties, it would have to change so radically it would no longer be BT as you know it. So would all the other networks you mention. But into what, well that's what we'd all like to know, isn't it...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I suspect (though I can't provide hard numbers to prove it) that the majority of the legitimate traffic on bittorrent is concerts and recordings by artists that allow taping and trading. Not just the domain of classic "hippie" bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish any more, this now includes bands as diverse as the Butthole Surfers, Charlie Hunter, They Might Be Giants and the Funky Meters (the "other" Neville Brother's band).
Because BitTorrent provides some reward for those with fast upstream connections, it encourages consumers to demand better upstream service -- currently, consumer broadband providers generally provide awfully poor upstream connections.
May we never see th
http://bt.etree.org
:-)
my cable company doesnt like me (at the average transfer of 3gb up and down daily), but i'm not doing anything illegal.
Page
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Most annoying slashdot poster?
Saeed al-Sahaf
Can I write myself in?Kenja
NineNine
nanogator
Karma: Contrapositive
All the MPAA would have to do is download a .torrent file themselves and take a look at all the IP addresses of the people in the swarm. Azareus can show you who is in the swarm, who is a 'seeder' and who has what pieces of each torrent. A MPAA-made (or contracted or whatever) custom application could keep track of who gets all of the pieces and have a nice list of the people who downloaded the whole file.
Source code for several clients can be found online, so a swarm monitoring app like this should be fairly easy to make just by changing one of them a bit.
It is a protocol? Do you need any special software?
I noticed it has its own source forge page, it is open specifications and open source software?
A P2P protocol would be a good thing, something similar is I2P is an anonymous P2P protocol.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
-it has spyware
-its makers have tried their best to turn the gnutella network into a private playground
-apparently they are spammers as well
All part of life's rich pageant, innit?
Not only are OSS people all gun-ho about it, but file hosting places (3dgamers.com comes to mind) are liking it too. I mean they post the New Hot Demo(tm) and get slammed with requests. Well you got three options:
1) Make people wait in line (which they hate).
2) Have ass-slow transfers (which people also hate).
3) Use BT so people help each other and a 2x increase in people equals a very small slowdown in overall transfer rate.
It really just makes sense as a protocol. You go to download something, the server contributes as much as it can, and clients pick up as much extra slack as they can. Only for the file you download, while you leave it on, so no "eating up the connection all the time" problems. If onyl one person downloads, well no net gain or loss for client or server. However with each additonal person downloading, rather than the server having to share it's bandwidth more and more, the clients help each other and the thransfer rate stays much more constant.
Hence why it has so much legit appeal. I really hope that the major browser makers start including BT in their browsers. They do that, and if it gets modified to run on the webserver directly, I imagine it could become the predominant file transfer protocol for mass distribution.
3Dgamers.com. Go click on a download, any of their demos will do. Look at the list: They pimp BT as the #1 method. Works great too. All the people hungry for the demo all help eachother out, and take the strain off of 3Dgamers.
There's a lot of large content out there, that is legal to get, and lots of people that want it. There is thus a reason to want to use BT to distribute it.
Like when slack 10.0 comes out, or more realistically, spiderman 2? ;)
I've gotta say, I work network security for an educational institution and we are/have been seeing PLENTY of bittorrent traffic. There's no doubt in my mind lots of college kids know about it by now.
bt.etree.org
Go there and sort the tracker list by 'served'. Look at all of the torrents starting in June. There are over a dozen filesets there, many over 1GB, that have been served 1000 or more times. Heck, just look at the front page! This is one VERY active tracker site. And it's all legal lossless audio too.
That usually acts as if there is more traffic going on then bittorrent and kazaa together, yet there is 100 times less to find. ;-)
Ah well...at least there, it's encrypted.
...CacheLogic seem to want to get their name in the headlines, so they run some basic stats about fading Kazaa vs. shiny new Bittorrent
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Sorry to interrupt (and sorry to pick on you), but this is confusing (or annoying at best).
"all BitTorrent packets were not encrypted nor decentralized"
Here's the rule:
Either, or.
Neither, nor.
Otherwise, while we can be quite certain that all BitTorrent packets were not encrypted, one can be left wondering if they were "not nor" decentralized, which would mean "not not or", which would mean that they actually were decentralized.
In other words "all BitTorrent packets were neither encrypted nor decentralized" is what I think you meant to say.
Alright, I'm done. You guys can now mod this all the way to negative infinity.
P.S.: English isn't even my first language.
How is it anonymous? You mean it uses something other than TCP/IP to share files? Otherwise surely each peer has an IP address?
Unless it uses the same idea as WinMX which basically encrypts the payload with the Bizarre assumption that the **AA isn't also going to download a copy of the client?
There's some really flawed logic out there sometimes....
Anything that relies on many people gaining easy access to many other clients to share, cannot have good security. This would imply that everyone that you share files with has had their identity confirmed as being non RIAA and that copies of the encryption/decryption software (P2P Client) are not freely downloadable.
From first principles, many people need Crypto 101 urgently! Security cannot be gained by assuming the only way the RIAA is gonna see what your sharing is by dumping packets and trying to decrypt them.... get real!
Oh and all those that think that security through obscurity is gained by being "off the radar" are in for a shock too.
Ewe are killing me with shear suspense
"Keep quiet and don't mention it...itll be the only network left before too long i fear."
Don't fear. FIGHT!
Fight against these bastardized laws and bastard corporate entities that don't see or respect you as a human being.
And since MONEY is the only language they understand, don't give any money to any cause that works against you, or that doesn't respect your liberties.
1f vv3 @l1 1337-5pE4| m47b3 +|-|3y vv0n'+ b3 4b1e 2 c|1pH3|2 0u|2 p0s+5!!!
What the crap did I just type?!?
Note that several hundred internet2 universities are now allowed to connect to internet2 direct connect hub. Check out i2hub for blazing fast college filesharing!
Netcraft confirms it!
PeerGuardian anyone?
www.methlabs.org/methlabs.htm
lightweight IP blocker to stop rogue connections.
like the MPAA, RIAA and advertisments.