Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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?
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."
You're forgetting to mention a point you practically just pointed out. How large do you think illegal game and movie rips are? About the size of Linux distros. Therefore, I don't think the traffic margin would be more sizeable with legit traffic ratings because a heck of a lot of people still use mirrors to get Linux distros, videos, etc.
The only difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits.
Haha, I don't think so. You as a slashdotter must be aware of the huge number of bittorent sites out there...
Of course. But I am also aware that many of them contain legal files as well. Examples of legal files include:
Linux Distros
FreeBSD Distros
Independent Movies (e.g. The recent Star Trek "reimagining")
Public Domain or Free Books (it's becoming especially popular to give away very old technical books)
Shareware Programs
BitTorrent Clients (I kind of get a kick out of this myself)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"CacheLogic attempted to measure the peer-to-peer network traffic by installing their network monitoring tools in data centers of large ISPs.".
No matter how decentralized a peer to peer network is, everyone still has to go through their ISP, and the bigger ISPs would cover a good percentage of all P2P users.
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.
Oops, small typo. Should read getting off.
No, that's why their traffic jumps during the winter. He was referring to why it drops in the summer.
I realize that BT is used to distribute a lot of questionable, if not infringing content but the same is true for cars. My point is, there are very few, if any, third parties (ie. non-users) that use the FastTrack network to distribute their products. There are, however, quite a few that seem to use the BT protocol.
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
It doesn't matter in this case. The MPAA has no way to monitor your HTTP traffic with suprnova, only the BitTorrent traffic generated when you open the torrent and download the content. You are in the clear. If they did have evidence of you downloading torrents, I'd guess that it would be of similar legality to hosting the torrents in the first place. Have there been any efforts or court cases trying to take down torrent sites like Suprnova?
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.
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.
(or alternatively, you could look at the Python source code which is very interesting for all the lazy CS students on holiday like me ;)
That kind of negates the idea of people not downloading over the summer, you'd need to download the source code in order to look at it.
...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