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."

Comments

Seasonal Traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Seasonal Traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oops, small typo. Should read getting off.

Re:Seasonal Traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

So the numbers went back up in the fall due to all the college students beating off?

I'm sure they held firm, even rose slightly.

Re:Seasonal Traffic

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yeh, as a former IEG guy, I remember that. Ah, those where the days! State-of-the-art equipment, an office in a glass tower just off Pike Place Market, gettin paid $$ to look at porn...

Re:Seasonal Traffic

[Ayaress]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How can they accurately measure it?

[hey]

I file trading is peer-to-peer (decentralized) how can some central "authority" know what's going on?

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[Mondongo]

I remember on a NYT interview that Bram Cohen said that all BitTorrent packets were not encrypted nor decentralized. All machines must connect to the tracker in order to download, so there ARE ways to measure it.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[athakur999]

They installed their monitoring system at the ISPs, so they can just analyze packets going into and out of the ISP's network. Kazaa packets and BitTorrent packets will look different and be destined for different ports, so it wouldn't be too difficult for the software to tell the difference.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[nkh]

Everything is explained in the documentation if you ever need to write your own client (or alternatively, you could look at the Python source code which is very interesting for all the lazy CS students on holiday like me ;)

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[okmnji]

If you can't RTFA, at least RTF(Summary).

"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.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[vDave420]

I file trading is peer-to-peer (decentralized) how can some central "authority" know what's going on?

Glad you asked.

The company I work for, FreePeers Inc, faced this same problem about 2 years ago.

At that time, I invented a statistics gathering scheme that took full advantage of the decentralized nature of p2p networks.

Previously, the client/server scheme was superimposed upon networks (see Limewire's network crawler, for instance, which contacts every node it can to count them).

My invention takes advantage of the nature of the network itself as a routing/aggregation tool to gather statistics for me,and let the results "ebb" thier way to our collector.

See the public results here.

Interesting to note is that we are running our aggregator node on a cable modem, and yet still get "round trip times" for measuring stats on the whole network of 5 minutes. This could even be reduced to about 2 minutes for our current network size.

In any case, the problem you describe (central counting of decentralized p2p info, such as network count or bytes transferred in a given time) is solved, and our company is awaiting a patent on it.

It does work well. We are running the aggregator on a 256Kbps cable modem (as I said above) but the BW usage is so rediculously low that it could be run on a dialup 56k modem, if only we had any in our office! With it we can accurately collect lots of good statistics about our network, and update it every 5 mins.

Each of those graphs in the linked to page is clickable, and will show more details.

-dave-

Use BearShare for all your p2p needs.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[jarich]

Use BearShare for all your p2p needs.

Doesn't bearshare still have spyware embedded?

From a quick google search

http://www.oit.duke.edu/ats/support/spyware/bearsh are.html

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[DeeRuss]

If their conversion rates are anything to go by, then they obviously can't measure. 1 petabyte = 1 048 576 gigabytes. Not the 10 million the article cited. Also, call me crazy, but wouldn't bit torrent sharing also drop when students are on Vacation? Maybe by the exact same percentage?

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[rctay]

Your ISP can identify the hash marks. Several Comcast subscribers have been put on notice for downloading movies and Adobe files. They were told to destroy the downloaded files and that the legal copyright owners had been notified. I don't have the link but google the particulars.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of that is great Dave, but Bearshare has spyware in it and it doesn't seem to stay up for me for more than a few days at a time. Why do you expend so much effort only to wrap it in such a crap program?

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[Cramer]

The tracker can be run on any port. Likewise, the clients can (and do) use any port. Many (and I mean a lot) of ISPs around the world rate limit BT traffic on the "well known ports". The only reliable way to get accurate numbers on bittorrent use is to decode the traffic -- peek at the actual content of each packet look for the BT protocol.

Kazaa works much the same way.

(Without the actual .torrent, it's a little difficult to identify what's being traded without piecing together all the data.)

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[Toresica]

(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.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[Captain Splendid]

Hardly qualifies as spyware, IMO. Save and Weathercast IIRC. Both easily disabled with firewall and a quick trip to the add/remove CP in Windows (although repeat when upgrading).

Not to mention they're pretty upfront about it. Guy's gotta make a few bucks somehow, and Bearshare has been rock solid (thanks Dave). Wouldn't use anything else for general P2P.

Re:How can they accurately measure it?

[jarich]

I'm not an expert on BearShare but the link I listed (http://www.oit.duke.edu/ats/support/spyware/bears hare.html ) specifically talks about ad toolbars that track every web site you visit, New.net (filtering all of your DNS requests thru their servers) and a couple of pop up add trackers.

Has he removed this obvious spyware in favor of a less intrusive money making model?

It would be interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

...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.

Re:It would be interesting...

[athakur999]

It's also worth noting that most people use BitTorrent for larger files like ISOs. So even though the traffic in bytes in higher, I'm willing to byte when it comes to "number of files transferred", Kazaa still has the lead.

Re:It would be interesting...

[grubber33]

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.

Re:It would be interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

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)

Re:It would be interesting...

[vidnet]

My guess is that BitTorrent would account for a much higher percentage of legitimate file traffic

Yes, BitTorrent is probably used for a hundred times more legitimate traffic. 0.1% as opposed to 0.001%.

But seriously... I can't remember when I last downloaded a distro on cds. Will we see netinstalls using bittorrent soon?

Re:It would be interesting...

[igrp]

Very true. Remeber this /. story about Blizzard using BT to distribute their demos?

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.

Re:It would be interesting...

[moonbender]

Well, I agree with your result - that the vast majority of bytes transferred using BT have the illegal bit set - but not with your means of getting there: looking at SuprNova is bound to result in a vast majority of the illegal stuff because, well, that's kind of what SuprNova is for. I mean, it's a (semi-) open tracker, sure, but I don't think a lot of people go to SuprNova for their legit torrents.

Sites who do legit torrents usually have their own trackers, since setting up a tracker isn't a very large effort if you already have a site of your own and easily worth the control and overview it gets you. And on the other hand, individuals who do not have a site to spread torrents with rarely do legit torrents.

Of course this is all backed up by no evidence at all. :)

While I'm at it, there are several numbers that would be interesting to look at: The relative usage of the various P2P protocols - this is what TFA talks about. This is something you can probably determine fairly well by only looking at the port ranges involved. The percentage of legal traffic compared to the illegal traffic - ie what we've just been talking about. This is extremely difficult and most likely impossible to find out at the backbone level.
What I'm interested in is the percentage of the total bandwidth P2P makes up these days. Imagine if something like a third of the total ISP bandwidth is consumed by P2P file sharing - then consider that nearly all of it is illegal. At that point the currently practiced stance on copyright violation is just shown to be absurd: either DO something against it, enforce the laws you already have instead of inventing moronic new ones, or come to terms with a reality that probably won't go away any time soon.

Re:It would be interesting...

[UserGoogol]

Ummm... isn't that business entirely based around screwing artists?

Kids are such slackers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well shit.

[MikeXpop]

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.

Re:Well shit.

[ackthpt]

I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction.

You should know by now that they certainly will, if they could show that ftp was ever used for music piracy they'd go after ftp servers, too. You're concerned that cow actually cares where it takes a dump?

Re:Well shit.

[the_mad_poster]

Put up a freenet node and keep it running if you want to share things without having to worry about idiots on the network ruining it for you.

That said, I've never gotten freenet to work quite right and just recently removed it again in frustration.

Re:Well shit.

[Tremyl]

They're not the RIAA, but the MPAA does definately look at Bit Torerent. To be blunt, using BT for anything the MPAA has a copyright on while a college network is fairly dangerous. The MPAA seems to run robots which, as best I can tell, find BT servers and check the owner of the network. If it happens to be a school, they generate a nastygram and send it to the computer department, with not so pleasant consequences. This happened to me a few weeks ago, where I was getting a few episodes of Firefly (and uploading at a whooping kB/s, too!)

Re:Well shit.

[bluekanoodle]

I'd kind of like to see them try. Bittorrent has plenty of "established" Legal uses and is being used by companies (Mandrakesoft, redhat, etc) to distribute their product.

Kazaa was designed and marketed from the get go as a way to share music and software among users. I don't recall anybody ever using it for their product distribution.

It's much easier to argue that a system has legal uses if you can provide concrete examples.

It seems to me that napster's, kazaa's, etc biggest hurdle was not arguing that the product COULD be used for legitimate uses but giving concrete evidence that it WAS being used for legitimate file distribution.

Re:Well shit.

[cerberusti]

The MPAA already does, we got a letter as a result of a bittorrent download about two months ago.

Seasonal Traffic Results

[SeinJunkie]

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.

There's a certain legitimacy with BitTorrent

[PIPBoy3000]

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.

Great, Slashdot....

[eril]

....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'd assume BitTorrent is seasonal Too

[yotaku]

"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?

Bit Torent

[trotski]

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.

Re:Bit Torent

[Peeet]

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.

That being said, wouldn't centralization (sp?) or merger of trackers create the one problem that other P2Ps have had? One target to attack? I think it's fine that BT is harder to find and nail down. That will help keep it as content-rich and un-**AA-able as possible.

Re:Bit Torent

[LordLucless]

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.

No, that doesn't fit with BitTorrents' (or rather, its creator's) stated aims. BitTorrent was not designed to replace P2P networks, but rather to allow the efficient downloading of a single file. BitTorrent is not designed to be hooked together into a massive network, it's designed to have an isolated little network for each file being downloaded.

IMO, the most important thing that needs to be done with BitTorrent, is moving the tracker out of the centre of a swarm. At the moment, each client downloads a metadata file from a trusted source, connects to a tracker to find peers, and then downloads data from the peers. If it wants to know about more peers, it re-queries the tracker. This gives any torrent 2 central points of failure: 1) the site distributing the metadata, 2) the tracker. Since metadata files are so small (and will become smaller with some modifications being worked on now - basically using a tree structure instead of a list to store hashes) finding multiple ways of hosting a metadata file isn't hard. A metadata file is basically a URL, with the addition of hashes to ensure data integrity.

Simple modifications have already been suggested that would allow a client to query peers for other peers, which would take some of the burden off the trackers. The advantage is more de-centralization of the tracker. The disadvantage is it's easier to poison a swarm with false peer information. Other modifications have been suggested which would allow a torrent to specificy multiple trackers, so if one went down, clients could query the second. The advantage here is redundancy, the disadvantage is that it could split the swarm, which benefits from being one large swarm more than many small ones. But nobody's yet come up with a way to fully decentralize the tracker, without losing its benefits.

The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.

This is even easier with BT than with Kazaa. BitTorrent, as mentioned above, has two central points of failure. Either could be taken down by legal means, just like napster. Moreover, BitTorrent was mostly designed for the distribution of large, legal files. Bram has already said he considers downloading illegal files over BitTorrent stupid, as it is trivial to see who is downloading what. It wasn't designed with anonymity in mind.

would be nice to see some detailed stats

[harlemjoe]

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...

Not all bittorent is warez

[mordors9]

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.

MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[unisol5]

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.

Re:MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it actually illegal to have a torrent on your system and not the infringing material? I downloaded several torrents from supranova.org and most of the time I never bother to download the content itself.

Re:MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[joshv]

There is no "bittorrent" traffic from suprnova.org. If you haven't noticed, people don't even download the torrents from suprnova.org. Every request for suprnova.org is round robin'd to volunteer servers. Each time you hit the site you get a different server.

When you click on a link to download a torrent you download the .torrent from yet another server.

Even if the MPAA monitored the .torrent download, this is not legal proof that the downloader of the torrent actually downloaded the file the .torrent points to.

-josh

Re:MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

I can confirm this...

Anti-Piracy Operations
PHONE: (818) 728 - 8127
Email: MPAA@copyright.org <mailto:MPAA@copyright.org>

Via Fax/Email

RE: Unauthorized Use of Copyrighted Motion Pictures
Reference#: [Withheld] (M)
IP Address: [Withheld]
Date of Infringement: [Withheld]

The title(s) offered included:
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT

Specifically, we have identified the following material as infringing:

Infringement Detail:
Infringing Work: WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT
Filepath: Who Framed Roger Rabbit-avi(1).torrent/
Filename: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.avi
First Found: [Withheld]
Last Found: [Withheld]
Filesize: 748,644k
IP Address: [Withheld]
IP Port: 6885
Network: BTPeers
Protocol: BitTorrent

Please contact us at the above listed address or by replying to this email should you have any questions. Kindly include the above noted Reference # in the subject line of all email correspondence.

We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is requested.

Respectfully,
Motion Picture Association of America

There was more to the email, specifically steps we need to take and such, but it just made it way to long and boring.

Re:MPAA monitors BitTorrent traffic

[foofie]

Erm...I think he means they are recording your IP if you join the swarm...Much easier to track than Kazaa actually. In some BT clients it'll display all the IP's right on the screen.

Source for .torrents?

[SubtleNuance]

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?

Re:Source for .torrents?

[jomas1]

Besides suprnova there is also: http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/ http://www.pleasure-torrent.com/ (porn only)

Disturbing

[Nom du Keyboard]

Am I the only one who find this disturbing that a private company is allowed inside a number of major ISP's and allowed to monitor traffic to the level of determining which programs the users are running? Doesn't this mean that they've looked inside the packets, since most programs now allow the user's choice of ports to use, and P2P means you can't analyze traffic based on its destination IP address?

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?

Re:Disturbing

[El Volio]

I would love for someone to explain to me how this isn't a violation of the Wiretap Act. Unless all the customers have given consent in the T&Cs, there would be a good case (for investigating this further. The exemptions for protecting the "rights or property" of the network provider don't really apply here, as courts have typically required a substantial nexus between the monitoring and the rights or property (think IDS on the DMZ). This sort of research project doesn't seem to fill that requirement, either.

Re:Disturbing

[madumas]

They don't have to inspect de packet content to determine what's the kind of traffic. They could use the stats that the routers gather.

I don't know how they did it, but here's how I would proceed:

You need is an access to the NetFlow data of a couple of Cisco routers on the ISP network. This data contains statistics about the connections between two IP adress like the port numbers, packets/bytes numbers and timestamps.

Then you setup a server to poll regularly the routers, aggregate the data and generate nice graphs using a software like FlowScan:
http://www.caida.org/tools/utilities/fl owscan/

Nothing complicated, the difficult part is to explain to the ISP why they should enable NetFlow and give you access. (It adds a little load on the router).

Re:A bit misleading....

[TheSHAD0W]

The quantity of data transferred is roughly the same, though. Perhaps as much as 1% higher due to protocol overhead.

You want to blow this?

[PhatKat]

Shhh!!

keep it on the dl

Re:You want to blow this?

[bfg9000]

Too late, my friend. Too late. I knew BT's cover was blown when a couple of young kids from my wife's CHURCH asked me (the guy off in the corner in the OpenBSD Blowfish T-shirt with the actual algorithm on the back standing by himself and chain-drinking coffee) if *I* had heard of BitTorrent.

"It's kinda like Kazaa, but way cooler" the young pre-pimply punk in the orange hawaiian shirt said.

"Yeah, cooler", said his little brother, wearing an equally tacky spider-man shirt.

"Oh, F***!" I said.

There goes the neighbourhood.

And I need to stress, these weren't even REGULAR kids. These were CHURCH kids, the kind that's not allowed to listen to Hootie and the Blowfish because they're the Devil Music. The good thing that came out of it was that I convinced one of the kids to download Knoppix and give it a try.

I had no idea BT had blown up like that. I knew the Suprnova site went down all the time, but I didn't know they were getting ... child-dotted? I *TOLD* them not to put the damn comic books up.

Re:Seasonality

[jomas1]

"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."

If we assume that kids have no interest in linux distros and other legitimate P2P uses and are dependent on P2P for copyrighted materials, then when kids are not online the majority of stuff that is still downloaded via P2P will be legitimate materials.

Since there are not many legitimate materials to download from kazaa, bittorent will come out ahead.

Re:Ya but...

[Cyno01]

I just dont trust a program called eDonkey for porn...

same book, same cover, same price

[radiumhahn]

People, people, people... The RIAA and MPAA look to slashdot to find out which file sharing systems to target next.

Re:same book, same cover, same price

[Eil]

People, people, people... The RIAA and MPAA look to slashdot to find out which file sharing systems to target next.

I'd also like to add that nobody here should mention the fact that you can Google for nearly every single torrent listing site in existance. Nor that .torrent files can be traded on websites, email, and chat rooms. Nor that there are dozens of bittorrent clients available for free download.

Let's keep this one to ourselves, shall we?

This just might be "the one"...

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:This just might be "the one"...

[DMUTPeregrine]

I know that Autodesk recently converted there regression test farm to use bittorrent for transfers. It provides about a 10x speed increase. Autodesk is a BIG company, if the RIAA or MPAA tries to outlaw bittorrent, companies like this WILL fight back.

And in other news....

[scifience]

New installations of spyware have dropped by 53%.

"We just don't know what is going on" said the CEO of Claria.

Who needs it

[smclean]

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.

Direct Connect?

[Epistax]

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).

Re:Direct Connect?

[phaxkolumbo]

Now, this is just my view (which, surprisingly, might not have any basis on reality...), but i've observed that DC tends to be more "regional" and "communal" for a couple of reasons...

DC hubs don't scale well (at least the software that i know of), 1000-1500 users per hub seems to be the maximum, therefore hubs tend to be more private, usually, and anyone can start a hub. Plus most of the hubs i frequent have some restrictions on user population (for example, amount and types of files shared)

There's a couple of DC hubs in my local area that allow only local people to connect and people look for stuff there first, and then resort to other methods (bittorrent, ftp, kazaa etc.). The ISP knows of the existence of these hubs, but seems to look away, since it keeps the traffic to the outside world down. The pattern seems to pop up on many campus LANs as well. And yes, there's legal stuff in there as well (*gasp!*), a quick search shows the ISOs for all the major linux distros.

Maybe that's why... anyone can get to kazaa or use bittorrent, but dc hubs seem to be more restricted

P2P, Bit Torrent, Kazaa, DC++, Open Source

[Dark-Helmet]

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.

They do

[PhreakinPenguin]

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.

Re:A bit misleading....

[Phybersyk0]

This might seem a bit incriminating, but...
Many trackers are starting to go private because of leeching. (suprnova.org has started doing this on some .torrents).

Some trackers will auto-ban your IP if your over-all ratio is less that 1:1 or 2:1. In some cases users themselves can elect to have an IP banned if they find a leech.

This is good as far as the private tracker goes, because whatever group running it can keep file distribution among its members quite clean, and on topic. For example mp3's are o.k. but warez are bad. or mp3's are o.k. but only if they're 320Kbps/VBR.

I personally use bittorrent as my try-before-you-buy CD purchasing station. I get an album, if I listen to it, if I like it, I buy it. If I don't it gets deleted.

I don't really understand why people would want to download movies though, because image quality means a lot to me. I guess it has to do with either being cheap, or poor. Or possibly for the same reason I stated above.

The only time i've used bittorrent "legitimately" was to download redhat 9, and that sucked so bad I switched to FTP.

If you're getting crappy download speeds and a resonable number of people are connected to the same torrent, maybe you should check your firewall settings.

P2P vs direct download??

[Tojosan]

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!

Re:P2P vs direct download??

[0x0d0a]

BitTorrent is rather unlike any of the other P2P systems out there.

From a user standpoint, it's "http, but vastly more scalable". It doesn't do file searching or anything like that. It just distributes load among all people downloading a file.

Re:P2P vs direct download??

[TiggsPanther]

So, in a short answer, why is using a P2P client sooo much better? From the consumer side that is?

For one, there's less load on the server(s). As long as the Tracker doesn't go under then mass popularity won't swamp the server, as quickly more and more of the downloaders can pick up the slack by offering up the chunks they already have.

If you can't get it down in one go, or something necessitates a reboot halfway through your Linux ISO set, it will always resume.
Heck, if the computer crashes then resuming will also check that what you have got isn't corrupt, and if it is then it'll automatically redownload the damaged parts.

Tiggs

Bittorrent beats Kazaa even more...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm betting it's much more

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:and this story made slashdot because?

[meringuoid]

seasonal...oh...I guess that's just seasonal for those who live NORTH of the equator eh?

Yes, that's true. Only for the vast majority of the human race.