Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic
Pranjal writes "According to a reuters article on Yahoo, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages." The article goes on to talk about how BT is no longer beneath the radar of those who like to sue file sharers.
That's a LOT of content right there. Can anyone think of items I'm missing?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The answer in in the question itself: don't develop/store in USA.
This kind of software is not ilegal here in Brazil, for instance.
Scientia est Potentia
BitTorrent wasn't designed to hide your identity unfortunately.
It's only a matter of time until they seriously crack down on Bit Torrent which is too bad because it's the only p2p app that will pull down 160KB/sec for me.
The secret is to allow for unlimited d/l and u/l but then create a perl script to monitor netstat -na and kill those connections via iptables which have a high recv q. Otherwise they'll suck down all your upload bandwidth.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
How about some torrent sites with great legal content?
This site is excellent.
If you have never used BT and watched how it consumes bandwidth, you really ought to check it out. Pretty neat.
Tools like Etherape will draw funky realtime network connectivity maps. Watching your computer talk to that many other peers makes you feel pretty exposed.
Azureus is my preferred graphical client under Linux. Any other favorites?
easy.
how easy it is to host it somewhere where you can post such files/links(torrents) without fear? just about just as easy.
for example, piratebay gets such threats regularly. here's one of their responses http://static.thepiratebay.org/sega_response.txt.
how easy it is for a litigation company to milk a publisher for money, by offering them a service that they'll scan the net for infringiments and then bill them (the publisher) for every c&d they send(and sell it to the ceo's as if this created automagically more income for the publisher, however, conviently for the litigation company the effect of these c&d's on sales can't be measured at all so they got a good milking cow right there without any means for the client to measure their 'performance' ).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
BitTorrent was intentionally designed not to hide IP addresses as its developer, Bram Cohen, openly acknowledges. That's because his goal wasn't to develop a P2P tool that could be used to share content illegally but to develop a P2P tool that reduced bandwidth for legally shared content, such as Linux ISOs, etc.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The tough part is that the .torrent file is pretty small. Just about anybody can host it, in fact many .torrent files get hosted from several sources online just because they're so small and organizing them is so useful. ISPs have a much tougher time tracking down people who have .torrents hosted because they don't take up massive bandwidth the way they would if the people were hosting .avis or .mp3s directly.
If you really want to shut down a torrent you need to shut down the tracker. The tracker needs a fair bit of bandwith (noticable by ISPs) and is necessary for the whole thing to work. That said, trackers require an order of magnitude (or two) less bandwidth than people who host files directly, so even these guys can fall under the ISPs radar. Legal challenges can be spotty (some ISPs remove the files immediatly, others (in foreign countries) don't care), and suing the user is obviously not a viable option except as a way to extort money from 8 year old girls.
I read the internet for the articles.
... that apparently started all of this. It was published by Cache Logic, who make traffic statistics boxes.
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide1.php
sigs, as if you care.
MGM is big about cracking down on people downloading their movies or tv shows...recently they cracked down on several people sharing the "Dead like Me" show which is only available on Showtime.
Wrong.
I got a C&D letter from my ISP, who got one from AOL TimeWarner. My kid downloaded a movie via Bittorrent, and my account was at risk. It wasn't a legal thing other than my TOS with my ISP forbids downloading copyright protected works. Plus, I'm not convinced that trading of copyrighted works without some form of payment to the copyright holder is a good thing. Basically, what you're doing is showing them how large a market there is for thier crap. I'd rather everyone just boycott the crappy content (I gave the kid hell for risking my connection for "The Butterfly Effect") so they get the idea to produce better stuff, not try and suck all the downloaders into paying.
I now only allow bittorrent when I need an ISO of ubuntu or fedora or something.
If you're Canadian, be careful.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Why oh why would you not P2P without a condom? BT Plugins like SafePeer (for Azureus) or applications like Protowall use blacklists from places like Bluetack to filter out known *AA addresses, among others. I don't really know how effective they are, but I'd be curious to hear from people that use them and still get C&D's. I have heard of plenty of people getting C&D's but those people weren't using condoms.
YMMV of course. I'm not advocating digital theft, nor am I criticizing it. I'm just curious as to why people aren't protecting themselves. Maybe I'm just fooling myself that they work at all, but I'd like to think they do.
-- Foz
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
>copyright law treats one second the same as a minute or an hour of material
That's not actually true. According to the 1976 Copyright Act, as interpreted by the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives (Source):
(9) Multimedia Material: Up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less, in the aggregate of a copyrighted motion media work may be reproduced without permission. Up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work (or in the aggregate of extracts from an individual work), whether the musical work is embodied in copies, or in audio or audiovisual works, may be reproduced without permission.
Considering the way BitTorrent works, a possible defence might be that you're not copying more than 30 seconds of the work from any one source, so your actions are legal. Of course, this is completely against the spirit of the law and would result in further restrictions just as soon as the Government got around to passing them...
Blizzard is using BT for transfering files to their Testers of their World of Warcraft game. Every time we get a new client download its well over 2gigs of data they are pushing. Patches are around 250-300megs. That's a lot of data to be pushing around.
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
"Given that BT requires a link to a .torrent, how hard
is it for companies to send a C&D to the ISP/owner of any site hosting illegal .torrent links? "
A few people are working on an anonymous BT tracker tool system for I2P.*ONLY* the BT tracker will be anonymous in this subtool that is being worked on as seen here on an update from 2 days ago. This would allow for publisher anonymity and should be fast since the tracker only coordinates the peers, with the peers doing the heavy lifting.
Of course having full anonymity (for the peers as well) would be useful , and maybe possible, but as your post suggsted - BT is vunerable at the tracker/publisher source. This is a solution to that vunerability, and in any event I2P is fully anonymous itself, if you want peer anonymity for a file :).
This BT tool is not ready yet for I2P, but I2P itself is making remarkable progress so I would not be surprised if it is ready within less than a few months. For more information you can also find the #I2P channel, with the #Freenet channel, on irc.freenode.net , I2P's chat network and IIP (I2P and the Metro IIP are linked).
Use Peergurardian and Blocklist Manager. Not 100% bulletproof but still a greatway to protect your computer from most unwanted visitors.
The thing to consider is that unlike Kazaa-like networks where the big bad *AA could search for their albums / movies and find out how many illegal files a user has by viewing their shared folder, torrents exist only for a single entity at a time, so the *AA trying to sue someone for downloading [insert crappy pop album here] would only be able to sue for that particular infringment, and they wouldn't be able to prove the user has 10,000 other albums on their system.
This, I would think, makes it dramatically harder, and alot less financially viable for them to start dragging BitTorrent users downloading illegal files into court, and is probably why it hasn't happened yet.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
The only way they could get the IP of downloaders would be to set up their own Torrent/filesharer
The torrent announcer is basically just a web CGI. A properly made wget command will give you the list of all the IPs, without having to mess with actually connecting to the swarm.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The university through which my own university's connectivity is provided, has quite a hefty firewall setup, with the capacity to classify traffic based on content rather than port usage. They then later used this to setup traffic shaping and limit p2p activity to a mere fraction of what it was before.
As the hotlinking whore I am, I will just link to their week-long sampling of traffic, which shows that BitTorrent accounted for 44% of outgoing traffic. This is before traffic shaping. No graphs of after-traffic shaping has been provided (yet).
In: http://www.cc.utu.fi/verkko/maarat/sisaan.png
Out: http://www.cc.utu.fi/verkko/maarat/ulos.png
Translation:
Muut = Other
Rest should be self-explanatory.
Both the parent and grandparent seem to touch, but not quite hit, the mark.
Downloading is protected under, at least, Part VIII of the Copyright Act, which is "private copying". From it, you can infer that you can download as much music as you like. Private copying arose from the days of tape cassettes; it gives musical copyright holders the right to levy blank audio media as a form of remuneration for private copying. It only covers music. Movies and software downloads can violate copyright without permission.
Uploading was upheld on an evidentiary matter. There was insufficient evidence to show that the user intended to upload the music, but rather uploading seemed to be a side-effect of using the peer to peer software, according to the judge.
To be clear, the judge did not "legalize" uploading. He simply stated that there was insufficient evidence to show that the user intended to upload, in other words, he never had the mental culpability (ie. mens rea) to have infringed the copyright.
So, as another posted noted, you can have a shared folder if it is unlikely to be shown that you intended to share its contents, and you can likely download music under the private copying provisions of the Copyright Act.
AtariAmarok completely missing the point of BitTorrent and has probably never used it.
BT is crap for most copyright infringement materials. Why? Actually, for the exact reason stated--"for the most part no-one dares to host them on typical static web pages or download sites."
BT is nothing like napster or kazaa or that sort of P2P app. There is no search function in the BT client. Most BT links are on typical web pages. (Ok, they're not static--the list of torrents is probably in a database or flat file and page generated. But then again, look around the web, the typical web page these days is not static.)
As far the best source for ISOs, Gutenburg, game demos...
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
No, not Earth, silly...this web site. /.
Hello, McFly. Ever hear of the slashdot effect? Ever hear of so many people hitting a server at the same time the poor thing dies? DDoS?
So when the DNF demo comes out, and a million fanboys on DSL at home and T-1s at work all go to download it at the same time, "the source" is the ABSOLUTELY WORST PLACE ON THE INTERNET to try to grab a copy.
Now, follow me, over the rainbow.
Imagine...it's easy if you try...an internet where we harness the bandwidth of all those fanboys. A system where instead of the flow of information getting choked off, the flow actually increases as more people download the file!
AtariAmarok mentions mirrors. Well, what if--I know this is crazy, but hang with me here--what if not only did each person downloading a file share that file to others to take advantage of downstream and upstream bandwidth, so that each download becomes a mirror, but what if this could happen simultaneous to download. Each user could share whatever piece of the file available locally without waiting for the download to complete. Each download, instead of being part of the problem, is part of the solution!
If only such a wonder system of distribution existed. Oh wait, it does.
AtariAmarok does make one valid point. How do you know what you are downloading is what you think you are downloading?
You don't. But then again, someone could hack the DNS server so when you try to visit slashdot you actually end up at some goat-related web site.
So, for AtariAmarok the solution is to unplug your modem, turn off your computer, and encase your hard drive in carbonite.
For the rest of us, BT is here. Ask your doctor if BT is right for you.
For those interested, PeerGuardian is here.
You can download without uploading with BitTorrent, but uploading makes the download four times faster.
The shareholder is always right.
Not using your common sense, I see.
See, courts and judges are not extraordinarily stupid, as a rule. They will see right through such feeble facades as that and still be able to throw the book at you.
It's a bit like what went on during the 50's-70's with segregation. When obvious discrimination was overturned, subtle methods were tried. The courts overturned them just as easily, because what's illegal is the underlying behavior, whether accomplished through blatant or clever means.
And your idea isn't even clever.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The mpaa isn't just contemplating going after bt users: they've already done it. A few weeks ago my ISP sent me an email saying that the MPAA had logged a specific complaint about copyright infringment from my IP address using the Bittorrent client. So... watch out.
You are correct sir.
In fact... google searches torrent files.
Actually... thats a nifty feature...