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.
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
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?
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
... 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.
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!
>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...
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 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.
For those interested, PeerGuardian is here.