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.
At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is."
But that doesn't mean that they won't be sued into bankruptcy anyway. Anybody want to bet that is (MP/RI)AAs next move? Sue the creator and coders of the various BitTorrent applications to bully people who might consider writing useful P2P software in the future?
Of course I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for anybody caught infringing on software/movie/music copyrights with BitTorrent. It's not anonymous by any means -- and the trackers provide a nice centralized target. Isn't it clear that BitTorrent wasn't designed with copyright infringement in mind?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Presidential Debates, funny commercials
You put a comma where "aka" should be.
Trolling is a art,
What the FUCK does this have to do with my rights?
... that I live in Canada where this is still legal.
And you guys though that America was the home of the free.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Porn? I mean, isn't that what this whole crazy internet thing is for?
My medium:
35% bittorrent
64% web
1% other
By content:
99% p0rn
1% Slashdot
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?
Sandvine's product is being speculated as the culprit. More details here. Is there anyway around this? I don't want to be stuck downloading new distros (which are coming soon) with slow BT.
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
I know the RIAA can bust you for downloading music, and the MPAA can bust you for downloading movies... is there any large organization (other than HBO, CBS, etc) that is looking to bust people for downloading television shows?
I have in the past downloaded shows when my VCR or DVR crapped out and didn't tape them so I was curious of the legalities of this.
Can someone tell me how many percentage points there are in all the internets? I'm pretty certain that about 70% is pron, 50% is spam mail and at least 85% of all internet traffic was in the form of mysterious, partisan, hard to prove or disprove, statistics about internet traffic.
... 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.
Then where's the room for /. talking about BitTorrent, pornography and spam? Seems to me that the 1% of slashdot can be broken down just about the same way as the rest of the internet... .35% /. talking about BT .5% /. talking about porn .1% /. talking about spam .04% /. talking about actual content .01% /. talking about itself.
.01%, there can be a similar breakdown: .0035% /. talking about /. talking about BT .005% /. talking about /. talking about porn .001% /. talking about /. talking about spam .0004% /. talking about /. talking about actual content .0001% /. talking about /. talking about...
/. spends more than 1% of it's time talking about itself, such as this post, and about 30% of the previous.
/. traffic created by its ugly and stupid layout scheme, that could be less ugly and break less browsers AND use less bandwidth with the miracle of CSS. But I digress.)
Of that
Although I'd be willing to be
(furthermore, I left out the proportion of
Am I wrong in finding that hard to believe?
I'm with you on this one. I'm watching a big chunk of the internet. My top 3 numbers are as follow:
25% http
6% gnutella
5% bittorrent
Maybe what I'm looking at is atypical, but I'm just not seeing the numbers reported. The article does not seem to list any source for its numbers.
The study comes from CacheLogic (http://www.cachelogic.com), which sells bandwidth throttling appliances to ISPs, schools, companies, etc. Considering that their business is to scare large-scale internet users into throttling the bandwidth use of your typical BT user, I don't find it at all surprising that they are claiming somewhat inflated numbers for P2P use on the internet at large.
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!
even the entertainment industry could use BitTorrent-like technology to offer video or music on demand without having to invest truckloads of money into bandwidth
They *could*, but they won't, because it deprives them the means to control distribution.
This is an industry whose MO has been to resist *every* new technology, whether it's beneficial to them or not - look at the lawsuit launched by Disney/Universal against the VCR - they wanted it banned, caput, illegal... even though today home video sales make up a huge percentage of their profits, they still hate it, because they no longer control the distribution (once they sell a video, they can't stop you from selling it to someone else.)
Look at the music industry, who fought tooth-and-nail against *radio*, claiming it would end music (after all, who would pay to go to a concert when you can get the music for free in your own home, and if nobody will pay for live music, how will musicians earn money?) It wasn't until they discovered they could control the airwaves that they finally (and begrudgingly) gave in - until the advent of the home tape recorder gave them new reason to fear.
The entertainment industries don't *care* about any potential benefits new technology will bring them, they're stuck in their old business model ways, and fear anything that might possibly provide competition for their cartels.
>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....
I downloaded a popular recent movie off of a suprnova bittorrent link, and the next day my internet connection was down. I called up the Cox customer support and they gave me another number to call but wouldn't tell me who I was calling. I called the other number and the guy on the other end knew the exact movie I had downloaded, explained politely that I was not supposed to be "uploading" that movie (which bittorrent automatically does), and then turned my internet connection back on.
I asked the guy if Cox was monitoring my usage, and he said no, that "someone else" had called them to complain. I assume this someone else was the MPAA or somebody working for them.