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Examining Bittorrent
ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.
Gimme an FP!
-DT
WOO HOO
Microsoft sucks!!!
Two words - avoid BitTorrent. HUGE investigations are going on to bust bittorrent users.
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The hammer revolution has begun.
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apterous.org
Or at least they pay him for links from Slashdot. And Roland. And Engadget.
What a wanker Sims is.
Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit. You really think that the scheme will remain legal because of these few users?
BitTorrent and the likes will be shut down in 2005. Mark my words. Since most of the traffic I see (I am an admin) is illegal, I'll shed no tears. It's you who violate copyrights who are to blame for the crackdown and the eventual clampdown on the internet - not RIAA, MPAA or any other corporation.
Are those being phased out as unimportant?
aside from movie and music piracy there are legal uses for bittorrent p2p too, like when Linux distros are released the demand is much greater than the file servers can handle and thats where bittorrent plays an important role, i prefer to get my Linux ISOs via bittorrent because it helps others get their ISOs too, for example FedoraCore-3 was released and it came on 4 CDs plus a fifth rescue CD making for a HUGE download, and also offered resume so if you have to log off or have a network problem you don't lose all that data and have to start your download over...
Considering the nature of Bittorrent and how decentralized it is, how would you even measure such a thing accurately?
I mean, in a centralized system like Sharman (KaZaA) it would be fairly trivial -- KaZaA even tells you when you start it up how many gigs are currently being traded.
But with Bittorrent?
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
WHY WON'T YOU LISTEN TO ME?? I wrote the parent message and this is to all of you who replied. I want to help you out, that's why I said 'avoid BitTorrent' right now. I wanted to help you, that's all! I'm a fellow geek.
There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms.
- recorder-box/
But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time.
My dream about a P2P PVR:
http://www.oberle.org/blog/2004/08/02/a-p2p-video
the downloaders of a file barter for chunks of it by uploading and downloading them in a tit-for-tat-like manner to prevent parasitic behavior. Each peer is responsible for maximizing its own download rate by contacting suitable peers, and peers with high upload rates will with high probability also be able to download with high speeds.
Does this actually work? I find that when there are limited seeds, those first in line essentially transmit as fast as they recieve, and increasing upload doesn't really affect total speed much. When there are lots of seeders there's plenty of bandwidth to go around so it's always fast. Does anyone notice that restricting upload significantly affects download speed?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are a few things that i would count as it's downsides. For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it. So unless you grabbed it while it was "hot" - you will have to deal with much lower speeds. Also i often find that i upload almost as much as i download, not being greedy or anything, but here in New Zealand broadband is still capped either on speed or on traffic. And quotas are pretty stingy, counting both uploads and downloads... but that is more isp/country specific i guess:)
How about the ability to withstand lawsuits? Isn't that more important than flash crowds?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A few performance problems are revealed
Yeah, performance problems should be fixed, but fix the name too. Name the next generation P2P client something like FuckTheRIAADickheadCunts. It would be interesting to see it get mentioned in the news each time RIAA sues something related to that P2P network. Call the "servers" instead "ejaculators" or something worse, and go on like that to introduce terms that violate various taboos. Soon enough, it can't get mentioned in the news anymore and (...now I get to my point, and now you will understand I'm not crazy, now you will see how this idea will triumph and free information once and for all...) RIAA's plans to scare customers by getting sue news in the newspapers won't work anymore!
HA HA HA!
Are you listening RIAA!?
We have you now!!!
THE NERDS HAVE YOU!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's easy to download full isos of software and have them error checked while downloading. Bittorrent is much better at transfering binaries than Usenet. Plus no chance of losing parts of the files downloaded unless there's nobody to seed the torrent.
Now would be a good time to put as much legitimate traffic (e.g. Linux distro's) as possible to make the case that Bit Torrent has legitimate use.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Mod this one: Shill -1.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You know very well that I wasn't talking about the legitimate traffic.
How does a moderator verify that this isn't a fake distro? Or do you go back to the site and verify all the checksums after the d/l?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
being offered for download via bittorrent. World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online, both major MMORPGs are are distributing their client software via Bittorrent.
LOL! legal torrents ... hehehe ... honestly you people slay me.
"There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms."
1) They wouldn't be fighting it, if a certain group wasn't abusing it.
2) What makes P2P work isn't the technology, but broadband. Something that's confined to 20% of the US population. A demographic that's primarely affluent, white males 20-30 years of age. That means that the geeks "new business model" doesn't work for 80 % of the US.
"But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time."
What's the rush?
A number of the major sites, which I shall not name, have all gone away this weekend due to the actions in the Netherlands.
Yeah. Don't like the message - shoot the messenger.
Good slashbot, good slasbot...
So is it a swarm of carrier pigeons or are they carrier honey bees that transfer the data? With swarmstreaming, do the bees have to get in line?
"However, this comes at a prize: system availability is hampered by the global nature of these components"
nice prize
w00t
And I thought spam did that.
... not to me, that's for sure. The courts have ruled that downloading music is legal in my country. We pay a levee on blank CDs, cassettes, etc., that gets handed to the music industry to compensate them.
Legitimate use is another case. But you wouldn't want to be the one who got busted, right? MPAA took down finreactor in Finland.
Distros should ship with a signed MD5SUMs file containing the proper checksums of the ISOs, in case the tracker is serving up a hacked distro. By checking the signature against the distro's public key (downloaded long in advance) the MD5SUMs file can be validated. Then that file can validate the ISOs' integrity.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The bad thing about bittorrent is that everyone is uploading - so the RIAA could go after everyone with infringement.
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Don't change browsers, make IE secure
Um...what does the Betamax decision have to do with foreign downloaders? And since you're invoking foreign nation status. Your country may view trackers as illegal, even if the US doesn't.
The irony is that a web site dedicated toward serving a p2p protocol expressly designed to rememdy the slashdot effect gets slashdotted.
So why don't they just use Bittorrent to distribute their mirrors?
As a solid, upstanding citizen of the United States (a country which has the best government that money can buy), I firmly believe in strongly adhering to all the laws of this fine country.
;)
That's why I always go to thepiratesbay.org.
They are located in Finland, of course, where US Copyright Law doesn't apply. So it's legal for them to offer files for downloading.
And, of course, in the US it's legal to download files. What is illegal is to offer more than $1000 worth of them for uploading.
So, please, let us all keep our Bittorrent downloads legal, folks. Thank you.
BitTorrent's protocol is built around the idea of SHA-1 hashing everything in sight. This is both to avoid corruption and to prevent fake dataa. Assuming SHA-1 is secure, then it will be impossible to fake the distro without also faking the .torrent file. If you can fake the .torrent, then you could have faked the distro via traditional means as well, so it's no difference.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
so, they traced (all) torrents from nova. But they didn't touch any torrent posted on slashdot?
Just guess what would been happend if they had did it.
Where do stupid people like you breed?
What color hair to bald people have on their heads? If that sounds like a nonsensical question, congratulations! Well, it is nonsense. If you're bald, there is no hair on your head and, therefore, no head-hair to have any color. Atheism is just as much an belief as "believing" that a bald person has no hair color.
You're on the right lines, but we should call it something really positive, something they couldn't possibly want to ban. They're pretty hard hearted, they're already happy being know as people who want to ban sharing. But lets see them try to ban JesusKittenShare (the premier opensource implementation of the RespectYourElders protocol) and www.cutebabies.org, the popular .behappy listing site.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
So they'll be shutting down ports 25, 80, and 21 also? Only the method used to communicate the data is different, the end result is the same...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Hey, I use Bittorrent a lot. I use it all over http://www.the-underdogs.org/, to save them needed bandwidth, and sometimes, to download fan movies or some other junk. It is a real pain in the neck. That's the only way to download large files on the internet, and it's awfully slow. With my internet connection getting 200-300 kbps on respectable sites, Bittorrent is excruciating. It gave me 100 kbps once, and that was after 5 hours of waiting. At an average of 40 kbps, it takes way too long for this to be a viable solution. I despise it, but it's the only thing I can use in some situations. Recently, one of my friends ordered Unreal Tournament 2004 online. He never recieved it. It was lost in the mail. Since he owned the liscence, he asked me to download it for him, since he had dialup. It is upwards of two gigabytes. Imagine that at 40 kbps. Not a chance. If there's a better, faster solution, I'd go with that, but for now, I'm avoiding 35% of internet downloads.
The moderator can check the file being uploaded against his own file with the SHA-1 sums of the torrent file.
Of course, with the SHA-0 cracked, how much time do we have left before we see modified binaries having the same checksum?
My bad.
Whether or not there are any investigations against BitTorrent USERS for trading illegal files (of which there is no evidence at all yet... there is only evidence of them going after tracker sites, which makes much more sense anyway), that does not mean you avoid BitTorrent completely. That's the whole point of P2P. It has uses that are legit, and uses that aren't. By all means, keep using BitTorrent for legit uses anytime you want.
To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful.
They judge it by the volume of your traffic. It won't even matter if it's all encrypted. For instance, in the case of a legit user, a port 80 will never transfer gigabytes of data per day.
That's how it's done at our university anyway. Unless you can somehow demonstrate that you have legitimate reasons for ports 80 or 25 transfering such volumes of data, it's no go.
As far as any other ports go, you block them by default and make users to apply for privileged open port while citing a good and verifiable reason.
Anyone have a .torrent of the article ?
Through the md5s on the distro's webpage.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
So you think violating a content producer's copyright is OK? Ok, let's start violating GPL as well... let's see how you like that. It's all about applying the copyright law.
There are also sites that list legal torrents, try File Soup or Legal Torrents for example. These are just two that I remember offhand, I'm sure there are many others as well. Remember, BitTorrent, like any other P2P application, has plenty of legitimate uses. Don't get sucked in by the *AA propaganda machine (not directed towards the parent, just saying that in general).
"The trackers themselves are legal."
In what countries?
"The site you pointed to in the Reg article was hosting the files themselves, not just the trackers - not the same thing."
I didn't point to anything.
"The trackers themselves contain no copyrighted material, just pointers to the shared file, just as a link to copyrighted material on a web page is not itself an infringement of copyright."
What countries copyright law?
"You really need to brush up on the technology involved, and learn the difference between a tracker, the shared file, etc., because right now, you come off as being, shall we say, uninformed."
Not as much as someone who assumes that all AC's are alike.
*HUGE* anonymous investigations!!
.torrent on one tracker. I'm not giving any legal advice here, but if you were to download one file for what you believe to be fair use, then they won't be able to come after you like they did with KaZaa users. Instead of the hundreds of shared files, your IP address is now only associated with one.
.torrent is being shared. Someone would have to look for all new torrents and connect to the tracker and start logging IP addresses for the lifetime of the .torrent, plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own?
I always listen to warnings like that! Y2K, update to SP2, don't download anything from the internet.
BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one
Could they monitor EVERY tracker and EVERY torrent on those trackers and log EVERY IP address, maybe.. But don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that
his clash with leaving core. I used to. SHIT ON become obsessed posts on Usenet are by funda8ental hear you. Also, if Vitality. Its I type this. to decline for irc network. The more gay than they 40,000 coming who sell another said. 'Screaming fucking market MAKES ME SICK JUST about half of the at death's door
"Yup. All it takes is any.
The legal principal is this: if the {object, device, chemical, drug} has a purpose for which it is legal, then the thing should be legal. "
In your legal opinion?
"The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule. The pressure to legalize or ban something evinces arguments about its legitimate uses, and it's these arguments that are persuasive. Saying "We'll do it anyway" is unproductive."
They prove "control" not "ban".
"In this case, since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P, it's inappropriate to ban it even if that software is only a small percentage of the service's traffic."
Not as efficient as a station wagon of DVD's.
Of course not. It's less than week since the raids.
Just wait and you can read about the convictions later on Slashdot. I'm glad that at least somewhere in the world the copyright is still respected.
Isn't it Sweden?
:-).
Yes.
Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers
here.
It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
pr0n ...ok 64% *maybe*
No sig for you!!
I just tried BitTorrent downloading for the first time this past week. I like watching the show "Lost" and missed an episode, so I downloaded it via BitTorrent. It only took about an hour or so, and I was able to watch. That was cool.
Then I decided to see what this baby could really do, so I tried downloading a movie, for "scientific research" of course. It took seven hours and was in spanish despite being marked english. So I tried again. The second time the movie didn't match the title. The third time was a charm. But I doubt I'll ever do it again.
First, it's stealing and I recognize that. I don't mind paying for a good movie. I suppose some do, but you'd have to have way more time the money. It costs roughly $3.00 to rent a movie at Blockbuster. NetFlix users probably average less. You get better quality with a DVD, and it's more convenient.
I will say it seems like a great resource for Porn though. Hehe.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
As usual you skew the truth to fit your ends.
"update Downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks is legal in Canada, although uploading files is not, Canadian copyright regulators said in a ruling released Friday."
I really wish the death throes of the **AAs could be more entertaining. If you refuse to adapt to the climate, you die, simple as that. BT (or P2P in general) can be harnessed for good, and, as iTunes, etc. has shown, it works.
Bittorrent did more than get the swapping strategy correct, it fixed the social psychology of p2p. Before, you traded files with other faceless users. This meant you had little investment in the uploads of others. People would join the network and not share files, cap their upload speeds, etc. Generally, this made downloading a slow and painful process. (Not to mention that it was difficult to tell if two similarly named files are the same ... there's too much diversity to get a good spread in file sources).
But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Users can no longer leach. There's social stigma attached to it. Also, you have some investment in making sure others have a copy of the file. If you liked it enough to d/l it, you probably want to share. Better yet, the action of the users of the site are focused on the same files, so resources are allocated fairly. Generally, it works better all around.
This leaves out the boost in nerd status of those who have large share ratios and upload lots of torrents. That helps with file availability too.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
.... when in the first matrix film agent smith captures neo and questions him in that chamber.
a nt stuff where you could post/spread your thoughts ideas and other information, but nobody could shut that system down, or remove/censor shit in there. and nobody could just simply seize servers or come up with warrants or shit like that....
e -storage
neo is reluctant to help the matrix robots, thus agent smith is getting annoyed with neo, and seals his mouth and asks him, what use it would be to make a phone call, if neo was unable to speak.
the whole internet, chatrooms, forums and democracy/societies boils down to if you can actually spread your knowledge and your ideas freely and let other have part in your life, and be part in others lives.
you can have a bazillion cool ideas, great stuff you figured out, things to help mankind, to save the planet, beliefs, thoughts and values...
but all of this is meaningless and you would life a life of desperate loneliness if the system/governments/corporations/sick-law would hinder you to distribute your values, ideas and thoughts and share them with others.
this is exactly whats happening these days more and more on this planet, and the future is foreseable, it doesnt take much ot be able to tell how oppressive and unfree this world has become already.
we need a system/forum/p2p/grid/distributed/failsafe/redund
we actually need "the internet idea" on the level of forums/platforms/usenet-like/live-messages/messag
anyone come up with any good ideas how to make this possible? any comments?
good luck to all of you for the future.
For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it.
You're right; HTTP is so much better, because when something is being downloaded by the masses from a single Web server you get about 0 bytes/s.
from right below figure 4: In order to test the integrity of meta-data, we donated to Suprnova an account for hosting a mirror. By installing spyware in the HTML code, we have registered each .torrent download and could have easily corrupt the meta-data. We conclude that using donated resources for hosting meta-data entails substantial integrity and privacy risks.
Well lets do some MATH! 53% of P2P is BT BT is 35% of the Net... so.... P2P is about 66% of the net... now 98% of that is... illegal? :D
I wonder if that includes encrypted networks or IRC DCC... :)
Along those lines?
Two words - avoid BitTorrent.
Why would I do that? If I use BitTorrent for legitimate uses - does that make me guilty of something? What if I download a legitimate Linux distro... or other open source? Can't get my Debian otherwise. Microsoft might like that but I don't.
Do we jail people who make kitchen knives, guns, baseball bats, axes, tanks, planes or cars? All can be used to kill people. No we don't. But we do condemn behavior.
To the behavior part. What you are really seeing is the same thing that happened with prohibition and other imposed legislation against public will. The entertainment industry is in collusion. Take your local cable company. Do you have a competitive alternative to wired cable as you might with the telephone?
If you are like many of the people the RIAA is chasing, you have had it with monopolistic and anti-competitive entertainment options. I deal with it by renting DVDs as it costs $4 and not $25 for the original. But in reality I should be able to just download it to my computer from Sony for $2. I choose to resist using BitTorrent to rip movies but I can't say I haven't considered doing otherwise.
In fact, this Internet is something the entertainment industry fears. You or I could start our own Internet television station and they don't get their cut. Sites like http://mediahopper.com/ will prevail in time. Note the absence of Canadian and US stations when compared to smaller markets.
Sooner or later the RIAA and cable monoplies are going to evolve or loose. But the cable companies realize this and that is why they are proving much of the Internet access.
Of course, with the SHA-0 cracked, how much time do we have left before we see modified binaries having the same checksum?
One of the major advantages of a p2p network is that if the file is good, there will be more people seeding & peering it.
If it's a legit distro distributed from a legit source, more people will seed and peer the file.
If it's a hacked distro, more people will find out and fewer people will seed and peer the file, and it will be harder to distribute.
This isn't always the case however-- before Farenheit 9/11 came out, there were a number of 700MB spoof video files with the title "Farenheit 9/11", and they were being mirrored pretty heavily...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
It would really suck if BT were banned - that would prevent everyone from making any downloads. Think of how much free bandwidth there would be - over 1/3rd of all internet activity vanishing because of a BT ban! Wow!
A month ago, a few days after I innocently downloaded a file, I received a letter from my ISP telling me to delete the file because they received a compliant on a copyright violation. It stated that future complaints of infringement would result in my (or rather my landlord's) information being handed over to the complaining party for legal action.
I offer my sincerest scowl and finger salute to the frelling promiscuous complaining party.
Due to financial constraints, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off until further notice.
You blew it in at least two ways. First off: the "legal principle" you described isn't a principle, and it's not general. You're alluding to the Betamax decision, which is specifically with regard to copyright infringement. Drugs and chemicals etc. do not come into play.
But more importantly, you left out an extremely important word in the "principle", namely substantial. As in "substantial noninfringing use". The betamax decision went for Sony because there was a substantial noninfringing use of betamax recorders -- and indeed people largely used them to record shows to watch later on. There is no substantial noninfringing use of bittorrent. The vast vast majority of the traffic is for infringement.
Actually, filesharing is quite legal under Swedish law. As far as murder goes, the most the US government might do would be to pass a law which said that it would be illegal to travel with the intent to do murder. Perhaps you already have. But once you are over there, without the original intent, it is generally wise to adhere to the local laws. Contrary to what you yanks believe, your laws do NOT apply to the rest of the world.
Soyes, it is quite legal to share files in Sweden, thank you.
As far as the rest of the posting goes, please show me one attempt at prosecution for less than $1000 of downloads. The FBI, about 2 years ago, made some noises about going after Napster users for criminal charges. They also mentioned that their cut-off would be 100 files for download. That was probably just to scare people too; nothing ever came of it. I'm sure they realized that they had better things to do, like finding terrorists.
If I lived in the States, I'd say "go ahead, RIAA, hit me with your best shot!". For their $3,000 settlement offer, that works out to be about 50 cents for all the DVD's and CD's I've gotten.
Needless to say, that isn't a very cost effective solution for the RIAA to follow. But it's an excellent price for me. It sure beats Itunes!
The study shows how vulnerable BitTorrent is to failures of Suprnova mirrors and trackers. Kill a large .torrent host and you effectively kill the network. Kill a large tracker and you severely cripple it. In comparision, ed2k network is much more resilient to attacks.
.torrent file that needs to be hosted on a large server. You can send an ed2k link by e-mail, IM or post it on Slashdot. Furthermore, ed2k has excellent search capabilities - both via servers (very fast and very efficient) and via distributed Kad[emlia] system (fast and efficient). With the ability to check the filenames and comments for a certain file, you are relatively safe against fakes even when you can't use verified links. Of course, here I deliberately ignore the fact that both networks need "community portals" to inform users about released files, to provide forums for discussion, etc.
/. and elsewhere (as if other networks don't exist), I still don't hate BT. Actually, I tried it again recently and was very satisfied with the download speeds. I don't wish BitTorrent bad. But with the recent developments with police raids on torrent sites and ed2k link sites in Europe the networks will be tested and I am not sure BitTorrent is best prepared for it. Suprnova appears to be safe because of its geographic location, but it still remains a single point of possible failure. I don't think ShareReactor was as critical to the edonkey2000 network.
First, you don't need servers to distribute ed2k links. A short ASCII string effectively replaces a large
Second, the servers play only a secondary role, even if many servers would go down, that would have a small impact on the network because of source exchange. And using Kad it's even possible to operate entirely without servers.
I do not hate BitTorrent, really. Even though I am a long time eMule user and even though I am very annoyed by the apparent popularity of BitTorrent here on
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
"Something is definitely wrong on your end with the speed problem. "
I've familiar with Firewalls, and have not only worked on the source code for Firewalls, but I've done a lot with the TCP/IP protocol as well, including written network stacks, or ported them when appropriate, several times.
Yes, there is a problem if you don't limit your download speed. But the Mainstream BT code allows you to do that, and so does Azureus (the most popular client). Yes, you do have to enable some ports in your firewalls, but if the parent poster hadn't done that, his performance would've been much worse.
There's a basic problem with the BT protocol to begin with. It's somewhat similar right now to where TCP/IP was in the early 80's. Basically, BT just blows. It should be MUCH faster, but it's not. And this is recognized.
Tell you what. Go to the duke.edu site for the latest FC3 release, and let us know how long it takes you to download the entire binary set (2.3 GB).
My experience is that BT will do great for the first 10% (100 MBs on a 1.5 Mbs / 256 Kbs DSL line), then go down to 50 MBs up to about 90 % of the complete set, and after that it gets stuck, and never completes. Not even after 3 weeks.
I see this behaviour across many different torrent sites as well. Sometimes it does work great though. Usually it doesn't.
The RIAA doesn't have much to worry about now. But if the
BT protocol ever gets fixed, it has great positive commercial value. Right now, well, it sucks.
Here's a link for the central internet exchange for Finnish ISP's to link together. Coralized FICIX stats.
;P
Compare the stats from week ago, and today. Guess what changed?
Most telling is the last graph indicating traffic for the whole year.
The largest Finnish torrent site, Finreactor got busted by Keskusrikospoliisi (roughly the same as FBI of USA).
I guess they weren't sharing just Linux images
Bot Assisted Blogging
There is no rule saying a seeder has to be slow, it can be just as fast as a normal web server. However some people like to run seeds on things like a modem. Try someone like 3dgamers.com, they use BT to distribute files. Their seeders are nice n' fast so if no one is downloading, you get a fast transfer. However, unlike notmal HTTP, if lots of people are downloading something, you still get it fast since you all help each other out.
2. the average download speed of 240 kbps O_O. I've been working with 30-50kbps on average, and I have my ports opened too. Could it be my smutty upload speed?
This paper and all of the recent news articles that provide an estimate for BitTorrent protocol traffic use the same source. A single slide in a presentation by someone from Cache Logic shows BT using 1/2 of all P2P traffic at a "tier 1 ISP." Other sources cite P2P traffic at 66% of all 'net traffic. Therefore, BT is 33%.
I think any estimate made without measurements at many major routers would be suspect. While there is no doubt that BT is quite popular, the evidence presented thus far for the amount of traffic using BT protocol is extremely flimsy. I would take it with a grain of salt.
burris
The real breakthru for distributed P2P tech will come when someone publishes a BitTorrent content distributor that can be plugged transparently in front of an HTTPD. So I hit http://www.whatever.com , and get my HTTP response, with cache and timing headers intact. But behind the scenes, the "www" host is really the entry point to a distributed server network, a pool of interconnected "torrent" servers that transparently balance the traffic throughout the capacitance of the protocol network. Those servers actually tap the "real" HTTPD behind that network only to check for updated content, which is distributed to the network on demand, to be passed through to requesting clients. The clients speak only HTTP, and can't tell the difference between the real HTTPD and the distributed network proxies.
As long as I'm asking Santa, I'll be more specific. That "www" host has its DNS resolved by the nameserver at whatever.com , which hands out IP#s of the other "torrent" servers distributed around the "Web". torrent servers get the IP# of the real host at whatever.com, so they get content. There are problems: HTTPS requires each serialized object requested/replied to be encrypted with/for the actual private key of the requesting client, unknown until the request is made. And "CGI" or other dynamic content creates a huge space of permuted object states. But, Santa, Google figured out how to deal with all this in a centralized datacenter, and they're damn fast. Get the elves on this, and children around the world will sleep with visions of sugarplums streaming to their download directories.
--
make install -not war
How can we share only with people we trust?
.torrent filename and/or the forum where the torrent is discussed could be a give-away, and lead to investigation
* HTTP authentication on the trackers: many BT clients allow you to authenticate through them -- this would block access to the list of sharers and to the files shared, BUT
* How would you know who to trust?
* A single infiltrator could bust up a whole sharing network
* If the web of trust doesn't scale, it's not as good a network as if could be
* The
* Torrent files could point to a site like TinyURL, but with authentication needed to access the tracker URL. These sites could spring up ad-hoc
* Then, each member of a group could self-tracker ther own torrents. This could further reduce the liability for a group
* If a rat is found, passwords can be changed
* But, an ad-hock web-of-trust for each torrent seriously limits the potential for a massive number of peers, which is currently one of the best aspects of popular torrents.
But for groups who want to sahre files that aren't that popular but specialized and protected from distribution by copyright statutes -- like say a group of people who want to trade videos of old presidential debates, or of video footage of the 9/11 attacks, or of unreleased Bob Dylan songs, or of comiled translations of Nietzsche (no source of Eng translations of his complete works exist) -- this ad-hoc indirection may work:
* Each member of the group has a Tiny URL website. Torrent files point to this site, but do not redirect unless you enter a password (might require a change in the torrent protocol) -- torrents can be distributed on a single website or anywhere else
* Each torrent has a tracker hosted by a different member of the group
* Each tracker has HTTP authentication
* Passwords are handed out via key parties
Good idea?
http://www.fucktheriaa.org/
There is no substantial noninfringing use of bittorrent.
Blizzard used bittorrent to distribute World of Warcraft to over 500,000 people. Is that substantial enough? Other game companies are using bittorrent to distribute games / demos / patches as well, because most game dev shops cannot afford the bandwidth required to host those files. Same is true of Linux distributions.
Those are just off the top of my head but I'm sure there are other legit corporations and non-profit organizations using bittorrent legally to alleviate the strain on their own servers.
I'd be interested to see a Groklaw writeup on this topic.
I have a few comments on your analysis of the BitTorrent protocol... My main criticism is that you are analyzing BitTorrent in combination with pirate web pages as a P2P file sharing system, when BitTorrent's real purpose is to be a file DISTRIBUTION system.
.torrent file) would obviously receive a genuine .torrent file, and the data in that file verifies the data received in the download. It's only torrent file redistributors like Suprnova.org where you'd need to be concerned about pollution.
.torrent file anyway, and a standard download would also be blocked.
:-)
BitTorrent is designed to replace and enhance the performance of a standard http or ftp download server. Where even ten simultaneous downloads can slow the performance of most inexpensive server setups to a crawl, BitTorrent can easily handle ten thousand or more, and in this it is an enormous success.
One necessary element of a true BitTorrent distribution is a dedicated seed server. This server ought to be always working, and should have a significant amount of bandwidth behind it; I'd recommend 30KB/s minimum, but more is better. You complain that seeders are "punished" and this is why torrents die, but while long-term seeders are nice, they aren't necessary. It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to. Having torrents die off when interest fades is an artifact of misuse of this specification.
You worry about pollution on Suprnova.org, and so do I; there's no reason why it wouldn't exist. But as BitTorrent was normally intended this isn't a problem at all. People visiting Blizzard's website to download content via BitTorrent (actually Blizzard uses a modified downloader, but the concept would be the same if users received a standard
You're also concerned about tracker availability. I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the
As a sharing method BitTorrent indeed has some deficiencies, but it simply wasn't designed for that. That BitTorrent is being misused for that purpose only testifies to its effectiveness. Perhaps a sharing system with elements taken from BitTorrent will someday arise; I know Suprnova.org is attempting to create one with "Exeem". But please don't badmouth BitTorrent.
Here in spain we have the same thing. Except that a private organization called the SGAE who supposedly distibutes the money among the authors (by popularity, which annoys many people) keeps of it, and insists that downloading is illegal. Plus if an artist says he supports piracy or anything that sounds like it to them, they take his music off the stores. So now we've got all artists 110% against piracy, plus nobody knows what's legal and what isn't.
Damn the music industry. As people have pointed out, music should be free. It's shows/concerts where artists get money.
The problem here lies not in the "Copyright Cartels" but in your Terms Of Service with your ISP. The problem is that the contract you signed with them for acess lets them disable said acess arbitrarily.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
No, I didn't.
The point I was trying to make was to maximize the embarrassment for the *AA's by cracking down on legal content - and show them for hypocrites they are wrt freedom of speech.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Except the copyright holder only needs one file to hit you with statutory damages of $30,000 to $150,000. And on KaZaa/Gnutella/eDonkey most people have file-listing disabled, so the copyright holder only knows about the one file they found through searching. And even if they did know about all the files, they can only sue you for the ones they hold copyright to. So BitTorrent seems just as dangerous as "standard" means.
Don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that .torrent is being shared. Someone would have to look for all new torrents and connect to the tracker and start logging IP addresses for the lifetime of the .torrent
That's not very difficult. They only need to get your IP once.
plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own?
Sharing just a part of a file is still illegal. It's not sufficient for "fair use" and "being useless on its own" is no defence, as copyright law says nothing about usefulness of the works protected (except the constitution does say copyright is to promote "Invention and the useful arts"...)
If you want safer use FreeNet. If you want legal check out Gnomoradio.
PS: IANAL
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
If people who live in countries where all ISPs severely cap uploads aren't wanted on BitTorrent, then where are they wanted?
It's clear that BT can't be easily modified for such uses, so why bother? Try designing a new system.
http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf
Covers a few of the same things, but is a server-side analysis across a large number of torrents, for a long period of time.
Hardware is bog-standard. Code will allow deletion of only those shows that have achieved a 1.1 share ratio; and only those shows that have an inadequate seed/peer ratio.
I hope that by "and" you mean "or". I've had a lot of files get up to 0.2 share ratio or so and then stop despite days of leaving Azureus running, largely because I was "late to the party" so to speak, and demand for the file just fell off.
Needs to be Open so that more codecs can be developed for it.
Codecs? Why? Did you originally envision having TV-out on the box but then decide against it and forget to delete this justification for making it updatable?
What you want is Coral.
Make a music sharing program called RIAA, and a video sharing program MPAA.
Then follow-up and make an overall sharing program called CopyRight.
It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to.
People can already play with their download while seeding it, as the major BT clients reopen the file in read-only mode once the download completes. Of course, this excludes operating system distributions, which require a reboot (or expensive VMware) for use.
I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the .torrent file anyway
There are a lot of web hosts that allow distributing .torrent files (a static file) but do not permit running any server-side scripts. These include at least Angelfire, Geocities, and Tripod. A fellow hosting .torrent files on a free web host would have to run a tracker/seed on his own computer on a broadband connection behind a port-forwarded router. Can't get broadband? Tough cookies.
My new content hosting webservice for Creative Commons licensed content. Upload content, click a button and it not only makes a torrent, but my server starts seeding it. torrentocracy.com/prodigem
If your country does not like the way it is getting shafted by the US trade restrictions(eg softwood lumber in Canada - or a million other examples), it could allow full protection of torrents until the US changes its trade laws.
Thus torrents could move from a copyright annoyance to a tool for trade negotiations.
It all comes down to two things: knowing where to host, and how to maximize your availability.
35% of all net traffic belongs to BitTorrent traffic. The corresponding web and traffic tracker required to power that is inconsequential.
I used to run NovaSearch.net, which was for a time the official search function of Suprnova.Org. I made up roughly half of all their traffic, something on the order of 300k pageviews per day by the end. Availability was indeed a large problem, and always my primary concern. However, my possible availability was much higher than actual availability. By this I mean that Novasearch had the POTENTIAL to be available much more than it was, due to reliance on Suprnova.
When SuprNova went down, NovaSearch (usually, often it could be used as an out-of-date cache when Suprnova was down) went down too, because it didn't get updates. That accounted for most of my downtime, very little of it was actually from issues relating to NovaSearch itself.
Despite all this, NovaSearch, during it's primary operational period, relied on only one dedicated server (A second was added for static content later on, but for transfer cap reasons, not actual bandwidth or load). This highlights the primary problem with Suprnova in regards to their reliability, they rely on donated mirrors, and that reliance has caused them to use an insufficient architechture (Last I heard the core of Suprnova was one single dual xeon server). Had they instead chosen to use a clustered solution that they managed themselves, combined with hardware firewalls and DDoS mitigation technology, the availability then and now would be significantly higher.
Tracker reliability is a much lesser problem. Torrents can easily survive short to medium tracker downtime just by the shear momentum of the users. Once they have a peer list, they can continue communicating with those peers even with the tracker down. And the widespread adoption of various unofficial additions to the BitTorrent protocol have further improved that. One such improvement that enjoys almost universal support among third-party BitTorrent clients is the multi-tracker protocol, which effectively allows trackers to be clustered so that even if all but one of the trackers for a torrent is down, it can continue normally.
Anyhow, this is a long post that sort of went off on a tangent and started rambling, but I thought that I should put a few words in because of the role I played.
Okay, so 35% of net traffic is Bittorrent. 53% of P2P traffic is Bittorrent, that means 66% of all net traffic is P2P, right? Last I heard, 66% of all net traffic was spam. Therefore, 132% of all net traffic is P2P and spam and nobody is using the net for anything else (which means you're not really reading this).
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
However, resources are finite. If Bit Torrent investigations are being ramped up, that means something has to give. If the parent is true, then a fucked up change of priorities has happened. Apparently Jonny Law now thinks that downloading the latest pulp thriller is an act of the highest heinousness, while slaughtering common folk O.J. Simpson style is fine.
FUCKED UP PRIORITIES. That's what America will be remembered by after it declines, like Rome did.
Together, bittorrent and suprnova form a unique infrastructure that uses mirroring of the web servers with its directory structure, meta-data distribution for load balancing, a bartering technique for fair resource sharing, and a p2p moderation system to filter fake files The hunt script selects a file to follow and initiates a measurement of all the peers downloading this particular file, the getpeer script contacts the tracker for a given file and gathers the ip addresses of peers downloading the file, and the peerping script contacts numerous peers in parallel and (ab)uses the bittorrent protocol to measure their download progress and uptime
Best fix for this is ratio enforcement.
tvtorrents.com (NOT related to tvtorrents.net, the site for the EFNet #tvtorrents channel) uses ratio enforcement, blocking users whose ratio gets too bad. 1 credit used per KB downloaded, 1 credit gained per KB uploaded, 1.5 if you're seeding a complete file. The end result is that until a set of DDoS attacks took the site down for over a month, torrents that tvtorrents.com carried were FAR faster than ones obtained from whatever #tvtorrents' site was. Unfortunately, many of the old tvt.com users have left and now the site is kind of dead. Even Enterprise takes a few days to get seeded, and Enterprise episodes used to be tvt.com's most popular downloads.
Unfortunately due to leechers who repeatedly signed up for new accounts to get around being blocked for leeching, it became hard for tvt.com to attract new users, which is probably why it never recovered. Some other method needs to be given to give people incentive to rack up a good ratio but without making things difficult for new users who have yet to rack up a good ratio.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Two things.
One while the majority of the dinosaurs did die out. Some became the reptiles and the birds. So technically dinosaurs didn't die out.
Second iTunes doesn't prove that the music industry is dying out, or not adapting, for behind the majority of the online experiments is the music industry.
And last the MPAA/RIAA are advocacy groups, and industry will always have a need for those. Just like OSS needs an advocate.
In Sweden, the largest movie distributer SF has a site for "renting" movies and TV shows online, that you see directly on your screen called SF Anytime (might not be accesible from a non-swedish IP). It has it's problems (it requires IE6 and WMP for example..) but overall it's a pretty good service. They have both movies and episodes of some swedish TV shows (though the selection is a little limited...). The prices are quite reasonable, about 1 dollar for a TV show and 4 or 5 for a movie. I've only used it for the free content they have (music videos), but that works great if you have a fast internet connection (the streams are at 400 kbps). And no commercials!
It hasn't helped one bit against piracy though, people still think free is better...
Give me a job. Please?
It is our DUTY and moral right as free men (and women)to fight unjust laws,whether it be the stupid pot laws that now imprison more of our brothers and sisters than the ENTIRE prison population of 1970 or the stealing of what was once fair and reasonable copyright laws by the buying off of our political system.And just as we once ran speakeasy joints and helped hide bootleggers,now we commit piracy and ignore the guy down the block selling weed.Before you scoff,please consider that the human animal NEEDS art just as we do bread and water because we are not only material beings but spiritual beings.This is why we have created art since we could first paint on walls.As a musician i have always made sure that anyone i played with share our works through p2p.As i showed each band time and time again if you charge a FAIR AND REASONABLE PRICE (in my cases,between $5.00 and $8.00 for the e.p and NEVER more than $12.50 (usually $10)for the cd) that the fans will ALWAYS be willing to support the artist so they can keep bringing them new and original art.It is when the GREED of those in power coupled with a willingness to allow the people to be trampled on for a price that allows such disgusting injustice to prevail.If the poor and abused citizen has the choice of paying their abusers or living without the things that their mind and spirit requires to grow,THEN THERE IS NO CHOICE BUT TO DISOBEY!Please see http://www.townhall.com/documents/odcd.htmlas mister Thoreau is much better on the subject than i.And how sad is it that i decided that i should post this as an A.C for fear of our increasingly jackbooted government.I can only hope that the good folks at /. will destroy my records if they kick down their door over my "thoughtcrime".
the installation procedures for most linuxen & bsden include the option of ftp installation. this means no wasting cdr blanks, nor waiting for an entire iso to download onto a new-ish [and in some cases therefore unavailable] machine. two-floppies-plus-internet is a great option when installing; unfortunately it puts a massive load on the machines hosting the distros--often run by financially strapped non-profits.
so, how long before bit-torrent distribution is available as an alternative to ftp when booting from those internet-enabled installation floppies?
does anybody remember debian's jigdo program for downloading their iso's? was that an ancestor of torrent? i don't recall jigdo being an install-time option; i'm just asking.
The trick, really, is to ask me to pay after I've seen the episode.
There are several community organizations that help provide jobs and a safe social atmosphere for mentally challenged individuals. I suggest your seek one out in your area. Post your city, if you know it, and I will help you find one.
If the **AA's understanding of bit torrent is TWICE as good as most peoples here.
Bit torrent has nothing to fear for a long while yet. (Meaning you people are mostly stupid.)
Sites go up. Sites go down. But the files will always find a way.
And so what if it dies tomorrow. People were pirating long before bit torrent or even napster existed. And will LONG after they die.
I am glad that so many clueless people use bit torrent tho. A shield of idiots around the die hard downloaders.
I'm not intimate with the BT protocol. But this strikes me as a way to stop the *AA people getting lists of downloaders, and at the same time improve BTs performance and robustness (not that they seem to be a big problem ATM):
When you connect to a tracker, as well as downloading the file you want, the tracker could give you a list of other torrents to download. The client would then carry on as normal downloading the file you want, and at the same time download chunks of the other files, up to - say for example - half the size of the file you want. The very nature of BT means you don't need the whole file to redistribute it.
That way, you have plausable deniability - you might be just downloading a Linux ISO, but at the same time you've downloaded chunks from a dozen other, maybe illegal, files, and re-distributed them to others. The *AA people then can't get a list of downloaders because even though you're downloading a chunk of the latest hollywood blockbuster, its not intentional, and you're not downloading the whole thing. You're just caching it for others to download from you.
The tracker could implement some strategy to decide which other torrents a client downloads, based on the least available or the most popular or whatever other criteria make sense.
The downside of course is that you download more than you actually need, but thats offset by the privacy you gain.
To the comment of Shadow, that Bittorrent is designed for offloading traffic from web servers. You are quite right, that was the original story, but currently we see both wide-spread illegal copying and significant non-infinging uses. A lot of People seem to want to download movies/games/TV shows/music digitally. SuprNova is the clear market leader on the black side of things. Bittorrent is a neutral technology which can be used illegally. Please read my position statement on that at P2PNet.net
A good quote in this context is "The Street finds its own uses for technology", William Gibson.
Another example is Freenet which would give freedom of expression back to the Internet.
Greetings, Johan.
If its wasting that much bandwidth, then the entire protocol must be removed from the face of the earth, for national security reasons of course..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Copyright was intended to apply to commercial transactions.
If I make a copy of something...anything... and give it my wife or kids. That's perfectly okay.
You're looking for some moral absolute here, and copyright is the *wrong* place to look for morality. Copyright today is about protecting big businesses right to make money. Its not about protecting artists or performers and hasn't been for the last 20 years.
TO summarize.... If my buddy buys a CD... Its OKAY to copy it to give a copy to me. Its okay for me to tape a TV program and loan it to a friend.
Azureus, the open source, cross platform, java bittorrent client, supports connection through a socks or http proxy...
of course passing all your data through an anonymizer proxy can slow down some of your downloads, but this might be the solution...
No direct contact with the tracker/seeder, all identifiable traffic stopping at some proxy, the proxy resending it to you on an know port...
easier than recreating a fully encrypted, non tracable p2p network from scratch, and only uses existing tech...
Now where can I find a nice, free, fast, anonymous proxy in the EU that can support a 2Mb broadband connection speed ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
There had been some talk before, but it looks like now it's happened: suprnova.org as mentioned in the analysis has now announced they're shutting down for good (qualified by an "as we know it").
I'd guess at least 90% of Internet traffic is created by something derived from the BSD TCP stack :P
Those using a consumer router based on Linux, such as the Linksys WRT54G, may find a way to run the Wondershaper on it. For instance, you can get replacement firmware for the WRT54G from Sveasoft that incorporates the Wondershaper. (Just turn on the QoS feature.)
I use the Sveasoft firmware and add a couple of iptables commands to put my UDP game traffic in the high-priority queue, so P2P uploads don't disturb my gaming. See the Sveasoft forums (registration and $20 required) for details. You'll also want to do this if you use UDP-based VOIP.
The copyright industry trade groups would attack the web sites, forums, IRC channels, etc. that disclose the IP addresses of any peer that has at least one infringing file shared. They would attempt to have judges interpret disclosing an infringing peer's IP address as contributory copyright infringement and, if that doesn't work, would lobby national legislatures to make it so. Suing more P2P users just might work to drive P2P so far underground that the casual computer user can't connect. Even Gnutella and Freenet have this problem if governments start attacking GWebCaches and seednodes.ref respectively.
You might want to take a look at mix-nets and Onion Routing. Freenet isn't really anonymous. (Just look at their FAQ regarding attacks...)
Again, because you signed an unfavorable contract which says they can.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Bram's distinctly not responsible for any copyright violations, any more than the people who created ftp or implementations of ftp servers are. But Bittorrent is heavily used not only because it's a great tool for hauling around movies and other CD-sized data, but also because there are sites that host torrents for that kind of content. And unlike Bram's work, their work is enough closer to abetting copyright infringement that they can be sued (and this weekend's news is that Supernova and a couple of other sites just shut down.) They may or may not be guilty, but they're at least close enough to sue.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So, even IF piratebay tracker would have been in Finland, it wouldn't be there anymore.
But luckily it was and still is in Sweden.
(All Finnish trackers I know of, are closed, not by authorities tho)
And, About US copyright laws... unfortunately Microsoft asked local police to investigate and so on... prolly old news already...
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
See here: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=628