Slashdot Mirror
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.
apterous.org
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...
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!
amazing, moderated interesting for not RTFA.
There are several tens of millions of bittorrent users. I cannot see that they all are going to get sued.
... again ...
How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.From the article:
Well, since, according to El Reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/brit_net_The stats:
All the above are LEGAL.my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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.
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.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
"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?
Oi. RTFA. The links explain exactly how they measured it. The 35% figure, though, is about 6 months old, and represented only one study. The actual number may be significantly higher or lower. (higher, I'd guess, as BT is still growing)
BT isn't limited to those ports in any way, shape or form, and many users use different ports.
... 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.
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 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?
No convictions in the link you pointed to. Unless you, like the **AA, like the concept of "guilty until proven innocent".
It's not possible to overturn the Betamax decision - there is no legal ground for doing so.
The only thing that can be done is to pass legislation making it illegal - and all that will do is make owning any home computer, and any other device capable of making copies, illegal. It would also make printers and photocopiers controlled devices, as they are also capable of making illegal copies.
And, since bittorrent is a distribution system, you would have to make any system that allows for illegal distribution of copyrighted material illegal. So much for email, and your local postal service.
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!
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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
You work for....a company who is going to drag people into court and force them to settle under its mighty legal fund?
Wow. Not really impressive. So-called "piracy" and more importantly, the RIAA's and MPAA's tactics are getting more and more press. To date, I know of few cases of people being busted. Sued civilly by greedy and useless corporations, sure. But not busted.
I cannot wait until I am done with law school and can contribute, knowledgeably, to the defense of such bullshit and hopefully the creation of more realistic and fair and beneficial laws. This artificial IP shit is harming the American consumer more than ever.
Maybe you should RTFA and find out how they did it.
You know, it may have just answered that question.
Hmm, locking that many away would be a great way to create an instant revolution, destroying all greedy and corrupt multinationals and lobby groups (who are corrupting democracy by buing laws and politicians).
Let them try it, it will return at them like a boomerang.
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..."
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?
And, yes, I DO have a constitutional right to copy music off the net - it just happens that MY country's constitution is not the same as yours.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
That's all it takes - see the Betamax decision.
Well, actually it only requires that the technology be capable of substantial non-infringing uses. It doesn't matter if no one actually engages in them, though it's always easier to make the case if you have examples to point to.
Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.
No, they probably are. If they're in the US, they're pretty likely contributory and/or vicarious infringers, though much depends on the specific facts involved. While you're not mistakenly reading Sony too narrowly, you need to not read it too broadly either. I suggest also reading the Napster decision.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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!
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.
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.
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.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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).
It's the same solution you guys should use - work with the technology instead of against it.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
You're right, but they don't have to sue everyone. They can just sue a few people to try to scare the rest of us.
The RIAA and MPAA have been doing it for years. You can see that their tactics are working because no one is using P2P, right?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
*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
Here a hint: don't bother to investigate me. All my use for BitTorrent is legal. (or at least I can convince a judge I was defrauded, someone posting FreeBSD_5.3.ISO when it is really some music CD for instance) You will find a significant number of slashdot readers who likewise only use BitTorrent for legal content, of which there is plenty.
They turned it back on after I called in.
I was unable to see the evidence against me, and I was punished without being able to defend myself (no trial, just punished (Internet access disabled) on accusation alone).
This reminds me of the Salem witch trials.
I hereby announce that I will do everything in my power to destroy the copyright cartels. I will not download anything more; I do not need their shows and movies. However, I will devote my spare time towards improving the open source projects like BitTorrent, FreeNet, etc., which will allow users to share any bits they care to with no possibility of censorship or control.
I can code, and I have a decent job so I have some disposable income. As much of it as I can spare will go towards these projects (like, donations, or purchasing equipment for them, bandwidth, etc.).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Most torrent sites make it clear that postings of torrents by users are the property/responsability of the user, not the site (like what you see here on slashdot: " All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSTG"
But again, the Betamax decision was, in part, about trying to go after a manufacturer of a device for helping people break copyright. Seems spot-on to me (but I could be wrong - the way the law works nowadays is getting downright S-T-R-A-N-G-E in some areas). What next - try to break down the "common carrier" status of ISPs? Oops, they've tried that, too. Damn!
BTW - love your sig.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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
Simple solution - post with an account. After all, all ACs DO look alike.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
pr0n ...ok 64% *maybe*
No sig for you!!
Banning something from private networks (even publicly own private networks) is different from banning something by law. The University has apparently decided it has better uses for its bandwidth than to let you be a file server.
The Internet as a whole is driven by demand, not by fiat.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Go for it. You won't be able to keep me from copying the software with the GPL in it anyway. You won't be able to stop me from using that software then. So it doesn't matter. We will just take it back. You're such a drone. Copyright robs the public. It causes stagnation, not innovation. So you know where you can stuff your damn copyright laws.
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.
Not familiar with firewalls? I have to cap bittorrent off at 350KB/s otherwise it saturates my downstream. Something is definitely wrong on your end with the speed problem.
That's scary.
-
Congress will have a very hard time abridging this right for the 95% of the world who are not covered by US law.
- For those who ARE covered by US law, again, congress will have a hard time, because it will be almost impossible to word a law in such a way that it has ONLY the desired effect.
Try to come up with some wording that forbids what you want to forbid, without having unintended consequences for, or negatively impacting, other technologies.Congress has a hard enough time with simple issues (it's not like they READ the bills they pass, anyway). Can you imagine the mess they'll make out of any such law? Overly broad - it hurts too many vested interests and gets tossed out. Overly narrow - it gets worked around.
The only long-term solution for the **AAs is to get their act together and find ways to make money giving the people what they want, the way they want it. Their "natural monopoly" is dead.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Wrong. There are no investigations going on to bust bittorrent users. There are investigations going on to bust people doing illegal file sharing, and some of them happen to be using bittorrent.
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!
Or, for those too lazy to click:
To quote you,Yes, it compensates them, but the thing you don't seem to want to understand is that THIS IS THE SYSTEM THE RECORDING INDUSTRY PROPOSED and agreed to. They just never thought blank CDs would go from $35 each to 30 cents each.my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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.
If the person who posted the question wanted to measure and quantify traffic in, for example, their own network, this would be the way to do it.
Stupid ACs.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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.
Says who? Considering the popularity *and* size of, say, ISO images of Linux distros/*BSD releases/..., I actually would think twice before making statements like this. There is no study yet that examines the ratios of illegal vs. legal or illegit vs. legit BitTorrent traffic, and furthermore, not everything that you might think illegal at first glance actually is - copyright laws are quite varied throughout the world.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I would put the .torrent file in the same class as a hyperlink - it points to other material, rather than containing the other material.
So?
The issue is, for contributory infringement, whether it materially contributes to the infringement of another, with the knowledge of the infringement. As for vicarious infringement, whether the party had the right and ability to control the infringement, and directly profited from it.
Both could include pointers. In fact, Napster merely maintained a database of pointers that permitted downloaders that wanted to reproduce works to find uploaders that provided access to copies, thus distributing them. Napster never hosted anything, however.
Sony simply says that the capability of the technology for infringement, where it's capable of substantial noninfringing uses, isn't enough by itself to impute knowledge for contributory infringement. If you can show knowledge by some other means, however, Sony is no obstacle to liability.
Most torrent sites make it clear that postings of torrents by users are the property/responsability of the user, not the site
That's irrelevant. The issue is simply as it is described above. Generally, a mere disclaimer won't absolve one of liability for one's own illegal actions.
What next - try to break down the "common carrier" status of ISPs? Oops, they've tried that, too. Damn!
ISPs aren't common carriers, IIRC. Their protection from liability largely derives from some important precedents and statutory safe harbors such as 17 USC 512 or 47 USC 230. (which ironically are parts of the DMCA and CDA respectively, showing that those acts weren't all bad -- just mostly bad)
BTW - love your sig.
Thanks. It's all true, too.
-- 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.
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.
The publicity is mainly what they are looking for. Like people say "you can't buy this kind of publicity". It's an effective way to demonize music downloading of all kinds, which is their main goal. They want non-computer literate types to think it is always illegal to download music, therefore they will go to the mall and spend $19.99 on the newest pop crap. But people are slowly starting to wake up to what's going on. Does the music cartel have a backup plan for the inevitable loss of the old way of doing business?
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.
The toughie as I see it is contributory infringement.
No easy argument there (though, with timeVicarious infringement is not so hard to get around ...
The infringement is in the actual copying, to tangible media, and there is no mechanism that I know of to remotely disable someone's burner, so the "ability to control" is not there. The torrent site has no control over, and no knowledge of, whether the downloader makes 1, zero, or many copies. It could be argued that removing the torrent would also stop the copying, but that could be argued as being several steps removed from the actual act of copying. By the same logic, the sale of blank CDs should also be banned (and burners).The "directly profited from it" is easy - there is no direct profit from hosting a torrent file - it actually costs you resources. Same argument as for use of copyright works covered by one of the exemptions provided in copyright law. Whether the school (or site) as a whole makes a profit is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular use qualifies as exempt.
In other news: up here several of the major ISPs are common carriers (Rogers and Bell are both phone companies and ISPs), and they were taken to court to provide the names of file traders. Unfortunately for the music industry, Canadian law doesn't allow for the release of their subscriber's names.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
People don't look at what's presented to them anymore.
They can only see common arguments and then when things are said related to those common arguments they try to reduce what is happening around them to those commonalities. So the common argument is "file-trading is legal in Canada because we pay levies" with the response, "no, only downloading is legal, not uploading."
So the one poster says "downloading is legal in Canada" and the brain dead must reduce it to the common argument. So instead of seeing "downloading" he can only see "file-trading." And so gives the canned response.
So that is "WTF." It does make sense in a sad, sad way. Just the argument doesn't.
Atheism is a belief system as much as Christianity. It is an unwavering belief that there is NO God.
Agnostic is less of a belief system. It's more like vague avoidance of the topic all together. To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, dont know, dont care. Very strictly speaking they're both "beliefs" (so is anything anytime you use the word "is"), but I think it's safe to say atheism is more of a belief "system" than agnostic.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
(citations omitted)
You are probably thinking of the dissent, which said:
Of course, even the dissent admitted that the Court "never addresses the amount of noninfringing use that a manufacturer must show to absolve itself from liability as a contributory infringer." Though this is probably because, as I said, no actual uses need be shown; only possible uses. The dissent recognizes this: "The Court explains that a manufacturer of a product is not liable for contributory infringement as long as the product is "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." Such a definition essentially eviscerates the concept of contributory infringement. Only the most unimaginative manufacturer would be unable to demonstrate that a image-duplicating product is "capable" of substantial noninfringing uses." (citations omitted)
So anyway, I tell you what; could you post some quotes, maybe with pinpoint cites, regarding this, if you're sticking to your guns.
-- 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 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.
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.
Soyes, it is quite legal to share files in Sweden, thank you.
I'll take your word for it, though Finland isn't Sweden, last I heard.
please show me one attempt at prosecution for less than $1000 of downloads
Remember: only criminal actions are prosecuted, or require that threshold. Civil actions are brought by plaintiffs, not the state, and have no threshold. Infringements as to a work with no commercial value whatsoever still permit statutory damages that could go as far up as $150,000 per work.
I agree though, that there's comparatively little criminal enforcement of copyright law. IMO there shouldn't be any, and it should be decriminalized.
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.
I would imagine that part of the deal is that you destroy or hand over the unlawfully made copies.
-- 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 Firefox team doesn't have the source for the latest version of Internet Exploder, and they seem to be doing okay.
- Linus doesn't have the source to whatever (contrary to the Scumbag Crack-smoking Oafs), and linux is doing fine.
- OpenOffice.org doesn't have the source to Microsoft Office, and OO is OK.
Now, back on-topic (wow - what a concept). Bittorrent is only one step along the way to the future of information sharing. I huge step, but we're not there yet. If the **AA has its knickers in a twist over Bittorrent, just wait a few years2. 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?
It's a nasty job, but somebody's got to do it :-)
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
The infringement is in the actual copying, to tangible media, and there is no mechanism that I know of to remotely disable someone's burner, so the "ability to control" is not there.
The infringements are distribution by the people who upload, and reproduction by the people who download. With BT, pretty much everyone is both kinds at once.
And tangible media includes RAM (see the MAI v. Peak case, which is widely followed) so as a general rule, following e.g. Napster, you have the right and ability to control if you can kick people or files off of the portion of the network that you're involved with.
It could be argued that removing the torrent would also stop the copying, but that could be argued as being several steps removed from the actual act of copying.
But it's the actual act of distribution, so there you go.
By the same logic, the sale of blank CDs should also be banned (and burners).
No, because the issue is right and control as to the infringement. Selling someone a burner or not isn't control over infringement. Only if you could control their use of it, would it be.
Controlling people's use of a network is fairly easy, however. Networks of these types aren't standalone things, really. You'll note that the way Grokster et al avoid vicarious liability is to make sure that the network is designed so that they cannot ban users or files no matter how much they want to.
The "directly profited from it" is easy - there is no direct profit from hosting a torrent file - it actually costs you resources.
Yeah, but direct doesn't mean all that direct. More 'attributable to.' Napster profited by using the infringement there as a draw for users who could then see ads, or who could be charged for other services that were planned, etc. No one would use Napster, as it was, if they were 100% legal. So that's enough.
Whether the school (or site) as a whole makes a profit is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular use qualifies as exempt.
I would disagree. You can probably be held liable for providing free resources for infringement if you're using that somehow to profit elsewhere.
-- 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.
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
It has to be a material contribution. That is, not an insignificant one.
There is a difference between saying that 'people sell drugs in Crackton and Bumtown' and saying that 'John Doe sells drugs at 1 Main Street, Crackton, between the hours of 9 and 5, and here's his phone number and a letter of introduction.'
The difference is not always a bright line matter -- but it's there, and courts can generally find it since they're used to dealing with these sorts of things.
On a related note, I find that people here often have difficulty with some important legal concepts such as intent, reasonability, materiality, etc. Here is an essay that I think helps with this. You may find it interesting.
-- 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.
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?
Congress will have a very hard time abridging this right for the 95% of the world who are not covered by US law.
At this point I would like to introduce you to the Hon. Robert B. Zoellick, US Trade Representative. He's the guy that threatens other countries so that they do what we want them to do.
We really don't have that hard a time. Sorry.
-- 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.
There is no substantial noninfringing use of bittorrent.
whoa, wishful thinking! The fact that you have a majority of infringing traffic is irrelevant - more precisely, the wrong angle. By your argument, medical use of marijuana should not be alowed either - since the other illegal uses are by far a majority (in the US at least). significant does not pertain to signal-to-noise ratio - it has to do with the signal vs. lack of signal comparison. If by banning BitTorrent there is significant damage for legal users[*] it should be legal. The rest is about enforcing the law when illegal uses come up, which is police work, not lawmaker work.
[*] and aside from bt becoming the preferred distribution method of free ISOs (Linux, *BSD, Gutenberg and so on), if the Blizzard and WoW are any indication, game providers could move towards such distribution channels too. Since there's no comparable tech that would withstand a flashcrowd for the download launch of the next big hit game client, that makes BT a significant tech.
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.
Oops, my bad on the spelling. No, I'm not a lawyer.
However, in the Grokster decision, a lot of discussion went into how to apply Sony to that case. They knew that Aimster had put forth a proportionality test, but the Grokster judges finally held that there could be no arbitrary ratio of infringing to noninfringing use.
Any use is therefore enough.
I generalize that to weapons, drugs, etc., to fit P2P networks into perspective with the culture of freedom.
I think you have an axe to grind. Perhaps you are a record industry lawyer, Mr. AC?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
So, I guess the only solution is
- either to come up with a grokster-style torrent (or an anonytorrent)
- or figure out a way so that all the stakeholders in copyrighted material benefit from the easy distribution model of bittorrent-like services
Actually, maybe implementing (1) will help put pressure to figure out how to get to (2).my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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.
Yeah. Guess you're right. I'll have to do some tweaking...
The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule
My ass. Guns are not banned.
What the fuck country do you live in?
- Bittorrent is used for many uses, some of them copyright-infringing (trying to stay on-topic
:-)
- Various entities (several computer software vendors come to mind, and not just the usual suspects, either) have been pushing for changes at WIPO regarding copyright law
- We can ignore the various mechanisms used to lobby for change at our own risk
Having said that, Paul Cellucci did more harm to US/Canada relations from the average Canadian's perspective, than anyone in recent memory.If it happens again, we're going to let you KEEP Celine Dion!
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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.
Yeah, basically. Grokster has been quite successful in not being sued into oblivion because they designed their software around the Napster and Sony cases.
They avoid being in a position where they can get knowledge of an infringement whilst materially contributing to it, and just making the software isn't sufficient to show knowledge. And they deliberately avoid having the right or ability to control their users.
This basically is done by being highly decentralized. The people running their supernodes are still liable -- but since Grokster carefully avoids touching them, the company doesn't care.
BT as a technology is not in danger from these suits. The people who are neck deep in involvement with its nefarious uses, however, are. No way around that, save for jurisdictional avoidance (which is inconvenient at a minimum). And users are always responsible for their own actions.
-- 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.
Meh. Anything to get Cellucci out of Massachusetts is worth it IMO; sorry y'all got stuck with him.
Perhaps you'd like to take Romney off our hands too?
Various entities (several computer software vendors come to mind, and not just the usual suspects, either) have been pushing for changes at WIPO regarding copyright law
WIPO is one important organization. But don't forget WTO (which has its TRIPS Agreement), of course that the USTR will frequently engage in bilateral arrangements outside of our multilateral ones, so as to promote short term US interests and damn the diplomatic fallout.
-- 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.
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.
Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo.
Slashdot is hosted in the United States and operated by a United States corporation. I know a few people who would consider "nyeh nyeh, my country is allowed to copy music freely and yours isn't" offtopic on Slashdot.
And which record-label-approved site has music videos available for public viewing? Most of the videos I've seen have been on eMule.
Well, seeing as we're not discussing Slashdot, I fail to see the connection between its ownership and the non-topicality of non-US talk.
And when the procecution cites this post in response to your defence you'll do what?
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?
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.
Problem is none of those things are true. We know that most media is overpriced and most actual content creators(artists, programmers, etc) are underpaid(at least comparatively, famous actors/actresses are an exception of course since they don't usually do multi-picture deals and their name has brand power).
This means that someone is getting the money and it is neither the content creator nor the public, who are the people these laws were initially designed to support.
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
Bittorrent is probably the best technology currently available for distributing media since the only time you really have issues with download speed is when there are far more leechers than there are seeders. Any company which wants to distribute a file could set up a tracker link and seriously decrease their bandwidth usage.
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"
There are tonnes of RIAA approved sites where you can view music videos. After all a music video is an advertizement for an album and a band. These sites use streaming rather than downloadable media. Neither the article nor the parent ever specified that the people wanted to keep the music video.
Having said that, Paul Cellucci did more harm to US/Canada relations from the average Canadian's perspective, than anyone in recent memory.
Thats funny... I thought the guys name was George!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Nah, didn't you get the memo - we're being nice to ole Dubya this week :-)
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Don't hide behind the Betamax decision, say what you mean: Copyright is wrong and no longer makes sense.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you don't like copyright law (and I don't) just stand up and say so, don't hide behind decisions like Betamax.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"as all the .torrent files that go into the system must pass a moderator..."
If that's the case, then they are acting more like Kinko's or a publisher, and are responsible for the content.
If they merely provide a glorified copying machine, then they aren't responsible for the content.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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?
Oh, and that sig ("Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism...") is wrong for another reason: atheism is not incompatible with religion. You can have a religion without theism. For example, Zen Buddhists don't believe in God, but are very religious (and sometimes they even erect displays)
Atheism is the lack of belief in any higher power, not the belief in the lack of any higher power.
Your definition of agnosticism is correct however.
If you would like to educate yourself further, please take a look at the American Atheists website. You'll find this page to be especially informative.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
i'd say music is a useful art.
the fact that every known civilization has had it in one form or another supports that.
and what arts would you say are useful?
music can make me think, it can challenge me, it can inspire me, it can communicate nearly anything.
pretty useful, i'd say.
Now read the rest of the page...
"How can I add a torrent to SuprNova library?
It's all quite simple.. you fill in the form on this page, attach the torrent file and when a moderator approves of the submission, it gets added to the next listing after the moderation (torrent listings are generated every 30 minutes)."
"What? Moderation? Don't you trust me? :)
Well this is the internet afterall...
Though if you want to do without that moderation, upload a few good torrents with good descriptions / links.
When an admin sees your good work, he can grant you the officious status of 'Unmoderated Submitter', which gives you a neat green nickname! (and who doesn't want that, eh?)
Progressing from that point, if you really want to help out, you can request to become a 'Moderator', who.. you guessed it.. moderates incoming torrents! (plus this one gives you a cool blue nick)"
So even if it were the case that warez were put onto SuprNova solely by these "Unmoderated Submitters" SuprNova is still responsible for their actions because they are responsible for who gets unmoderated submitter status.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Exactly. I'm on a few invitation-only trackers, and none of the clients can get away with upping faked up/down ratios for any effective amount of time.
On the Bright Side, maybe there'll be fewer of those whacko Dutch "Top 100" floods in the sounds.mp3 groups. My european trackers are all humming along quite nicely, regardless of the dutch troubles.
yo!! Buggeroff, not everybody's got the same dsl/cable speeds, just be glad your mom and dad let you spend your life and their bucks in the rec room down there, and lay off the generalizing.... eh, like a good boy? thanks
Total BS. Agnostics simply say that there's been no definitive proof of whether or not (a) God(s)/Goddess(es)/It(s) exist, and it's really pointless to claim that such (a) being(s) exist (and to try to describe their characteristics) without such proof. Just because a lot of people happen to believe the same unverifiable set of opinions does NOT make that opinion fact.
As far as what happens after you die, who knows? You might find out that human beings should have never stopped worshipping a paisley monolith buried somewhere in deep Africa. The only practical approach to find out what happens to you after you die, is to wait until you die & approach the possibility of afterlife with a sense of adventure.
Listen, buddy. I dislike Bush as much as the next guy, but he has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with our current copyright laws. Go lay the blame elsewhere (hrmm.. maybe Sonny Bono?), but t'was not Dubya.
Move along.
-Matt
Duke '05
The world can be wrong today for once.
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?
Didn't Napster use essentially this argument as their defense, and get their asses handed to them in court?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
A country where guns are banned, apparently. Why do you find that concept so difficult?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Any use is therefore enough.
No, it was decided by those judges, in that case, that any use is enough. Next time round, it may be decided that some ratio or other is a minimum required, or that almost no amount of non-infringing use is enough, etc.
One case does not make a binding precedent.
I think you have an axe to grind. Perhaps you are a record industry lawyer, Mr. AC?
Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Maybe you should go out of the us for once... ;)
AC: Religion implies the belief in things which are not perceivable by our senses, and thus incompatible with Atheism.
Wrong. Atheism means you don't believe in god(s). What you're talking about can be called naturalism or materialism (or even "asupernaturalism")... disbelief in supernatural forces. Gods are one kind of supernatural force, but not the only kind, so materialists are a subset of atheists.
AC: The point of Atheism is not to avoid deism or theology but to avoid the acceptance of ideas that cannot be disproven
Once again, you have incorrect definitions for words. What you're talking about is scepticism (or "rationality", or "science"). Many atheists are also sceptics, and vice-versa, but the words are not equivalent (although this explains your confusion)
Also, you keep on capitalizing "Atheism", which is technically a spelling error. It is not a proper noun.
> Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit.
This article is the first I'd heard of widespread illegal use of BitTorrent.
I doubt if it's really all that many users; I suspect every thousand downloads
or so of this type represents only one person (whereas, every thousand Mandrake
ISO downloads represents several hundred people) -- i.e., the amount of traffic
involved doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of users.
> You really think that the scheme will remain legal because of these few users?
No, I think (BitTorrent itself) will remain legal because it isn't really a
very good system for copyright infringement. As the article notes if you read
it, someone distributing an illegal movie or somesuch exposes himself to easy
discovery for hours or even days, because the seed has to remain online until
the first recipients have the whole file.
> BitTorrent and the likes will be shut down in 2005.
No, Suprnova and the likes will be shut down. BitTorrent will continue to
be used by distributors of popular content to ease the load on their ftp
servers.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
(or at least I can convince a judge I was defrauded, someone posting FreeBSD_5.3.ISO when it is really some music CD for instance)
And when the procecution cites this post in response to your defence you'll do what?
He will likely say exactly what he said in that post. He was trying to download FreeBSD and someone posted a music CD under that title.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
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.
For example treating post shock syndrome and multiple sclerosis. These are however overlooked by the born again prohibitionists known as the fda. (Which imho is bankrolled by tobacco and alcohol companies but thats a different issue- Whoever granted them a monopoly on human suffering i'm not exactly sure)
Chemicals which have a legitimate purpose are controlled if they can beused for bombs, drugs etc.
Also in this country, (England&Wales) many objects are prohibited in situations, such as carrying a large kitchen knife in public for example.
Thank you (wish I knew who you were so I'd know who I'm thanking, but that's ok)
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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 ----
Well, actually it only requires that the technology be capable of substantial non-infringing uses.
.torrent file coming from RedHat.
Such as the distribution of the World of Warcraft open beta client, which was available via Blizzard's downloader, which turned out to be a BT client? Then there's that Fedora Core 3 ISO I got via BT - with the
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Total BS. Agnostics simply say that there's been no definitive proof of whether or not (a) God(s)/Goddess(es)/It(s) exist, and it's really pointless to claim that such (a) being(s) exist (and to try to describe their characteristics) without such proof. Just because a lot of people happen to believe the same unverifiable set of opinions does NOT make that opinion fact.
Exactly. Just to make clear why agnostic != atheist: Agnosticism implies that
(a) the existence of a [G|g]od has not been proven and that
(b) it has't been disproven either, which means that
(c) we can't really make a statement.
There's also "hard agnosticism" which assumes that it's actually impossible to prove/disprove the existance of a [G|g]od.
So, an agnostic definitely is not an atheist, because the assumption that there is no [G|g]od violates (b).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them.
You are clearly getting paid by Microsoft, SCO, the GNAA, the CCCP, PETA and the tobacco industry or else you wouldn't make up such a ridiculous claim!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Maybe there's some way to turn this back on the RIAA - Can we file some claims about "Copyright Infringement" with their ISP, and get them shut off too? Sure it wouldn't be permanent, but it would sure be inconvenient.
Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them.
./.
Could you please apply this to your own sig? I don't know if it's your opinion or not, but personally I don't really care, it the little black and white thingies that's the reason for me to read
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
All of what you're saying is true or almost true. However, the transfer rate cited was anemic compared to the numbers that should be obtained. Bittorrent is not perfect at the current moment, but it definitely isn't horrible or worthless.
.torrent for. If you setup things properly and someone can transfer it, bt will usually saturated your connection if you have a proper client. That's my experience and the same of many others.
I've seen it work great for me consistently, and see the problems you are citing. However, it's not to the degree you are citing. It will saturate my bandwidth with control packets and other overhead making it go slower. I've never seen the slowdown you're talking about, and I've downloaded 158 torrents that I still have the
I want to make sure it's said, I really do understand the problems with it. I'm a college student who is starting to study networking more extensively. I couldn't dress it down or anything with my knowledge, but I know it's not perfect. It's also the best there is right now for its purpose. So, until something is better, let's make the best of it?
That's scary.
launch.yahoo.com
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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").
Legal or not, you know what you're doing is wrong. You know that you wouldn't want it done to your works. I'm not saying you wouldn't choose to give away your copyrighted material should you create some. I'm saying you would want to be allowed to CHOOSE to do so.
I believe in FAIR use. Fair use means sharing with your friends, not a million people who know your IP address. Fair use ends at mass distribution.
Remember, its a copyRIGHT. Linux developers excersize their rights by giving away their work. Corporate entities use their rights to protect their code. Have some respect for your fellow human beings' rights, or move to China.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
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.
my highest average speed yet on a sizable torrent has been around 200kB/sec but I've seen speeds over 300kB/sec. The trick is finding well-populated trackers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good.
Sorry. That's just not so. Copyright law was designed to allow only authorized people to operate a printing press. This may appear to protect authors and whatnot(that's the spin they put on it anyway), but it's real intent has always been to insure that only "approved" people could publish and distribute their own work. The work against all P2P(and all uploading by individuals) is designed to do the same thing to stop self-distribution. We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world. Especially now that it's so easy. Hence the attempted lockdown of the internet. They may succeed as long as we remain tied to somebody's wire. This is why I constantly drone on about the necessity of developing true wireless internet(ad hoc style or P2P, a real distributed net in every sense and truly robust). Any two computers can be a micronet(Heh, remember them?), and anybody can join in on the fun. Only then will the net be truly free of control by those who shouldn't have it(gov't, corp.). It's not hard to see that products under IP protection suffer from complete stagnation until those protections expire. For example, the moment somebody makes a completely patent free computer(or ignores patent law and fixes Intel's umm...er...stuff), you will see speed increases that go way beyond Moore's law. It won't happen because of the potential for profit. It will happen because somebody or a group of "manybodies" will want a faster computer. The barriers created by IP are holding back progress. People motivated only by money to create something will never produce a product as good as one motivated by the need for the poduct. Those motivated by money are always in a rush to "get it out the door"(Do we need to mention names here?), and what comes out that door is usually garbage, and under IP law, nobody is allowed to fix it except that company. So now for the most part we are working with crap computers and crappy software, and most people are buying crappy music because that's all the publishers will let out.
Problem is none of those things are true.
Ooops! Are you disagreeing with your first paragraph? Or did you mean that none of those things are true today?
What?
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
Corporate lobbyists have won several extensions to the copyright act, which ultimately inhibits creativity by keeping the "raw materials" from entering the public domain, where they can then be used to further advance the art, literature, etc.
Nobody should "own" an idea for their lifetime + N number of years, especially since even the idea of "intellectual property" is an artificial modern construct.
See the January 2005 issue of Analog for an interesting take on this whole mess.
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
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?
Remember, its a copyRIGHT.
That doesn't make it a right just because a gov't says so. Copyright expires(eventually). Natural rights don't. The U.S. has a thing called the PATRIOT act. It's a lot of things. Patriotic is not one of them. Just because a law has a warm, fuzzy name, doesn't make it a good law. Calling something like the Jim Crow laws the "Furry Kitten" laws doesn't make them any less despicable.
What?
since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P,
Not for me, not if its Bittorrent then its usually something like 1800% slower....
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Wrong. Agnostics are atheists, and you just explained why. Agnostics don't believe they can answer "Is there a God?", which obviously means they don't believe the answer is "yes".
Both of these statements are true:
"Agnostic != atheist"
in the same way that these statements are:
"Honda != automobile"
So, all you've really demonstrated is that
Equality is different from set-membership.
Agnostics don't believe that the answer is "no" either. (Over-generalization is fun.) Depending on your definition of atheism that might or might not mean that they are atheists.
If you define an atheist as someone who doesn't assume that there is a God then agnostics are atheists. If you define an atheists as someone who assumes that there is no God then agnostics are not atheists.
All atheists I have met so far belong into the second category.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
> something called the Profanity Blacklist
Yeah, I was put on that. Funny thing is, that kind of "censorship" (I know it isn't, really) is the same as CyberSitter & stuff like that. What I mean is, when I was put on that list I hadn't been swearing. I was talking about politics at the time, closer to the "Right" side. So, evidently, backing a Republican is profane. Hmm, maybe it wasn't an incorrect assessment.
> We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world
One problem with this line is that "their poison" doesn't belong to them. They are spreading ??AA's poison. I'm just happy that I got all the movies & TV shows I really wanted before the torrent sites went down. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good ones left to use when the next TV season starts (other than TVTorrents.something).
> the fact that every known civilization has had it in one form or another supports that.
Almost every known civilization did not charge for the right to listen to its music, though. That's precedent.
> what arts would you say are useful?
Art as in the art itself, none. They do, as you point out, have useful attributes though. They can make you think about other things, etc.
> music can make me think, it can challenge me, it can inspire me, it can communicate nearly anything.
> pretty useful, i'd say.
What about the music that DOESN'T make you think? The stuff I have on only for background noise. You could argue that that is "useful," but it could be static as well. Music just sounds better than static. Is that less useful stuff freely copyable then?
FYI, a "few" people live in Canada too.
> Why can't Americans ever seem to see the difference?
Because most of the people make insults to cover ALL Americans. When someone says "You stupid yanks," I don't assume they mean "The stupid yanks in charge of the US," I assume they mean what they say. Many of them actually hate Americans because they can't disassociate Americans with the government that controls them.
Agnostics don't believe that the answer is "no" either.
Correct. And since theists are anyone who believes the answer is "yes", while atheists are everybody else, that means agnostics are atheists.
Depending on your definition of atheism that might or might not mean that they are atheists.
Since someone earlier in the thread was already kind enough to paste in the definition from the dictionary, that's what I've been using.
If you define an atheists as someone who assumes that there is no God
And in general, if you define a word to mean something besides what it really means, you can "prove" all kinds of wacky stuff.
Most torrents linked to on /. are "legitimate," AFAIK.
atheist noun a person who believes that God does not exist -- compare AGNOSTIC
agnostic noun a person who is not sure whether or not God exists or who believes that we cannot know whether God exists or not -- compare ATHEIST
-- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, sixth edition (2001)
Either the OALD is wrong or I am right - or this is yet another area where the definitions depend on who you ask.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
-- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Since the definition established for this discussion was already explained 6 posts ago, your introduction of alternative, wrong sources is meaningless. Proc6 gave a reference she trusted, and I explained that she was incapable of reading it.
AC: For instance, in the case of a legit user, a port 80 will never transfer gigabytes of data per day.
Odd. Have you see this site, http://slashdot.org? It transfers 10s of gigabytes daily over port 80, and is completely legit.
Could you please explain to me why exactly my source is wrong any yours is not? All I see is two excerpts from two different dictionaries who differ in one detail. Without further information from a source that knows more about this topic than a dictionary it's pretty tough to call one source right and the other one wrong.
Also, the source you cite points to two definitions, one of which says the same as my source. Given that your argument as to why agnostics are athists is based on a certain interpretation of the first definition given by your source, having the second one contradict you might prove bad for your argument.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Could you please explain to me why exactly my source is wrong any yours is not?
For the FORTH and FINAL time: "my" source is right because it's not "my source"- it's Proc6's source. And since I was responding to Proc6, her source was the pertinent one!