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
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!
... 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.
The irony is that a web site dedicated toward serving a p2p protocol expressly designed to rememdy the slashdot effect gets slashdotted.
So why don't they just use Bittorrent to distribute their mirrors?
As a solid, upstanding citizen of the United States (a country which has the best government that money can buy), I firmly believe in strongly adhering to all the laws of this fine country.
;)
That's why I always go to thepiratesbay.org.
They are located in Finland, of course, where US Copyright Law doesn't apply. So it's legal for them to offer files for downloading.
And, of course, in the US it's legal to download files. What is illegal is to offer more than $1000 worth of them for uploading.
So, please, let us all keep our Bittorrent downloads legal, folks. Thank you.
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.
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.
Anyone have a .torrent of the article ?
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).
*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
Isn't it Sweden?
:-).
Yes.
Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers
here.
It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
pr0n ...ok 64% *maybe*
No sig for you!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
- 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Make a music sharing program called RIAA, and a video sharing program MPAA.
Then follow-up and make an overall sharing program called CopyRight.
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.
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"
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.
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