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Wired Interviews Bram Cohen, Creator of BitTorrent
ZP-Blight writes "Wired has posted an in-depth five page interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of the popular Peer-2-Peer software, BitTorrent."
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a 5!!! page article?! I sure hope they figure out a good way of distributing all that bandwidth to a large amount of people with minimum slowdown!
Grease & Counterbalance
A local radio station WJR 760 in Detroit interviewed him earlier this week. It was apparent that he needed to hire someone with a little better speaking skills - especially when he knows he'll be ambushed at nearly every opportunity.
I couldn't believe my ears when the talk show host asked him: "Does it bother you that people use your product for negative purposes, sort of like the scientists who developed the formulas used in the atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands?"
My jaw hit the floor when his reply was "Well, this isn't exactly an atom bomb...." That's why the lawyers are winning right now. It's not because they're smarter. It's because they are SO good at twisting things around, and us geeks can't speak in public worth a damn.
He also wouldn't admit that bit-torrent is a revolutionary way of transfering data, he kept downplaying his program. Come on man! You're not a programmer right now. You're a salesman and a human resource department. Act like it!
Personally I think BitTorrent's core advantage over other file sharing technologies is also its core architectural weakness, namely its centralised nature. This allows an editorial filter on content made available through BitTorrent, yet also makes a juicy legal target. Until recently BitTorrent's obscurity has protected it, but clearly this is no-longer the case.
(Disclaimer: I am working on some free software that is competitive with BitTorrent)
yep
Comment Read. There will be a delay before the comment seeps into your brain.
I think so, but the search is down, so who knows? I know they posted an article about a wired bittorrent article sometime recently. But that could have been the article about how movies/files/etc are distributed.
Seastead this.
Wired is getting slow.
Wired
Cohen
Wired
Cohen
Wired
Cohen
Wired
Cohen
Not a 5 page article. An article on the web does not have pages, since the web does not have pages (you scroll down), What we do have is an article split in 5 sections to allow for more ads, more branding, more clicks.
Wired Marketing droid to potential advertisers: We got 5 million clicks yesterday--grumble under breath: one million people clicked 5 times-- and displayed 25 million ads --grumble under breath: 5 ads per click, times 5 sections.
"Piter, too, is dead."
How old is this article? I remember reading it atleast a week ago. Is slashdot slipping or what?
That was in the January issue which was on newsstands a month ago. You know, the one with the Virgin dude Branson on the cover?
A link on a website leads to a file on a p2p network. This is the killer app of bit torrent and the reason it is likely here to stay.
Actually, the previous Wired article was not an interview with him. It was an editorial on the "Dark Pyramid" of the pirating underground. There was no interview with Cohen in it if I remember.
I can't seem to get to this new one just now (thank you
Other than that.. great product! I downloaded megs of tsunami videos from http://www.waveofdestruction.org/ as they were posted.
Speak truth to power.
This is at the top of the story:
:P
"Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo. For free video-on-demand, just click here."
Unfortunately someone forgot to add the link
The executive vice president for research and planning at CBS, David Poltrack, elaborates: "In our research with consumers, content-on-demand is the killer app. They like the idea of paying only for what they watch." The trick, he figures, is to work out a solution before the audience for illegal downloading becomes truly huge. He figures the networks have 10 years."
Come on dude! We don't like paying for content on demand, we like getting content on demand for free. And, you think it'll take 10 years? Try 3, at most.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
If you have not tried Azureus, you have not felt the full power of bittorrent.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Okay I get the basics of Bit torrents distributed file sharing. But could someone please explain the details. That is how does the original site know who has what slices. How does the system heal itself when a seeder signs off taking with him some of the pieces. How to the nodes decide which peers to ask for what and get updated on who has what as more peers sign on. How is the download=upload actually enforced--what stops me from creating some evil bittorrent that only downloads then hands out shit.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wouldn't mind playing with some Amazons myself.
He's smart, he's understated, he keeps doing new logical puzzlement stuff, and he's made a simple application spread worldwide without marketing through word of mouth, and simply because it does what it's meant to well. That's true innovation.
But I have to say, Sailor Moon Bram really freaks me.
One of my coworkers floats in the same circles as this guy. Apparently he's the type of person people try not to talk to at parties but who gets invited anyway for absolutely inscrutible reasons.
"In our research with consumers, content-on-demand is the killer app. They like the idea of paying only for what they watch." The trick, he figures, is to work out a solution before the audience for illegal downloading becomes truly huge. He figures the networks have 10 years.
Sounds like a very liberal estimate. I'd say that illegal downloading has already become pretty "huge". If it wasn't, what are the MPAA/RIAA getting so worked up about, and why are all these TV executives commenting on it in the first place?
Later in the article they discuss the takedown notice Dreamworks sent to ThePirateBay.org concerning Shrek 2, for those of you who havn't already, and are interested to read the letter (and the hilarious response), check it out here:
Dreamworks Takedown Notice & Response
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Yet this feature has existed in other P2P applications for years.
Not only that, it exists in Kazaa which was mentioned as the "slower technology" in the same article. Yet, in reality, Bittorrent really seems to be faster from what I hear. What is the actual explanation?
I misread his name as Brian Cohen.
"He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"
Ho hum. Long day.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Here's something that I've been wondering:
I haven't looked at the source, but given the broad description of the protocol I'm assuming each "chunk" has a GUID along with the payload. Obviously, this allows for swarming and reduced download/upload bottlenecks, but doesn't it also allow for easy corruption of the data stream?
For example, when the RIAA tried to defeat Napster by brute force, namely setting up drone/honeypot PCs with libraries of corrupted files, the method failed miserably. I would guess that by its nature, knowing what IP you were downloading an entire file from, it wouldn't be too hard to filter out known RIAA servers.
But, with BitTorrent handling the gathering of chunks from the swarm from multiple IPs, doesn't that greatly increase the likelihood of success for a similar attack?
For example, shouldn't the MPAA be able to download the source code and modify encoding so that if (Random() % 1000) a chunk flips some of the bits in the payload? Wouldn't installing this code on a farm of drones eventually "corrupt" the datastreams on BitTorrent?
Or are their safeguards in place for this kind of attack?
The article states that he is living off his Paypal donations. Anyone have any guesses on how much money he may be making off Bittorrent? Of the people here that donate, how much do you send?
I like bittorrent, but my problem is that I can't easily search for what I want in torrent form.
Please, I hope I am wrong, but it seems that one is forced to go to "seedy" (I mean, really seedy, as in icky) websites to get the links.
Point to point is a protocol for connecting devices over the internet e.g. over a VPN using point to point tunneling protocol
P2P is peer-to-peer e.g. for downloading... erm... Linux iso's, yeh, Linux iso's
How can I get people to try to talk to me? I've got the shower thing down right now, so I know that's not an issue... The clothes, maybe the clothes are out of date? I can't tell, I have no fashion sense. Or maybe it's the hair, that hasn't seen a blade for about 5 months?
Hmm....
Actually, this interview appeared before the Shadow Network article. It's from last year, Dec 29, 2004 -
0 .html/
http://wired.com/news/archive/0,2618,2004-12-29,0
Yes, bittorrent is dead. Nothing to see here, move along. Suprnova was the only website that was or would have been able to host torrent files for the general populace to download.
Back to the Mom's garage crowd on mIRC with you!
72 comments and gone. New record.
The big media would love to take him down personally for creating bit torrent, and the only thing stopping them is that Bit Torrent is just legitimate enough to be a hard case to sell. Enough users use it legally, that they couldn't argue it's primarily for piracy. But what if that were to change?
Bit Torrent is just a tool, it cannot do anything illegal by itself. The user must choose to do something illegal with it. Going after Cohen is no different than going after a gun maker for gun crime. The exact same arguments used against gun makers could be used against Cohen. He's not screening his users, is he? Neither are the gun makers. In both cases, some of their users are committing crimes. Different types of crimes, but either way, a legitimate tool is used for an illegitimate purpose.
In the long run, the only way to win against the forces opposed to individual liberties is to link our causes. This is the IP equivalent of what the NRA faces with guns, so it only makes sense for both camps to realize we are fighting the same ideology just in two different manifestations.
Allies, even allies that don't really understand your cause as well as you do, are important. Many of the gun owners' postings I have read on right wing boards frequently have derisive attitudes toward the **AA now and see them as the computer equivalent of "gun grabbers." It's a fitting analogy because the **AA want to be the "computer grabbers." Mandatory DRM is akin to mandatory trigger locks because either way, some bureaucrat is telling you how you must maintain and use your property.
To protect our rights we must continue to assert individual responsibility as the solution and push for solutions that go after perpetrators of crime, not their tools. That is the only way we can not only cut down on crime, but also protect people like Cohen from amoral, mercenary attorneys like those behind the **AA
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
what's funny is that the pirate bay got slashdotted due to this story. by the third page its basically "hey everyone get free movies, television etc.!" to people who didn't even know what BT was...plus not too many people knew about piratebay before. haha. stupid Wired
Now, to the extent that BitTorrent's architecture lends itself to centralized control of content, as asserted by the original poster, Cohen has indeed opened up the owner/operators of said points of control to legal attack.
Seastead this.
I read the article (no, really!) and found it to be mildly interesting. What bothered me, though, are the statements that, basically, "the more clients that are uploading pieces, the faster the download gets"
That's all fine and dandy, but the author makes it sound like this gets around the limitation of one's own pipe to the Internet. If you're on a modem, there's no way you are going to cut down a 500MB download from hours to a few minutes, yet the article has a paragraph that implies that an hours-long Kazaa download is cut down to a few minutes with BitTorrent.
Obviously, if the limiting factor is the source pipe, then more sources equals faster download at the destination. This kind of writing bugs me since it doesn't mention such obvious limitations -- it all sounds "miraculous" (or "marketish"?).
Here's the article text, Bittorent style: ...von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because Linux...
C'mon, start serving you leeches! That's all I got!
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
...BitTorrent is also used for legal purposes. As people figure out how to make money with it I predict that the majority of BT traffic will be legal. I used it recently to distribute Tsunami videos on my blog. 30,000 visitors a day over the last week and I agree that its centralized nature is its downfall, but not for legal reasons. BitTorrent trackers apparently use a ton of bandwidth and they're not Apache friendly if you're using BlogTorrent. We need decentralized or distributed tracking before BT really takes over.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
It would be nice if the submitter or "editors" had linked to the printer-friendly 1 page version.
(MPAA exec on intercom to his secretary): "mrs Jones find me a 3D prototype manufacturer".
[delay]
(secretary):"I found four of them, but Jesus, they're $5million each!!!"
(exec): "buy four and ship them to that fucker Cohen by the end of the day - and my names not Jesus it's God"
You're propably right about him not being a rhetorical genius - ie. the article states :
:)
Cohen in fact has Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.
I don't imagine many people, who have trouble relating to others, are great speakers.
But his reply to the "an atom bomb" question is IMO actually rather good. Any semi-intelligent person should be able to see, that a comparison between Hiroshima & Nagasaki and downloading copyrighted material is plain stupid.
Instead of suggesting for him to hire someone with a little better speaking skills, my suggestion would be for the radiostation to hire someone with a bit better interviewing skills
http://a1112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/20040528/www. wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/images/FF_150_bittor rent1_f.jpg
Bringing your mosaic ideas to life. Mosaiclegs
I went to High School with Bram Cohen. He was brilliant back then too. The article paints a pretty good picture of what I remember of him. We went to Stuyvesant, a specialized HS in NYC with a standardized test to get in. Basically, it's a school for uber-nerds.
Found a picture of the Math team back in 1993. Bram's the guy with the bushy hair in the back row near the center next to the tall asian guy and another guy with a hat. He was the co-captain of the team that year, if I remember correctly. I think he ended up in the State University of New York at Buffalo. That always bothered me for some reason. He definitely was smart enough to make it into a better school. Why did he choose to go to Buffalo?
AnimeNEXT anime convention
CNET report Just weeks after legal attacks crippled the popular BitTorrent file-swapping community, an underground programmer from its ranks has stepped forward to announce new software designed to withstand future onslaughts from Hollywood. Sloneck, the head of that now-defunct SuprNova, officially announced the Exeem project in an interview on the NovaStream Webcasting network.
...The only shows he watches are those he buys on DVD. He particularly loved the first season of Paris Hilton's The Simple Life. "You can watch that show for six hours," Cohen says, "and your brain is still empty."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
By the way I don't build tables for a living. Should have previewed again.
As other posters noted, the .torrent contains the "signature" of the data, so you can be sure it is really what you asked for.
.torrent from a TRUSTED source, usually a web site, instead of searching the network itself using keywords.
But unlike other p2p programs, you need to get the
This is why you can still get fakes on eDonkey even if the files are also identified by their hash. Of course if you are using a trusted website to get your ed2k:// links, you get the same benefits (minus the incredible bittorrent speed of course).
Is there a way to use P2P/BitTorrent anonymously? What would be a cool BitTorrent app is one that can not only use BitTorrent but also use an IP Anonymizer.
I'm sure every hollywood film maker out there doesn't have food on their plate
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
From TFA:
"We consider it a regrettable but necessary step," says John Malcolm of the MPAA. "We saw the devastating effect that peer-to-peer piracy had on the record industry."
I literally had to wipe the spittle off my monitor after reading that.
(For those uninformed: There is no evidence that the recording industry profits are down due to file sharing.)
I think Wired purposefully lacked many details of the BT protocol for obvious reasons: their target audience.
I think Wired tried to dumb that article down (waaaaay down!) for the sake of moron's who cant understand what a tracker is, or the concept of optimistic (un)choking (but then again, do you really wanna read about all that stuff in a Wired article??)
seems like everybody's really picking on the little technical details (although I guess they should have reworded it to sound not-quite-as-WRONG).
Enjoy an e-piphany
that's not what it was DESIGNED to do.
Hell, the INTERNET is primarily used to steal stuff, if you want to break it down by percentage.
Should the Internet be illegal? No.
So why do you care about what bittorrent is used for now? Play up the POSITIVE aspects, not the negative ones. Christ on crutches.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Because other "good" clients won't give the pirate clients the pieces they want. No seeder would run a client that tolerated leechers that didn't tit-for-tat.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If the content providers provide a way for people to pay for the content that they like then they would be surprised to find that a lot of people would pay.
.
They could have a disclosure in the movie that reads something like this:
if you liked this movie and you feel that, perhaps, you somehow viewed it from a copy for which no license has been paid, then you may pay for it by sending a check too . .
or: log on to our_website and pay for it there.
Until the content providers do this they really should not complain that things aren't being paid for.
We are not all thieves.
They will be pleasantly surprised that they will get a percentage of people who will pay their license fees.
It would be free money for them. All they would have to do is spend the money. They don't have to provide distribution.
Recently the above companies announced intentions to distribute movies online over DSL set-top boxes
I wonder if each STB will have BitTorrent on it and DRM files will be shared out as they are requested by customers - the only download the consumer would have to make from the distributors central server would be the DRM authorisation key?
This could be the key to legal movie download services
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Basically, the other people in your tracker group sort of give you download leases; when you are able to upload X amount to them they will honor X*Y requests from you. You take whatever you need from every seeder, and then use that to fill in pieces missed by non-seeders so you can get download leases from them as well (seeders don't tit-for-tat IIRC).
Unless the files are very large and take hours to complete, a tracker group will be upload heavy amongst the finished group, and download heavy amongst the unfinished. I imagine the distribution of upload vs. download over time looks poisson in nature.
The real benefits in bittorrent is taking advantage of people who are altruistic and don't take down their client _right_ after it finishes downloading, but leave it on for an hour to help others with an additional non-tit-for-tat download source.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
- The FBI goes after a P2P server because it is transporting illegal material.
- The FBI goes after a P2P server because it refuses to cooperate in an investigation.
See the difference?Seastead this.
Did he do much work on Steam?
Peerguardian 1.99 (pr14-3) blocks loads of IPs that belong to gov't, music industry and the likes.
http://methlabs.org/
"For movie industry insiders, file-sharing seems like all downside. Unlike TV networks, movie studios get no revenue from advertising - getting massive online circulation won't put a penny in their box offices."
Funny, it seems like I have to sit through a good 20 mins of commercials before movies these days. Not to mention the cheezy local ad "slides". In some capacity, that revenue is paying the movie studios.
So do most of the non-conventional quantum leapers. When you have a son who has autism, you begin to see the signs of it in other people.
It isn't a matter of 'he's not trying to communicate effectively', it's that he CAN'T - at least not easily. Believe me, it's heartbreaking to see a child locked in his own world unable to communicate with others or even unaware WHY he should. It's even worse when you're an adult and no one around you can understand why you can't answer questions directly.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I.e. pick which files in the torrent to download first?
not
"Him make good snoo snoo."
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Dude, the punchline of the The Village was that you figured it out halfway through, which made the actions of the Elders inhuman and horrible.
Then of course, there's what you can infer from the actions of the guards.
That movie is *much* deeper and more multi-layered than any of Shyamalan's other work.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
All important browsers are open source now. But i still have to see an annoucement that BT is now incorporated into browser X as a protocol.
heck, you could probaly do it with one library and some implementation details in the browsers, as most are written in C or C++.
Just a protocol just like http:// ie bt:// that delivers the content to the browser for display.
Maybe this will solve the slashdot effect.
(oh wait no, it won't. most slashdot readers betray their geekness and still use IE, the browser that has not seen maintance sine 2000. This will maybe get them over the line; free porn directly in your browser)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
So, a telented protocol designer should branch out in to entertainment industry economics and/or psychology, rather than design neat new software?
What branch of ethics do you subscribe to?
I forget what 8 was for.
He should have answered: There is no way to use my product for negative purposes.
The exchange of information, and in general the exchange of non-physical objects that can be copied at no cost, is not wrong. The only thing that's wrong is the law that says that non-physical objects can have an owner.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And then we should regulate cars, knives and brickmakers. And monitor every communication between people. Perhaps there should be a LawXML spec that everyone should build in to every application, so that when copyright is extended again, old software doesn't "mistakenly" allow ilegal activity.
That which is not forbidden is mandatory.
I forget what 8 was for.
"He particularly loved the first season of Paris Hilton's The Simple Life. "You can watch that show for six hours," Cohen says, "and your brain is still empty.""
Just like paris....
anyhow, its a good read. a little too focused on TV and Legal issue's, but overall good. I hope bram continues to have an excellent development career.
"..since the web does not have pages.."
;-)
Never heard of a web page, huh? Here, this should get you started.
Looks cool, but no linux client, so no dice for me
Large companies like to keep things the way they are. One of these days, some punk with a million dollars will start a web based TV network and light a fire under all the major television networks.
Radio stations became TV stations when someone decided to invent the TV. This is just another step forward in technology and eventually it'll drag the big companies along with it kicking and screaming.
By 2006, 40,000,000 downloaded.
If 1 in 100 (400,000) people donate an average of $10, that means he'll have about 4,000,000 easy...
I understand he has a problem which does not facilitate him playing well with others. However, it sounds like his more like an arrogant programmer that had to quit his job and work day and night to produce anything worthwhile. I mean we all get ideas for our pet projects when we can't work on them and have to deal with the reality of life. The real talent comes when you can hold down a job as a factory worker, programmer, pizza boy, whatever and then find time to produce something that might be of use to others in your little free or borrowed time. His comparing himself to Mozart is little more than arrogance and I find it to be not the case from what I can glean from the article.
http://www.chessvariants.com/link2.dir/amazons.htm l
Free games:
http://www.csun.edu/~lorentz/amazon.htm
http://www32.ocn.ne.jp/~yss/index.html
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Is whitewater: http://ww.walrond.org/
When Linux patches come out, some RPM servers get overloaded (and apt-get and up2date, and others). If instead of downloading the new updated software as ftp or http downloads, they should be bittorment files. No matter how overloaded the server gets, you get fast downloads. I know when new distributions are relased they are in the range of 650-2560MB (sometimes even up to 5.1GB). At 150KB/s, that's a 9.5 hour download. Torrent is the only way, but the good news is that instead of having to download across the internet, you usually only need to download from either your ISP or from a maximum of 2 hops from your ISP. Your bandwidth is fully utilized.
The legal test established in the Betamax case is not: what do the majority of users do? It is: are there substantial legitimate uses? And I think the answer for Bittorrent is clearly: yes. Or, rather, YES! It's not just Linux distros. The tracker at http://bt.etree.org sees TERABYTES of data flow past on a DAILY basis, all of it 100% legal music from taper-friendly bands. I'd say that's pre-e-e-etty substantial. And that's just one site! (Although it probably is the largest completely-legit BT site in the world. But they're also competing with Furthurnet, which is a more traditional P2P system, but also 100% legal music (but it requires java, so I don't use it - my motto about java is: "write once, run anywhere-but-here").)
PCtechtalk recently had an interesting interview with Bram about performance and stability: http://www.pctechtalk.com/?m=show&id=3062
I don't know what's mnore funny, the link, or the fact that you put a referer in there.
Some AC.
"Does it bother you that people use your product for negative purposes, sort of like the scientists who developed the formulas used in the atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands?"
The proper response is "Yes, it does bother me, but we only have Bill Gates to blame. After all, without the Windows Operating System, these same people would never be able to use the internet for anything illegal. KaZaa, eDonkey, et al are just exploiting flaws in Windows, after all."
Yes, I have a torrent client on my Mandrake install, the DJ would never even go that direction. Plus we get to rag on Billy Gates using his own words, slightly skewed.