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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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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
It's calld a "printer friendly version".
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Given that quoted paragraph and the following, it is apparent that even after interviewing the creator, the author has absolutely no idea what bit torrent is for or how it works.
He [Cohen] sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers...
Yeah, I'm sure that's what he was thinking when he created the protocol...
a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie
No, trackers keep track of who is downloading or seeding the file, there is no sniffing around. Infact, there is no search capability that I am aware of...
The more files you're willing to share, the faster any individual torrent downloads
Are you kidding me? No... the more people downloading/seeding an individual torrent, the faster it downloads. More files have nothing to do with anything.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
go to www.google.com type in FileIwant filetype:torrent Press search.
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"?).
It would be nice if the submitter or "editors" had linked to the printer-friendly 1 page version.
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
The interesting part is that the protocol (or trackers) don't have to deal with those kind of decisions. The clients can each behave however they want, but you are rewarded for playing nice with better connectivity. Badly behaved clients end up with no peers willing to send them data.
There is nothing gained by writing a BT client that is an asshole to it's peers and nothing stopping you from trying. It will simply be ignored by the other peers that aren't assholes.
Culture is more than commerce