Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wired Interviews Bram Cohen, Creator of BitTorrent

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bit-o'-honey dept.

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."

31 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. WJR 760 by Puls4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:WJR 760 by kmak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And if he "brags" about Bittorrent, the Slashdot crowd will call him arrogant...

      I agree with you with being more articulate though. I think the standard answer should be to deflect responsibility, just like a politican!

      Probably something along the lines of:
      "It is the responsibility of the individual to decide what he/she wants to do with it. I'm only responsible for discovering new things."

      Or maybe even a bit extreme:
      "Someone can stab someone else to death with a pen. Does that mean pens should've never been invented?" (Or insert something equally trivial..)

      Merit alone, sadly, isn't enough anymore..

      --

      I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
    2. Re:WJR 760 by gowen · · Score: 3, Insightful
      My jaw hit the floor when his reply was "Well, this isn't exactly an atom bomb...."
      But he's right. The Atomic Bomb dominated international politics from 1945 to 1990. This is seriously small potatoes by comparison. Kudos to him for keeping his achievement in perspective.

      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    3. Re:WJR 760 by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nope, that's not it. The proper response is something like:

      (Cohen) What can I do? Even now, there are evil bittorrent people who have used my software to burn villages to the ground, teach schoolchildren to write with their left hands, sodomize livestock and advocate american usage of the metric system! It makes my skin crawl to hear how it ressurrected Jeffrey Dahmer and caused him to go on a zombie rampage, eviscerating screaming women and devouring innocent children! Stop zombie Dahmer, think of the children! What will we do when the terrorists twist my innocent application into a weapon of mass destruction, simply because Congress couldn't stop the partisan bickering long enough? Bittorrent doesn't even prevent AIDS, let alone cure it!

      (Radio host) But, you say this can be used by terrorists, and you still created it? What?

      (Cohen) What, does that sound a little ridiculous to you?

      (Radio Host) I dunno, can it be used...
      (Cohen, interrupting) Because it sounds more than a little ridiculous for you to compare Bittorent to nuclear weapons. C'mon, tell us straight. The RIAA didn't put you up to this, but you've been one of their lapdogs so long, they don't have to explicitly tell you to do this sort of character assassination.

      (Radio Host) Now wait a minute...
      (Cohen) No, you wait a minute. Bittorrent doesn't do anything the internet itself doesn't do. Except that if ever the RIAA was so insane to suggest the internet be made illegal, even the most bought senator would laugh. Bittorrent is just a networking protocol, something your mouth-breathing bosses couldn't describe in layman's terms if their lives depended on it. A protocol that makes the internet slightly more efficient, and not much more. It's clever, I like it, and so do quite a few other people. What do you say to that? (stomps out of the booth).

    4. Re:WJR 760 by stupidfoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So that fact that a bunch of linux distro's being released as .torrent links means nothing, eh?

      Where did I say that?

      Just because some people are using BitTorrent to violate copyrights does not mean it has no legitimate use.

      You know what primarily means? You might want to check your dictionary. Or here, I'll help you.

      Primarily
      [adv] for the most part; "he is mainly interested in butterflies"

      Hence, the primary use for bittorrent is currently pirating. Yes, there are other uses, but they're not as popular.

      I can get a shiny new (legal) .iso image in far less time over torrent then I can over an http download, in almost every case.
      Congrats. I use it for legal means too. But that doesn't mean I ignore the fact that most people don't.

      It is the person who misuses it, not the tool, that's the problem.
      Exactly, so addressing the reason that people misuse a creation of his is a perfectly good way of answering a loaded question like that.

    5. Re:WJR 760 by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not to go offtopic, but at what point do you start ignoring laws in a serious way? If it was made law that you have to murder your newborn son, most reasonable people wouldn't even hesitate to (attempt to) evade that law.

      Granted, now all the copynazis will jump on me, for "making a comparison that is ludicrous". But I'm not, just illustrating the far extreme end of this spectrum.

      Is it right for an IP cartel like the RIAA to lock up all music forever? I mean, even if this falls into the public domain some day, there is nothing to say that they have to release the keys to decode them. But that's just music, nothing art-worthy in a traded Britney Spears mp3, same with movies...

      What about books? We're safe for what, the next 30 years, until the big public libraries digitize to save money on storage. Even if they only do so with public domain works, at some point, the publishing industry will want to cash in too, and provide only ebooks. How will that go down?

      Us frogs, I fear they're boiling us slowly. And you people sit around arguing that even if it is getting a little warmer, it's not hot at all.

    6. Re:WJR 760 by stupidfoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, if you don't do it, than no one must!

      Come on. Seriously now. Why must we all be so blind to this? Bittorrent has a plethora of legal and worthwhile uses. The problem is that the majority of users out there aren't using it for that. Arguments of "I don't use it illegally! I download linux with it!" are pointless.

    7. Re:WJR 760 by RailGunner · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Exactly, so addressing the reason that people misuse a creation of his is a perfectly good way of answering a loaded question like that.

      I disagree, I think that would be out of scope. I think it would have been far more effective to list the legal uses and focus on the positive. It's possible to violate copyright with a lot of different items - cameras, CD Burners, pencil and paper, a photocopier, a scanner, etc. But - that's not exactly "newsworthy", is it?

      Also, is there any way to list metrics of exactly what people are downloading via BitTorrent? If there isn't, it's only an opinion that BitTorrent is used primarily for copyright violations. I could argue that the legal uses are numerous, and I can think of a number of sites like this one that have numerous, legal Torrent links, and looking at the traffic stats, Distrowatch gets a lot of hits.

    8. Re:WJR 760 by RailGunner · · Score: 2, Insightful
      A better analogy would be a knife. A knife can be used to trim fat from a chicken breast before I grill it, to dice tomatoes, to trim excess plastic off a cast mold, to open boxes, to perform surgery, etc.

      A knife can also be used to rob, kill, maim, and hurt other people.

      The reason I think the gun analogy is not as effective is because there are too many people with the shortsighted mentality that guns are "bad" and that the world would somehow be safer if all the guns were destroyed... like you couldn't get shot with a crossbow.

      Knives are a better analogy, because people are more familiar with them. Not everyone hunts, so many people are unfamiliar with a deer hunting rifle. The only gun they've seen is the Sat. Night Special...

      And this is where the RIAA / MPAA has been quite effective - by equating p2p apps with piracy, they've poisoned the minds of a lot of people who are completely unfamiliar with what can be an extremely useful tool, and this is the mindset we have to combat, not the abuses of the RIAA / MPAA.

    9. Re:WJR 760 by DrSkwid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I didn't say no-one does, I merely stated that not everyone does, one of whom is myself.

      Arguments of "I don't use it illegally! I download linux with it!" are pointless.

      Are they? Yet that is exactly type of argument that legitimized home VCRs

      --
      There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    10. Re:WJR 760 by tsarin · · Score: 2, Insightful
      He is arrogant -- astonishingly so.

      Take a look at his LiveJournal, for example. Well nigh every other post is an ego-wank of a calibre to make even DJB shake his head in shame. Bram's right and everyone else in the world is a moron.

      Some years ago, I was on a mailing list with him. During a discussion on building crypto-using apps, a few posters were arguing in favor of making sure apps used parameterizable encryption a/o hashing algorithms -- so when, say, a weakness is discovered in MD5 (hmm ... sounds familiar, no?), you weren't hosed. Bram disagreed, suggesting that merely the app's version number was somehow sufficient for getting around the problem. You just push out an upgrade that uses a new algorithm.

      His response to perfectly civil -- oh yeah, and valid, sound, convincing argument that his suggestion was bunk, such as that you can't force users to upgrade, how will new versions play nicely with old, &c, was "Fuck you" and name-calling.

      Nice.

      I'll still use his protocol, and even donate, because it's about the best we've got right now for what it does, and I appreciate that. But I don't -- and don't have to -- like or respect him.

    11. Re:WJR 760 by jandrese · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's a Livejournal, self centered ego wanking is required to get an account.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    12. Re:WJR 760 by Per+Wigren · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't know the rate of AS among geeks, but I do know that neuropsychological conditions (I like to call it "differently abled" rather than "disabled") are overrepresentated among geeks and the more extreme subcultures. I myself has ADD and I know a lot of ADD/ADHD persons who are geeks AND goth/industrial/punk..

      AS people (AS=Asperger's Syndrome) tend to be superhuman geniouses in a few narrow areas while ADD/ADHD people tend to be theoretical almost-geniously experts in a wide range of subjects.

      Our (me and my fellow ADDers) problem is that we are so easily bored and when we see the finish closing in we already finished the project in our head (the only thing left is to actually implement it) and the mental energy runs out and we have to move on to something else so we don't get a deep depression. Repetitive work (such as implementing on the computer the stuff you already implemented in your head) causes depressions..

      The reason ADDers are overrepresentated among subcultures are that our way of thinking and making conclusions differ quite a lot from non-ADDers. For example we skip the little details called norms, principles, culture, traditions, etc and go straight to the root matter of the current subject. That's why a lot of us don't feel that we fit in and search alternative lifestyles that fit our minds better...

      People with ADD and AS can be the biggest resource for a company that they can possibly get. You just have to rethink and adjust the internal politics a little. A single interested ADDer can do 10 persons work in short time. You just have to make sure that someone else take over when it gets repetitive and move the ADDer to another project that he/she shows interested in. And put the byrocrazy to a minimum, nothing can kill motivation more...

      Oh, did I mention that we tend to make long LISP-like rants with deeply nested paranthesis? :) Have patience, we'll soon get back ontopic as we usually have a good stackmemory. :)

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    13. Re:WJR 760 by iamwahoo2 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Bittorrent does nothing more than speed up some transfers over the internet. Just like upgrading to broadband. The context of the question, comparing it to a weapon of mass destruction is clearly meant to demonize Cohen, whereas Cohen is clearly more interested in the technical aspects of his programming. The question was insulting. Comparisons like these are only intended to manipulate the minds of simple people that will make the conclusion that bittorrent = bomb = evil!

      Anything can be used for evil: paper, pencils, water, telephones, lightbulbs, RADIO, microsoft windows, electricity automobiles. If the radio announcer does not like it, he should go live in a cave... Oh wait, the terrorists live in caves and they are EVIL, he'll have to live in a ditch.

    14. Re:WJR 760 by iamwahoo2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you get rid of BT do you think downloading of illegal content will stop? (this is rhetorical, so I'll answer for you) No, it will not. BT is just the favorite tool because it is fast. Get rid of it, and it will be replaced. Actually, getting rid of it would be damn near impossible unless you go into everyones home and remove it. Further, pirating has increased with more broadband because broadband is faster. It is simply a matter of being able to distribute massive content quickly. Do you want to force the population to limited internet capability to protect the content distribution industry. That is essentially what this argument boils down to.

    15. Re:WJR 760 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      To twist around your arguement, how about guns then ? It can be argued that committing crimes is the primary use for firearms. Yet I do not see them being banned.

      Do you really believe that the amount of firearms manufactured around the world have peaceful uses ? You mostly read about millions of bank robbers, murderers, enforcers of dictatorial regimes, terrorists etc. using them and then it hits home. OK, it's not metrics. But it's strong anecdotal evidence to me.

      Not trying to troll but, but as of date, the American arms industry is all hale and hearty, no ? USA doesnt have a policy against developing nukes(save for other countries) or a gun law as of date even though the peaceful, legal uses for firearms, nukes etc. is probably not even a significant fraction of their illegal uses. OK, it's not metrics. But it's strong anecdotal evidence to me.

      I have used your own logic in my arguements. If you are not going to use the "primary use" logic for one thing(guns), I fail to see how you apply the exact same logic to something else(bittorrent) to call for it to be banned.

      If RIAA has a problem, they can ofcourse go after the specific cases of copyright infringement i.e. the users actually engaging in exchange of copyrighted material. But one thing they may not do is ban a protocol or shutdown a site just because it *may* have primarily illegal uses. Not anymore than they can demand to shut down the internet or ban the tcp/ip protocol just because it is being used for primarily illegal stuff.

  2. Not a 5 page article by chris_mahan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

  3. 3.9 beta version download delays are uncool by spoonyfork · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The built-in delays for downloading multiple files in the 3.9 beta version of BitTorrent are a bit extreme. I know it is a user config setting but a default of 300 minutes between downloads? Uncool. How about a countdown timer or something so others don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on. Thought it was buggy or crashed at first. Ended up going back to version 3.4.

    Other than that.. great product! I downloaded megs of tsunami videos from http://www.waveofdestruction.org/ as they were posted.

    --
    Speak truth to power.
  4. Re:Cohen didn't invent multi-source downloading by PhilHibbs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Simple. Don't break the law, and you won't become a "juicy legal target". There's nothing illegal about BitTorrent, but it is illegal to violate copyright with it, so don't do that.

  5. Bram is cool by Amiga+Lover · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. bittorrent weakness by helix_r · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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.

  7. Re:Speed Bittorrent v. Kazaa by Sanity · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I'm really not sure which is faster, although if its BitTorrent, I suspect it may have more to do with the usage patterns of its users than the way the technology is designed.

  8. Re:The best thing about bit torrent by grm_wnr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    eDonkey can do that. And IIRC, it could do that before BT, though I'm not certain.

  9. A related cause by ShatteredDream · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  10. Re:Old News by digital+bath · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fucking christ, I am so sick of these "I saw this article N days ago! Slashdot is slow!" comments. Look, the way /. gets articles is through submissions. If you see an article worth submitting, then fucking submit it. Don't bitch about it a week later when somebody else finds it.

    --
    find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
  11. The point is... by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  12. fair use and wanting to pay for it by tallbill · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  13. Not how the algorithm works. by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  14. movie studios get no revenue from advertising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "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.

  15. why isn't BT incorporated into browsers yet? by nietsch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  16. Could be in other places by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.