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."

Comments

HUGE!!

[Moustache N Tits]

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!

WJR 760

[Puls4r]

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!

Re:WJR 760

[kmak]

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..

Re:WJR 760

[bwindle2]

Maybe his autism has something to do with that? "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"

Re:WJR 760

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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).

Re:WJR 760

[Anonymous Coward]

He should only answer a question if he gets to ask the interviewer a question too.

If the interviewer doesn't respond Bram should just start talking slower and slower and then finally disconnect.

Maybe that's what happened.

Cohen didn't invent multi-source downloading

[Sanity]

The article seems to imply that Cohen invented multi-source downloading, for example:

Cohen realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up. He sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers, a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie. Then it downloads a chunk from several of them simultaneously. Many hands make light work, so the file arrives dozens of times faster than normal.

Yet this feature has existed in other P2P applications for years.

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)

Re:bittorrent weakness

[314m678]

go to www.google.com type in FileIwant filetype:torrent Press search.

Article Text (Bittorrent style)

[OECD]

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!

MPAA plans cohens retirement

[AmericaHater]

Cohen has even started sketching out ideas for his own puzzles. He dreams of making enough money to buy a 3-D prototyping machine and retire."

(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"

High School Memories

[echocharlie]

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?

Quote of the Millenium (so far)

[jpellino]

...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."