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The Centralization of BitTorrent Networks
Writes writes writes writes "A group of graduate students from the University of Washington have posted a a new independent report about the extent of centralization in regards to BitTorrent communities. The report indicates that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active, even despite their large degree of centralization (and perhaps exposure/liability). Furthermore, the report attempts to determine if the torrent communities follow the 80/20 rule, by measuring the Long Tail of torrent distribution."
So seriously, is BitTorrent dead?
No. Well, we don't think so, at least.
That should have read, "is BitTorrent for Warez dead?" And no, it's not, but it probably won't appear like suprnova.org did again...
Is BitTorrent dead? No, it will never die. Just as FTP for Warez dwindled and other transfer services took over (IRC, Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent, foo) it didn't kill it. FTP, IRC, BT, foo, all have valid reasons for existing other than warez.
BT though, above all the others, is actually really useful for trasferring large files quickly. Yeah, it's not good for the long term but I'm sure someone will come up with something that will make the protocol attractive for use outside of the Warez arena.
It's just that the warezkids are all about picking up new tech and using it. It's their nature as they are generally tech oriented.
I wish I could be a grad student and publish a bunch of bullshit with graphs and get my degree!
This isn't really suprising.
Whether it's FTP ip's, P2P network names, or in this case centralized BitTorrent servers, it all matters on who has access to these sites and how much exposure that site has.
If say SuperNova was a registration only site it might have stayed open for another couple months. If say SuperNova was a registration site which only registered friends and known people, there's even less of a chance of being taken down.
Any large publicly available distrobution method for illegal digital products will attract the attention of the authorities and be brought down. Small, regulated, private networks will continue to run despite a crack down. This has always been true.
But than, for the authorities, it really is more important to take down the larger sites not eliminating the problem.
-Teiresias
Sure people are easily tracked who use bit torrent. I doubt they really care. Bit Torrent allows easy ways to find files. It may not be mainstream easy, but it is very easy to use. You can get tons of movies/music/tv shows/warez with little effort, much easier than tracking down ftps and getting access from someone/ using kazaa and hoping what you download is really what you think it is, etc. People want easy access to filez! THey don't care about getting caught
Would it not be an ironic twist if the media companies adopted BitTorrent to distribute shows. Maybe the next supernode will be a Sony site.
I had thought that the more recent statistics showed something more like a 5/90 rule...
Their search engine was actually pretty good (it's down right now due to excessive traffic). It shows details about the torrent like what files are inside, the speed of the tracker etc. Quite useful.
Underholdning.info
as has been stated on previous threads, google is one of the best torrent search tools available. Use filetype:torrent.
File Rush is always good for movie trailers, demos, patches, etc...
This would help reduce the liability of centralized 'link sites'.
Sure, you can still be tracked once you hit a tracker, but at least the source of the links is safe.
And before you shout ' freenet is slow', getting a simple BT link from FN would work well. Thats what FN is designed for.. Small bits of data..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...to a few a Torrent "communities" and feel pretty safe.
First thing is that the communities don't share warez and big mpaa releases, just stuff you can't find elsewhere. Sure we are centralized but no one is going after people who share documentaries and obscure stand-up.
Are they?
Beware however... some torrent sites are selling out to scam artists. Take this site for example - they hosted DVD's to "Appz" and sold out. I assume it's now a MPAA dragnet.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I very recently used BitTorrent to retrieve a couple of popular Linux ISOs. The performance was horrendous. Yes, my client was properly configured and the firewall was configured correctly. While over 200 peers and 60 seeds existed in the swarm, my download rate was an abysmal 20-30KBps. My upload speed, on the other hand, was a nifty 110KBps. (You're welcome.)
This may seem like an isolated situation, but, I find it to be the case more often than not. Occasionally, I will experience a fast download but, only rarely. I realize that BitTorrent may be a good/only source for illegal downloads but, it was supposedly designed to distribute load and increase performance. For me, BitTorrent rarely meets its design purpose. In most cases a reliable FTP server offers better performance.
So, I question BitTorrent's usefulness and whether it will last for its originally intended purpose.
We (Distributed Systems group at the University of St. Andrews) presented a paper at PGNet 2004, available at:
http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf
which shows (Figure 10) that 75% of BitTorrent users don't upload as much as they download, or put another way, the majority of the uploaded data comes from 25% of the users. I don't have time to work out just how much of the data each section is responsible for, but the numbers are interestingly close to the 80/20 rule.
I don't have time to run the numbers right now, but I wouldn't be too suprised to find that 20% of users uploaded 80% of the data...
Legaltorrents.com (RSS) has a few things -- it's small but growing...
---
Free, quality mixing software for MP3 DJs
it seemed to me like those guys had placed emphasis on domains, but is it not possible that multiple domains may point to a single site?
for example, with suprnova.org's multitude of mirrors, it's really a single site that uses many domains, so it doesnt seem fair to me to say that 10% of the domains having over 90% of the files is a big deal, and is very skewed towards centralized locations.
Enjoy an e-piphany
If you are like me and believe that sites which simply trade hashes of illegal files should not themselves be illegal, you might want to consider heading over to www.lokitorrent.com and making a small donation to their legal defense fund.
Who knows - if one site acheives the budget to stand up for themselves in a legal battle, it might set a very welcome precedent.
From TFA:
First of all, it should be noted that the dataset was from early December, and thus preserves the distribution of torrents before the recent site shutdowns.
So, you may want to try reading a little more closely next time. In no way does this article indicate "that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active".
Slashdot moderators, mind RTFAing before publishing submissions?
The reason why the "extra long tail" is so amazingly long is because the authors are merging two different types of BitTorrent usage. BitTorrent was designed for legitimate content, and for content distributors to run their own trackers. For example, my tracker is used just to distribute my own projects. Distribution is off the main website, with only one torrent shown. This is an example of BT's legitimate use, and even the largest legitimate BitTorrent sites pale in comparison to the piracy sites. There, you'll see much higher numbers of torrents, and few servers that only distribute small numbers of torrents.
But, I am familiar with how to use BitTorrent and where problems can occur. I sit on a multi-megabit high-speed pipe (bidirectional). The BitTorrent client was set to limit upload speed at 110KBps, the client's default. I did try lower upload limits as well as limiting the number of connections but, it didn't change anything with the download performance. After the download completed (12 hours) I opened up the number of connections and removed the upload limit. Leachers enjoyed upload speeds of 600KBps until the up/down ratio hit 3 and I then removed the seed.
I remain unconvinced about BitTorrents abillity to meet its design goals. Whether that is due to BitTorrent itself or selfish users, I don't know, but performance isn't what it should be and it seems to be getting worse with time.
Informative.
The problems are that
1) If it's a C&D and not a 512 Takedown Notice, then there's nothing that guarantees you'll get one. A plaintiff sends C&D's in the hope that it'll cost less for them than immediately preparing a lawsuit. But these days, it's hardly unusual to get sued right out of the gate. That you can't ignore.
2) You have to do what the C&D says to avoid the risk of a lawsuit by the sender (though there is also the chance that you can ignore it and still not get sued). Likewise with 512 Takedown Notices. This costs you effort at least, and may significantly impair what you were doing.
3) 512 Takedown Notices are probably the best, since you can't be sued if you're eligible to receive them, until you have received it and have not complied with it in accordance with the statute. But you have to do some advance work to be eligible to receive them, and virtually no one outside of businesses bothers, even though it's pretty easy and protects against some, but not all, liability.
-- 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.
It is true that the closing of Suprnova.org was a mighty blow to the availibility of torrents, but it changes nothing in the long run. In a few weeks there will be a new uber-big torrent directory. Actually, there already are a few.
.torrent files are very small and easy to spread. Finally, even if every peer has a slow dialup connection, a broadband downloader can still reach some very respectable speeds. Not to mention that most of the clients preform superb error checking on each peice of data.
/. posts.
In my opinion, BitTorrent is still a new and wandering technology. It is being employed in many different way and still has plenty of undiscovered potential. It is already an excellent way to cheaply distribute free software (i.e. linux distros). It is also a great way to distribute 0-day files with minimal liability and cost.
BitTorrent is still the best way to get less-than-legal new (...brand new) tv show episodes, movies and multi-platform games. There are many reasons for this. Namely, it spreads liability across hundreds or thousands of individuals, not a single server. Secondly,
As a protocal, BT is perhaps the most promising for large file distribution. There are some faster, and some even less centralized protocals, but in the end BT beats them all.
If you are concerned about BT's future as a method of underground file distribution: worry not. The torrent underground has its roots firmly planted in IRC. In fact, some of the best sites for well seeded torrents are just web-front ends to IRC channels (i.e. tvtorrents). BT will exist until something better comes along. That is the way of things.
note: this is not directly in response to the articles, rather it is in response to some of the other
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
... it's really hard to meet the 1:1 etc. requirements unless you get there early.
... I can stay up and be prepared to feed that 90% downstream but that just means more people with an incomplete RAR/ZIP/AVI whatever.
... for example, keeping a torrent open should count for 4% an hour, so that if you keep the torrent open for a day after you've finished downloading, even if no-one feeds from you, you still get credit for making the torrent available.
The number of torrents I start downloading and then find that there's no more seeds etc. so I get 90% of a large file and then I'm stuck
And if I get to a download late, I can sit there and download, say 100Mb fairly quickly from all those nice seeders (say 10 seeders and just two new downloaders), but then anyone new that comes along has 12 sites feeding and since 10 have 100% and then there's me with whatever I've downloaded so far, I hardly ever get a chance to feed downstream, so I sit there for days and never get anywhere near 1:1)
There needs to be a better way of rating people who want to be good torrent users
Watching a poor-quality .avi of a movie is a completely different experience than seeing a much better version - even a rented VHS. The same is true with music uploaded at 128 kbs as compared to straight off the CD.
Torrents allow you to say "this movie sucked, I'm damn glad I didn't pay for this shlock" just as you can sample a CD and say "no way I'm paying $16 for 2 good songs and 10 shitty ones". So yeah, I'm bloody well glad I didn't pay for flops like "Alien vs. Predator" or "The Aviator", but "Van Helsing" was *much* better in the theater and well worth the money.
And do you honestly think, having eagerly watched all the BG episodes via torrent, that I'm not going to watch them *again* when they start airing here in the U.S. in a few days? Really now, anyone who did that should have their geek license revoked.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
There's an easy-to-use wrapper for bit torrent available here. It allows grandma to simply click once on a link and download the torrent... even if she didn't have bit torrent installed.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Watching a poor-quality .avi of a movie is a completely different experience than seeing a much better version - even a rented VHS.
You must not have gotten the memo. Movies on DVD are ripped to MPEG4, and generally look indistinguishable from the DVD itself (and many times include the actual Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track). In essence, you're downloading a copy of the movie that many are hard pressed to differentiate from a DVD.
In the case of movies running in the theater, ones shot from camcorders are watchable but not in excellent quality, whereas those ripped from a screener DVD (this practice may have been discontinued recently, I'm not sure) are quite excellent.
The same is true with music uploaded at 128 kbs as compared to straight off the CD.
Of course, no one releases albums in 128Kbps anymore, it's all 192Kbps or VBR. Throw those tracks on a CD and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference.
The "downloaded copies have poor quality, so that's why people will still buy the product" argument doesn't hold that much water in a lot of cases. Most people would gladly take 99% quality at 0% price rather than 100% quality and 100% price. THAT'S what the movie studios and record companies have to compete with. There are far fewer altruistic downloaders than you may think.