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Hylton Jolliffe writes "I wanted to alert you to an article by research Marc Eisenstadt that digs deep into BitTorrent, its potential and limitations and its implications for podcasting, filesharing and more."
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Yet another third rate 'blog' that no one has heard of tries to get attention to itself by submitting stories to slashdot. The guy doesn't mention eDonkey/eMule at all while it is still the most widely used P2P network in the world.
You really can't be too suprised when Michael "PayPal Accepted" Sims is doing the story approvals.
Don't make him angry.
was it worth the read? is there a mirror?
~/.sig: No such file or directory
its potential and limitations
;)
I guess no one told Mr. Eisenstadt that bittorrent is a sacred cow!
If only he distributed his server load like a P2P network.
Seems this didn't load for me. Has it been slashdotted already? Impressive, nice work guys. And girls. Or maybe my internet connection sucks.
This sig left blank for page turns.
I grabbed BT for Win2000 and installed it in about 7 minutes, then I hit the torrent link for Knoppix. I was downloading the ISO at around 36KBps (about the limit of my DSL connection).
Since I was heading to bed while it downloaded, I left BT up that night and the next day while I was at work to help other people out.
I had seen BT as a place to snag nothing but rips of movies, and I've stayed away. The legal-usese BT community needs to do a better job of promoting the positive and allowable uses of BT and P2P sharing tools. They have a way to negative stigma right now.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:ef-r7S3esgUJ:ww w.corante.com/getreal/archives/bittorrent_exeem_me tatorrent_podcasting_what_so_what.php+&hl=en
January 11, 2005
BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: "What? So What?"Email This EntryPrint This Entry
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
SUMMARY: The index that facilitates the sharing of files on a large scale is also the Achilles heel of peer-to-peer file-sharing, because it is vulnerable to litigation and closure. So what happens if the index is itself distributed? I try to get my head around the latest in peer-to-peer file sharing, and explain a bit about what I've learned, including the fact that BitTorrent's power rests in its 'swarm' distribution model, but not necessarily in your end-user download speed. What has this got to do with podcasting? (Answer: invisible P2P plumbing helps the podcasting wheel go round).
[Warning: lengthy article follows].
First, some history
(skip ahead to the next section if you're already bored with the Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa, and BitTorrent saga).
Napster opened our eyes to the power of distributed file sharing on a massive scale. But it was closed down by lawsuits to stop it from listing copyrighted works for which the owners would naturally have preferred to collect royalties (there are thousands of commentaries on the pros and cons of such royalties, but that's not the focus of this posting). Successive generations of tools such as Gnutella, KaZaa, and now BitTorrent have created their own buzz, their own massive followings, their own headaches, and their own solutions to others' headaches. Here's my rundown of the 'big ideas' (and the people behind them):
Napster (Shawn Fanning): This was the Mother of big-time peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfers, i.e. my computer directly to yours, with a central server to maintain lists of who had what in order to initiate the transactions. It had a pretty decent user interface, plus the rapid growth, novelty, excitement and publicity that ensured plenty of good content. Those central server lists, leading to mass free trading of copyrighted material, also led it to be shut down.
Gnutella (Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, creators of WinAmp): This was an open-source protocol that linked autonomous 'nodes' (users of the network) to other nodes, thereby eliminating the need for a central server list. Searching reliability varies, however, because it is subject to outages according to the connection/disconnection of individual users along the way.
KaZaa (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who later created Skype): This technology built on a proprietary protocol called 'FastTrack', conceptually an extension to Gnutella, that deployed distributed 'supernode' search indices whose IP addresses were built in to the software, and which avoided the problems of (i) Napster's centralized lists and (ii) Gnutella's over-distributed nodes suffering outages and weakening the search. The prevalence of built-in 'adware' and the distribution of 'junk files' that masqueraded as originals were two of the weaknesses of the (still) wildly popular KaZaa.
BitTorrent (Bram Cohen): This was the next 'creative leap' in the P2P world, based on the following insight: distributing large files in fragments among large numbers of users, and requiring every downloader to be a partial uploader (of these fragments), enables the 'best of breed' of swarming behaviour -- as a file becomes more popular, so it becomes easier to download, rather than harder (as is the case with traditional file distribution)! A good overview explanation and a helpful analogy are provided in this excerpt from Brian Dessent's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide:
BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker band
With the first link, the chain is forged.
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&id=301&vid=1072
% 3A%2F%2F www.corante.com%2Fgetreal%2Farchives%2Fbittorrent_ exeem_metatorrent_podcasting_what_so_what.php
And right click:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:http
So BitTorrent is just about spreading the distribution load across multiple peers and can't speed up my physical connection to the internet.
That's why I click on every banner I see that says "click here to increase your download speed". I think of them as the little speed boost arrows you could drive over in Excitebike.
--
This is a joke. You have been joked with.
Google cache
That's about the poorest excuse for a DSL for a Downloads SLowly connection I've ever heard of.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I object to the term "podcasting"
People were doing that WAY before the ipod came about. and people will be doing it way after the ipod is dust. Why do we need to name something people were already doing after a companies product that DIDNT invent it.
It's like the hype surrounding blogs (woo, a webpage....) except worse because atleast blogging is nominally different (in that it's journal-like) and blogging doesn't have the name of a company embeded in it (I know about blogger.com but they came AFTER blogging).
It's just so lame it makes me have a fit, when people talk about their "podcasting" it makes me want to ram a fist into their trendiod eyesockets and scream into the gooey mess that's left "People were doing it way before you even heard that flaming useless branded buzzword".
just had to get that off my chest.
This page suggests that the number of users is due to fake servers.
There are a few websites that have created elaborate systems to offer torrents (as they're called) and display how many seeds taco has swallowed and users are currently connected to that "torrent".
Nice and, how many seeds have you swallowed latley!!!!!
BitTorrent requires tracker sites to handle all the partial-fragment-negotiation (think of the madness of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and you get an idea of the cool juggling that a tracker has to do).
If he knew anything about BT, he would know that the tracker only introduces peers to each other. The tracker only knows which peers are finished and which aren't. Each peer then manages it's own "fragment-negotiation" which is really just downloading the rarest pieces from it's own point of view. There isn't any negotiation at all, really.
burris
HERE! is a torrent of torrents from the former Suprnova! Download and spread the word!
So big whoop, BitTorrent relies on the trackers and the trackers get shut down sometimes.
That's what this is for
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4149647.stm
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
This blog/article does no such thing as the poster suggests of "dig[ging] deep into BitTorrent".
BTW: WTF is podcasting?
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Help stop the karma whoring.
January 11, 2005
BitTorrent, eXeem, Meta-Torrent, Podcasting: "What? So What?"Email This EntryPrint This Entry
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
SUMMARY: The index that facilitates the sharing of files on a large scale is also the Achilles heel of peer-to-peer file-sharing, because it is vulnerable to litigation and closure. So what happens if the index is itself distributed? I try to get my head around the latest in peer-to-peer file sharing, and explain a bit about what I've learned, including the fact that BitTorrent's power rests in its 'swarm' distribution model, but not necessarily in your end-user download speed. What has this got to do with podcasting? (Answer: invisible P2P plumbing helps the podcasting wheel go round).
[Warning: lengthy article follows].
First, some history (skip ahead to the next section if you're already bored with the Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa, and BitTorrent saga).
Napster opened our eyes to the power of distributed file sharing on a massive scale. But it was closed down by lawsuits to stop it from listing copyrighted works for which the owners would naturally have preferred to collect royalties (there are thousands of commentaries on the pros and cons of such royalties, but that's not the focus of this posting). Successive generations of tools such as Gnutella, KaZaa, and now BitTorrent have created their own buzz, their own massive followings, their own headaches, and their own solutions to others' headaches. Here's my rundown of the 'big ideas' (and the people behind them):
Napster (Shawn Fanning): This was the Mother of big-time peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfers, i.e. my computer directly to yours, with a central server to maintain lists of who had what in order to initiate the transactions. It had a pretty decent user interface, plus the rapid growth, novelty, excitement and publicity that ensured plenty of good content. Those central server lists, leading to mass free trading of copyrighted material, also led it to be shut down.
Gnutella (Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, creators of WinAmp): This was an open-source protocol that linked autonomous 'nodes' (users of the network) to other nodes, thereby eliminating the need for a central server list. Searching reliability varies, however, because it is subject to outages according to the connection/disconnection of individual users along the way.
KaZaa (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who later created Skype): This technology built on a proprietary protocol called 'FastTrack', conceptually an extension to Gnutella, that deployed distributed 'supernode' search indices whose IP addresses were built in to the software, and which avoided the problems of (i) Napster's centralized lists and (ii) Gnutella's over-distributed nodes suffering outages and weakening the search. The prevalence of built-in 'adware' and the distribution of 'junk files' that masqueraded as originals were two of the weaknesses of the (still) wildly popular KaZaa.
BitTorrent (Bram Cohen): This was the next 'creative leap' in the P2P world, based on the following insight: distributing large files in fragments among large numbers of users, and requiring every downloader to be a partial uploader (of these fragments), enables the 'best of breed' of swarming behaviour -- as a file becomes more popular, so it becomes easier to download, rather than harder (as is the case with traditional file distribution)! A good overview explanation and a helpful analogy are provided in this excerpt from Brian Dessent's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide:
BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be
Nice try, but it doesn't work. I'm thinking about holding in my feces, but my body is still doing it automatically. This troll only works for breathing. SHIT! NOW I HAVE TO THINK ABOUT BREATHING! Fuck you.
To cure people of being selfish-bastards, please reboot the universe.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Then, when a low volume, private site suddenly gets its 15 minutes of fame by being mentioned on Slashdot (or some other well-read news broadcast), it would automatically enlist the horde of new requesting sites to help distribute its content. The rest of the time, both before and after the flash mobbing period, it would just serve its own pages itself in the current manner.
Since it is hard to predict which sites will be "discovered", it would be necessary for all standard servers and browsers support the http protocol extension, so this can't happen without a lot of coordinated work, I'm afraid. The protocol would have to be extended, web servers modified (Apache would e adaquate for a start), browsers modified (Mozilla/Firefox would be adequate for a start). When server was becoming overloaded it woud start by discarding requests from browsers that did not support the protocol, so that it can build up the initial seeding of helper sites. As long as there was more demand than available helpers, these old incapable browsers would continue to get ignored. Once a large enough group of capable helpers was built up to fully support itself, the group could start accepting requests from incapable browsers. That would provide incentive to upgrade older browsers.
All of the neat 'broadcast' stuff that could be happening on the net is being stifled by the 10:1 download:upload formula used by cable and phone internet bit carrying companies.
As businesses, selling bit toting services and desireous of entering the IP content delivery business, this makes sense. Why should users be able to distribute content for free when they can charge for delivery.
As it stands now, live music broadcastss are barely possible using a packet synchrounous distributed network. For top quality ogg, it's not possible. The only alternative is a slew of big fat servers like the akamai network.
What to do about it? Who knows. But it's going to kill the internet for individual audio/video broadcasting.
Yes, I know about mbone.
Yes, I know it's not really broadcast when it's distributed throungh a big tree of 'relays' which introduce some tolerable latency.
How about a "Peer2Peer" category for Slashdot? Who's with me? :-)
So, anyone using bittorrent over i2p? Is it really anonymous, and is it fast enough to warrant use? How do the speeds compare to the regular 'net and Freenet?
Suprised no one has caught this:
"...by research Marc..."
Shouldn't that be:
"...by researcher Marc..."
Ah, grammar and its many uses.
Azureus is ok for Linux (though I still prefer the official btlaunchmanycurses.py) but for Windows I use Shareaza as an all-in-one p2p app since it also does gnutella and edonkey.
Karma: bad (mostly unaffected by funny mods)
This "article" summerizes slashdot postings.
A post is marked as flamebait that talks about the biggest problem with bittorrent. How about instead of trying to sweep problems under the rug, we instead try to fix them?
Did you actually read the post to see if the AC accusing it to be a troll was right?
I use BitTorrent on a daily basis. I love it. I get 400k a sec download speeds. And last but not least, I never have to spend hours scouringt the net for what I want, because there are so many bittorrent sites.
My 2 cents. Yall can keep it for free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
Well, object all you want, but the word is a pretty good one. It's a lot better than eCasting, iCasting, or netCasting, which is what it would have been called during the Good Old Days.
Broadcasting + iPods = PodCasting.
... of course
*sigh*.... the quoted text doesn't appear in the grandparent. Search it for yourself.
- That's about the poorest excuse for a DSL for a Downloads SLowly connection I've ever heard of.
I live at pretty much the limit of my telco's ability to provide a quality DSL connection and I only get about 384Kb/s total throughput.You're not the only one who thinks it sucks.
Every time I try to download a file with eMule, it gets stuck in the "Waiting..." position. For a 3mb MP3 that noone else was downloading, I was waiting FOUR DAYS, and it hadn't started.
Since torrents only work with popular files, and never individual MP3s, IRC is the way to go.
If the info being transfered is copyrighted then it is not legal for the 'client' to ask for and accept this info nor it is it legal for the 'server' to respond to these requests. If both the 'client' and 'server' are coroporating then this transfer will happen just fine.
If however either the 'client' or the 'server' are undercover 'good guys' then they can easilly rat out the other party; who, in the Internet, can eventually be tracked down and served with a lawsuit.
If you are running software that either requests (a 'client') or distributes (a 'server') information subject to copyrights then the copyright holder or an agent acting on their behalf can bust you, provided that the magic peer-to-peer search leads them to you (or your search leads you to them).
The only legal questions are whether this constitutes entrapment. If it does the pirates win and copyright law is broken. If it doesn't then the RIAA/MPAA/whoever wins and copyright law is safe.
All the fancy peer-to-peer protocol magic in the world can't change these basic facts. You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.
On the other hand a different argument based on 'first principles' makes 'Digital copyright management' schemes such as CSS, HDCP, and Windows media also can't work.
The end result is that reality is set up to make copyright infringement impossible to stop and also impossible to hide (unless you absolutely trust who you are sharing information with, an unreasonable assumption).
This is just like the rest of life, breaking the law (murder, terrorism, etc) is VERY easy but getting away with it is VERY hard thus we make the punishment too great to worth the risk. Of course terrorism fails to respond to this formula and thus results in an up-hill battle that no one likes (lack of freedoms, privacy and security), one that eventually is destined to fail terribly.
Bittorrent needs to be publicized more for its clearly legal uses.
I've looked into this, but with Suprnova gone, what's a good reliable tracker for general legit distribution? One problem is that a lot of trackers, especially those using the bytemonsoon code, won't take any torrent submission that doesn't have an entry on NFOrce.nl, and the NFOrce FAQ says that it posts only releases by "legit release group[s]", offering no advice to people outside the so-called "scene" other than the cryptic "pre your release and make sure it gets spread ... If this doesn't make sense to you at all? Oh Well. (!)"
It wouldn't be nearly such a huge problem if people didn't have to put up with pathetic upload speeds on their dsl connection. For example I have a 256/64 connection, If I were to download something that took say 5 hours I would have to have it maxing out my upload bandwidth for at least four times that. And during that time I can't use the internet properly because all my upload bandwidth is used by bittorrent.
...how BitTorrent is inherently better than, say, eDonkey?
.torrent file drops it, that file ceases to be findable till someone else hosts it. Whereas the eDonkey file is findable as long as anyone has any of it shared. This single-point-of-failure seems like a major weakness for BitTorrent, doesn't it?
They seem like much the same things, with the exception that if the guy hosting the
(Oh, and the torrents can be sets of files rather than singletons, which is a nice-to-have.)
So why is it that everyone's so gaga over BitTorrent and pooh-poohs eDonkey?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Especially in the past few months, "decentralizing BitTorrent" has become a really hot topic where everybody wants to share his idea of getting rid of the annoyance of a tracker. It surprises me that most people - even many developers of BitTorrent compatible software whom I know and respect - seem to overlook the fact that BitTorrent's "centralized structure" is there for a reason.
The reason is called _control_.
First let me repeat what Bram uses to emphasize on every opportunity: BitTorrent is not a _filesharing_, but a file _distribution_ protocol. Considering that, the tracker is not a "single point of failure", as many suggest, but a "single point of control". With a tracker existing, access to the files being distributed can be (indirectly) controlled via access control lists (ACL) built into the tracker. For instance, one tracker may answer to authenticated users only, another tracker may postpone general access and grand exclusive "early stage access" to peers from certain IP range within a time frame of the files' release. Unfortunately, the ACL part of the (original) tracker has not been implemented until today (partly my own fault, I have to admit), but some alternative tracker implementations do have this since a long time now - often used to reward "good behaving" users (TorrentBits, anybody?).
Control is probably a bad thing for filesharing, but it is an important issue for file distribution. As for the availability of the tracker, it wouldn't be such a widespreed problem if not for legal issues, which in turn is because BitTorrent is actually "misused" for filesharing. So in other words, BitTorrent has not been decentralized not because we couldn't do it, but because we want to keep the option of control open.
Henry 'Pi' James (member of the developer team of the original BitTorrent)
PS: Since I've already explained how BitTorrent is not designed for filesharing, I also want to point out it is in fact not really suitable for filesharing. The "swarming effect" - which is what BitTorrent is all about - can only be achieved in "slashdotting scenarios", that's why BitTorrent has been adapted for filesharing by two major groups first: anime fanssubbers and tv ep captors, both releasing "hot content" whose value decreases fast, compared to movies or software, for example. For the sharing of mid and long term files, BitTorrent does not really have a significant advantage over other P2P systems.
Therefore, no node can be accused of knowingly committing a crime.
See projects MUTE http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/c ustom&xmlName=ants for more info
and ANts http://www.myjavaserver.com/~gwren/home.jsp?page=
Sharemail fell into vaporware hell not long after that post; Email these days isn't very good for sending text messages, never mind binary attachments, what with all the spam ruining it.
RSS ended up being the ideal medium for this, instead of email. It uses DNS rather than crypto for authenticating sources, but that's usually good enough.
Signed torrent files can get pretty large for large payloads, as well, making them not only easy to block, but many email services would block them if they were too large anyway - already.
These days, I'm thinking we need a decentralized replacement for the original distributed search protocol - DNS.
It's nice to make a googlewhack, though!
--l2oto Decker
Life sucks, buy a helmet. :) Those asymetrical rates not only unbalance things (it takes 4 cable uploads to max one cable download) but it also rewards selfish dine'n'dash behaviour. If your BT client doesn't allow capping its rates, you can always pause it does Internet use.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.