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Today in P2P

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."

8 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Legal uses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have downloaded over a hundred gigs of music (every single file of that is LEGAL)

    I have uploaded 200 gigs of that same music.

    http://bt.etree.org

    it is a wonderful site with a range of music.

    I am not alone in that usage either. people who download pirated material generally dont come to that level (most bittorrent copyright infrigning material is not upwards of 1-5 gigs either, except dvd images)

  2. I OBJECT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about by burris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  4. Nova by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    HERE! is a torrent of torrents from the former Suprnova! Download and spread the word!

  5. Re:Legal uses by jobugeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only problem with bt.etree.org is unless you are a Phish or Grateful Dead fan, the selection of music is very limited. I've looked many times and seen very little else.

    --
    I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
  6. False advertising! by d_jedi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  7. add BitTorrent to http protocol by John+Macdonald · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As I visit yet another site to find it slashdotted, I find myself wishing that the basic http protocol included BitTorrent-like capability for basic web pages.


    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.

  8. Re:Slashraped by Rei · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey, it's not as crazy as it sounds. If someone would just make a standard of "Content-Encoding: bittorrent", it'd take off ;)

    I've written a script (just finished last night) to make it easier to serve torrents on a website (they create metainfo and serve all files matching a particular pattern in a given set of directories, and shut them down and delete the created torrents when you stop it), designed to be used with MultiViews enabled (i.e., if they request the file, and they have their Accept header tag prefer bittorrent, it'll give them the torrent instead of the regular file; otherwise, they'll get the regular file). The downside is that I'm going to need to see if I can get any browsers to include bittorrent in their Accept tag :P It doesn't hurt - just a couple extra bytes per page request. It'd be best, however, if browsers were nice enough to let you set your own Accept tag :P

    Content-Encoding would be better, because it would be transparent. You wouldn't get a bittorrent download launched, but instead it'd be unpacked straight to the browser cache. A good implementation would allow multiple file to be torrented together, although that could get tricky. In theory, you could serve all requested static content in a single torrent; in practice, this may be unreasonable.

    --
    We're practicing our labials.