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Hurricane Electric Offers Bit Torrent Service
heypete writes "Hurricane Electric is now offering BitTorrent tracker/seeder services on behalf of paying customers. One need only upload the file desired to a specified directory by FTP, and their system will automatically generate a torrent file, add it to a tracker for that customer, and act as a "seed" to ensure that the file is available to downloaders. This could prove to be extremely useful for distributors of large files (such as Linux distributions), as bandwidth for the tracker and seeding services does not count against the bandwidth quota for the account."
Nobody ever argued the legality of the bittorrent protocol.
It's used by quite a few software companies. Games for example, since they are large in size.
A knife is a perfectly legal tool. It can cut us free when we are trouble, cut our food, or in the hands of a surgon can save lives.... it's when that knife is in the hands of a serial killer that it becomes illegal.
No knives have ever been accused of murder. Only the person who intentionally uses it for the act.
Same with bittorent. It never did anything wrong. It's users were the ones breaking copyright laws.
Same for HTTP. Some use it for kiddy porn. But that doesn't mean Yahoo is illegal, or illegitimate.
Their big problem is they don't do a very good job of communicating their policies to other network companies and to spam blacklist maintainers. The communication effort is badly coordinated, and there's a certain short-sighted self-righteousness by key people, who hate the thought of sucking up to blacklist maintainers.
The sad thing is that sanctions against HE mostly hurt their email customers. It doesn't hurt HE, which seems to have all the business it can handle. And it certainly doesn't hurt the spammers, against whom HE is already doing all they can -- and who just move on to another provider when they do get busted.
We've got something like ten accounts with them, and have never had any down time or other problems.
No, I don't work for HE or have any affiliation with them. I am glad to spread the word about them because I've had several other accounts with hosting outfits that just didn't grok good service the way HE does.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
First, and I'm not sure about this, but I think Azureus trys to keep your ratio sane. That way, if you limit your UL to 1 kB/s, you can't download at 300 kB/s. After all, that's not very fair. Second, we're talking in kiloBYTES. I don't know of any dileup modem that can get 40 kB/s. Lastly, Unless you have a wicked net connection, I also don't think your wireless network is the bottleneck. You probably have an asynchronous connection, which means your ISP is giving you a shitty UP and fast DOWN. This configuration isn't optimal for BitTorrent, but it still should work. Your network should only slow down if its saturated, and even if you have "pathetic speeds", you may have already reached that point. I can only get about 25 kB/s of upload out of my pipe, and beyond that things start choking. Down AND up. This is on Comcast Cable, fyi.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I would like to use these things for uploading digital pictures I take(what can I say, I'm a resolution whore), but I would rather the whole world not see my friend wearing a wedding dress with a giant Bart Simpson mask on.
It would be neat if you could put a user name/password on the torrents. Not incredibly secure, but still better than nothing.
Torrents work best if a lot of people are downloading/uploading. If you've got a picture that is only meant for a few people, it would make more sense to just upload the picture to the server rather than use Bit Torrent. That's probably why there isn't any access control. It wouldn't be any use to limit people when you want as many seeders as you can get.