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Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released
wintermute1974 writes "After sitting at a stable release of 3.4.2 since last spring, Bram Cohen's official BitTorrent client has been upgraded to version 4. In addition to its existing, rock-steady functionality, BitTorrent now sports a new queue-based UI. The revision details are on the BitTorrent site. Packets are now marked as bulk data too, which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data."
The OS X client is still at 3.4.2. Is anyone working on an update? (I'd offer to help, but I don't program :p)
stop all the downloadin.
Does it have an FM tuner?
Since it's a decentralized standard, we'll need other clients to mark packets as 'bulk data' as well to get full benefits in routing from this. Since companies are starting to use BT commonly to distribute files in-game (or will, shortly), their code will need to be updated too. So, no magic bullet but a step in the direction of creating a heirarchy of data packets.
I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?
Or will this not be a big deal at all?
Probably some of everything, I suppose.
The actual link is to the download is here.
The changelog:
Gan Family Homepage
It's Java based and seems to have every useful feature you can imagine:
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
I haven't checked out the new official client yet, but Azureus has always been way ahead of the pack and I assume it still is. (Things like fast restart, nice visualizations of clients and file pieces, etc.)
Pat
It looks to me like this new client is adding alot of the features other clients added in themselves. The main part being the configurations from a GUI. Perhaps he's trying to get everyone using HIS client, so there's more control over the populus of BT users?
Is it just me... but does anyone else find it ironic that there isn't a torrent available for downloading Bittorrent?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Because I hate going to the theater to see... uh, Linux binaries.
is bulk data what fat chick pr0n is being referred to nowdays?
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
has had a far better interface and featureset for years.
No you don't, because the protocol has not changed.
...which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data.
Too bad it's all broken copies of LG3D.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Also of note is that BT 4.0 is using a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License.
It's complient with the Open Source Definition. Not huge shaking news it seems like.
Can somebody explain what that means?
I'm assuming that's not like bulk mail over the internet. I'd hate to accidently download viagra when I just when a torrent file.
Heh. I laughed.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
I tried the official website and it seems that their News area is non-functional at the time of this posting and Google just brings up tons of people asking the same question.
I haven't heard so much as a peep regarding the new Mac version during the dev of the latest Windows client. Can anyone give us an ETA on 4.0 for OS X?
Dear Lazyweb:
This version of bittorrent is licensed under the BitTorrent Open Source License. Could you please compare and contrast this with other open source licenses for me?
Thank you, Lazyweb.
With the recent tragic death of everyone's favourite torrent site, what are people using these days for sourcing movies?
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Now if only I could convince my stinking ISP that downloading linux ISO's is not illegal :-)
NOTE: This is the windows version
Tried it out throwing down some linux torrent simultaneously.
Downloads save to the desktop by default (although editable) and look like Firefox's Download Manager with details, progress bars, etc. Really nice because opening up 5 torrents used to mean 5 seperate windows. Client worked fine on most of the trackers given by A Quick Google Search.
Download it quick! I'm sure someone will torrent the executable...
I hope packets are also marked with the evil bit too, which is significant considering that most of all Torrent traffic is currently evil data.
My main gripe with the default BT client is the lack of per file settings. BitTornado (site's down at the moment) allows the user to download specific files in the torrent. This is useful since people can post aggregated torrents and the user can just select the files that he wants.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof
After trying out all the clients I have come to love BitSpirit. It's coded in C++, which in my opinion runs with less of a memory footprint then most of the Java clients, it also includes every feature imaginable!
Check it out, its definitely a client worth looking at.
Don't know if this is new or not, but a streaming peer-to-peer protocol like bittorrent would be pretty cool. It could be used to inexpensively broadcast audio or video almost live, potentially making news reporting available to a wider selection of journalists. Checksums on data would obviously be a problem here and malicious nodes in the network would have an easier time of disrupting communications. This mechanism needs to be independent of media type, and rely on being used in combination with file formats that can be picked up and played from any small chunk. The client could decide which portions of the stream it would rather get, sacrificing liveness to get as much as possible, trying to pick up the nearest blocks in the future first to stay as smooth as possible, or minimizing buffer size and going after the most recent blocks to stay as live as possible.
Shouldn't this story be under the Games section?
Illegal? Samir, This is America.
What ever happened to that new and decentralized torrent program?
Look at the licence, it seems to me that's the "control" is something he certainly isn't overly interested in.
He probably just wants to offer a product he can be proud of, maybe so people will appreciate his work and choose to support him.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
So, now that [ insert favorite DMCA/RIAA/MPAA C & D closed .torrent site here ] is closed, where do I get these Linux binaries that you speak of?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I've tried to like azureus, and I actually still use it as there is pretty much no alternative gui wise in linux, but I really wish there was.
Basically it brings my system to a crawl. Java vm (and yes i'm on 1.5) feels like a pig imo. We need a native gtk/qt gui that's in c/c++.
And please don't be a smartass and point out there is the basic gui that the official comes with. It's way too lacking. AFAIK, the only way to throttle is by using the ncurses one. Never mind that you can't set ratio's (I set all of mine to 1:1.), or bind all torrents to one port instead of needing all open. Pretty much all of the other clients do that now, except the official so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
So as you see, there are quite a few things lacking in the official client. I've checked freshmeat periodically but couldn't find anything for linux. I know there is bitorrando and some others but they require access to a mysql server wtf?
My windows friends used to use azureus and didn't fair much better performance wise but now they pretty much all use bitcomet.
I don't mean to knock the azureus team, cause as it is they've made a pretty good functional gui, but java just brings the performance down too much.
You misspelled "Camino".
no one uses the official bit torrent client. The most popular clients the last time I checked are Azureus and ABC, both fine programs.
Installer doesn't give any indication it's installing until you get a "Finished!" box. No choosing paths, no status indicator, nuffin.
.torrent file associations.
Two donation nag screens.
Steals
No scraping the server for total seeder/peer numbers.
No moving completed downloads. No advanced seeding rules. No selecting of individual within a torrent. No download speed capping.
25mb memory usage running just one torrent.
Nothing excites me about this client. I look forward to its apparent efficiency increases being incorporated into Azureus et al, though.
Not here at slashdot according to this.
The problem is the users
"But i'm not dead yet!" ;)
That and a few others.. Pirate Bay, Demonoid, Torrent Reactor, etc.
To be honest, I haven't been waiting at all.
I don't know where you got the idea of bittornado requiring mysql. It most certainly does not.
The official client has been miles behind most of the unofficial ones, and as far as I know nobody with any sense uses it anymore. And as far as I can see, this new version only makes it slightly less inferior. So why does it matter that it's been released? For that matter, why was it even made?
I don't see the point in reinventing the wheel as far as clients go when there are far better alternatives already out there. Let other people write the clients, and concentrate on improving the protocol.
...new versions of eDonkey and the NMDC client have been released. I can't wait!
It's a great way to bring your system to a crawl, espically if you don't have the latest greatest hardware. It's neat if all you are doing is downloading, but if you want to like DL in the background and play a game, not so good. It is just too processor hungry.
I maintain a tracker and seeds for my Air America Radio archive. I'd like to offer more seeds (like a whole week's worth of shows), but I don't want to open hundreds of ports in my firewalls. I also don't want to be so on the bleeding edge that no one can download the files - and of course I'm too lazy to test it myself....
Might as well link to the joke so...
c om puter.mov
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=gijoe-
and more can be found at
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/gijoe.html
It's one of those were either you laugh your ass off or become disturbed at the amount of free time people have. Personally I laugh my ass off.
BitTorrent allows
Mack the wrong choice some Friday evening and you may with you had....
Yeah no kidding, my two biggest memory hogging applications are:
- javaw.exe @ 43,616K at the moment
- firefox.exe @ 40,564K at the moment.
I like Azureus enough that I'll let this slide since I don't use it all the time (newsgroups are fun), and I dislike IE enough that 50mb doesn't seem so bad, plus I have enough ram anyway.
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
Can you use the new version to seed a torrent you've already downloaded? I tried doing this and it didn't seem to recognize that I had already downloaded the file. Using windows version, and it generally seems a bit buggy.
1. There is actually no RFC or other detailed documentation for the BT protocol. The unofficial clients were all written based on the source code from the official client (and more recently, based on the source code of other unofficial clients). IMO Bram should create a formal RFC, but that is pretty unlikely (he's not interested and the IETF is probably too conservative to do p2p).
2. Sadly the python clients are the only ones usable on 64MB virtual private servers. Most of the unofficial clients are platform-specific (Win32, GTK+), or require a bloated JVM that has no chance of working in less than 128MB.
I find it tragic that noone has released a high quality POSIX C client. Maybe the OpenBSD guys will eventually get around to OpenBT?
bit-torando
btw that article was fro Thursday November 4, 3:01 AM
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yeah. Second-rate, late, half-baked software that makes all of your books, all of your magazines, all of your movies, all of your newspapers, all of your music ... and that also sequences your DNA to help keep you alive. And, just for fun, does any aspect of your life depend on Oracle or Sybase? Does your employer use either of them? Do you use a bank, for instance, or do you ever buy airline tickets? I ask because in the past 2 years, both Oracle and Sybase have switched to Mac OS X exclusively for the development of their products.
It always makes me laugh when people shit on the Mac, because it just goes to show that they don't understand just how much of their world depends on Macs.
PC users had to wait almost a year. It's not possible to complete PC and Mac versions of software at the exact same time, and they would lose money for every day they wait in order to make the releases concurrent. Windows = majoriy = more profit.
What, no one is going to talk about the new BitTorrent Open Source License that has been slapped on this 4.0 version?
Thoughts about this would be much appreciated. I'm reading through it right now.
What does disappaering seeders and trackers have to do with the BT protocol?
My First Post. Any one notic the link to Suprnova . I thought that they got shut down http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/05/005720 7&tid=95&tid=1 (slashdot.org)
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Depends on your location. In some places overseas (from the US), punctuation such as "blah blah". is becoming accepted, if not preferred.
Use the Java VM >=1.5 to keep CPU usage from going through the roof though
Can you tell me where I can find Java 1.5 for Mac OS X? From what I gather, Apple is holding their release for OS X 10.4; does Sun have a build for Mac OS X?
Jay (=
Remember the Google Zeitgeist before they removed the OS stats last year? Mac 3%, Linux desktops 1%. Just another data point, I guess.
You mean the version of Kenosis that is integrated with BitTorrent?
It's still alive and kicking. Check it out at http://kenosis.sourceforge.net/
here's the dude in chicago that makes 'em
http://www.fenslerfilm.com/
TODO: come up with a clever sig
would be a minimize to system tray option. I know thats not that hard to code in and makes the whole process a lot easier. I know for a fact that most people like to keep thier task bar pretty clean (and I can honestly state that on any of my systems I have less than 6 icons on my desk top.) I dislike clutter, and I know I know I should get a mac. The mini is on its way...
I am actually working on writing a new Torrent client for a project of mine...
I will be looking for the new documentation on the changes.. hopefully its better then the stuf that's out there (like not mentioning the bencoded dictionaries need to be sorted... grrrr)
Anyways, anyone have any requests for what this one is to do? I already have both console and GUI with installers and speed capping planned. I'm not sure how but I would like to get a plugin system working too.
The codebase right now is not yet working, otherwise I'd post a link.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Actually, as the other person replying has so eloquently made clear, my understanding was backwards. It's the period-goes-outside-the-quote-marks style that is preferred and the US (henceforth "stupid") style that is accepted.
Just because the US uses the stupid style doesn't mean that other countries do.
First, let me say: Hi-Larious.
But your comment is still completely irrelevant to the question of the specifics of why bitorrent has a custom open-source license.
The best answer you're going to get is by reading it, line for line.
A quick answer on WHY the license is needed, is:
- unlike the BSD / MIT licenses, it requires to you make source code modifications to the bittorrent code available to the public.
- unlike the GPL it does not require you to make the rest of your [non-bittorrent] source code available, if bittorrent is integrated into your project.
- it includes a provision to void the entire license if you file a patent claim against the bittorrent code / its author.
It may be wrong, but I actually prefer it for readability, like brackets around your code block. Does that peroid end your sentence or a quoted sentence?
Well, in countries such as mine (Spain) we have rules to deicde whether the period goes inside or outside the quotation marks. If the marks contain the full sentence, the period goes within the marks (and no additional period is afterwards needed), otherwise it doesn't.
1) They said "We are the knights who say Ni."
2) They repeatedly said "Ni".
I don't know very well because it's not my native tongue, but it wouldn't surprise me that English has some similar rules. And when I say rules I mean as established by good English language literature...
If that were all he's interested in, he'd use some simple and brief non-copylefted free software license like the new BSD license or the MIT X11 license.
There is considerably more in the new BitTorrent license than in either of those licenses. Among other things, the new BitTorrent license specifies which licenses can be used as sublicenses and how much one can charge for distributing the source code of sublicensed derivatives.
Pride in one's work doesn't come from a license and people aren't going to give him money because of the license.
Digital Citizen
If you want to follow the example of Bram who only downloads legal stuff, you can test your brand new BT 4.0 client with the excellent Wired CD, in Ogg Vorbis :
.torrent
Wired CD
In practice, it doesn't leak resources like all the python/java/etc implementations do, and its interactive ncurses client is the best bittorrent one I know of. It does also use our well-known GP L :).
Remember the Google Zeitgeist before they removed the OS stats last year? Mac 3%, Linux desktops 1%. Just another data point, I guess.
I'd be curious to see those stats just prior to the release of the Mac Mini and 12 or 24 months after the release - I'm wondering just how many converts Apple are going to get from the windows crowd. (I'm hoping it's a lot - I personally am not a Mac user, I'm exclusively Linux, but I wholly support people using Macs since they have a proper operating system instead of the toy that Microsoft produces).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
In English, you can find examples of good literature that do all sorts of weird things. The "rules" are often just arbitrary, and are "enforced" by anal retentives who want to post to Slashdot, but have got nothing interesting to say on the topic under discussion.
How much longer until true internet Multicasting gets here?
Why can't a server send one packet, that gets multiplied where the network braches down to each branch that is listening?
for something like file distribution, you could multicast parts in a loop, continously sending out part 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,... and a client can start listening at any point, and peice the file together.
where's my IPv6?
The idea of OSX as just a pretty GUI is a gross disservice. I wouldn't touch OSX (or any other proprietary OS) with a ten foot pole myself, but credit where credit is due.
If the license isn't valid, you are not allowed to redistribute the code. That is basic copyright law.
The *only* thing that allows you to redistribute the code is the license. So it is in your own interest to defend the license.
Of course, if you don't redistribute the code, you don't have to accept the license. The GPL is very specific about this, but it is true for all licenses. Or used to be, apparently there is a trend in some juristictions to consider the transfer of the program from harddisk to ram in order to run the code to be covered by copyright (very much against the spirit of copyright law), which mean accepting these licenses will be needed if you just want to run the program.
Actually, his use of the Full-Stop(.)* was perfect, but his use of speech marks ("") was wrong, these are used for Quoted Text only. The correct sentence would have been: You miss-spelled 'Camino'. But it was still funny :)
* The proper term for the (.) is 'full-stop', not 'period'
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
The correct sentence would have been:
You miss-spelled 'Camino'.
But it was still funny :)
* The proper term for the (.) is 'full-stop', not 'period'
Sorry about the Double-Post I forgot the formatting and didn't preview - "Doh!".
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
OK, genius. Let's all revert to speaking greek or something then, because obviously English is WRONG.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
that there is no torrent link on the download page...
QTorrent is quite decent.
In some CVS revision quite some time ago (several months, perhaps a year?), that feature had already been introduced. It's not that big an issue, too, since it's only been about four lines of code.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I wonder if the new version has multithreaded the client so that receive and transmit are in separate threads?
This is important if you are using traffic shaping on your upstream connection, as I am. I'm on ADSL, and so my upstream bandwidth is less than my downstream. To prevent BT from consuming all my upstream bandwidth I am using the tc module in the kernel to restrict the BT packets (the rate limiting in BT is next to useless, as each instance of the client will use the programmed bandwidth - there is no "global" sharing of the bandwidth, so if you have 4 clients running it will take 4 times the bandwidth of 1 client).
The problem is that if the client is blocked sending an outbound torrent packet (because the traffic shaper queue is full), the client will not process any available incoming data packets, and this will hammer the download speed - I have expermimentally verified this.
Now, if there were separate threads for downloading and for uploading, the uploading threads would block as the TC queue filled, but the download threads would not be blocked, and could handle the download at full speed.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Multicast is not suited for file replication. If clients join a multicast stream, they can only get what the server is spewing out now, not the history. Fine for live braodcasts, sucks for everything else. You can't say: "Dear server, give me that file." The server will broadcast the file, and you get whatever portion is currently broadcasted wehn you join.
Then, there's also the issue of bandwidth/error correction. Mutlicast is UDP, you can't go and say: "Sorry, server, I didn't get that last packet, send it again". Multicast is purely uni-directional in that way. Again, fine for broadcast, sucks for file download. Any error correction info would have to be distributed along with the stream, dramatically increasing bandwidth requirements. Also, if the server is broadcasting at a highe rate than the client can receive, packets are gonna get dropped, and the client looses.
To sum up: Multicast was never meant to do downloads, and it shows.
Actually, a full stop is any punctuation mark used to end a sentence. This would include (.), (?), (!), etc. According to a google search, it also includes (:) and (;). If you're so inclined, each of these full stops has a name: period, question mark, exclamation point, colon, and semicolon.
Speaking of new features in Azureus. If you install the latest version from CVS, http://azureus.sourceforge.net/index_CVS.php, you will notice a few things, one being "decentralized tracking"...
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A full-stop is what you Americans call a period. In English it's only a period when used to indicate a long pause... like that one.
Even if you considered a Question mark or an exclamation mark to be in the same category as a full-stop,(because they end a sentence) The colon(:) & Semicolon(;) are never used to end a sentence, but rather to continue one
American - English Conversion
How to use punctuation
There are countless ways in which the English language has been bastardised by America... one of the funniest ones I heard recently was when I was on hold waiting to speak to someone over there. The message said: "Please wait, someone will be with you momentarily." The funny thing is that this actually means that someone will be with me FOR a very short length of time, not IN an short length of time as it was obviously intended to mean.
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
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And misuse of punctuation is very easy to do... can anyone spot the not-so deliberate mistake in the above post? :)
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
I'd like to see an American-English one for the other English-speaking countries of the world, being Canadian, we take on a lot of both English and US usage and throw in a few terms of our own. I'd like to see what words other countries use.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
Changelog: using GTK not wxwindows (wxwidgets).
Well you can use wxwidgets and build with gtk but I guess they are just going straight to gtk. Is that for speed or memory savings? I'd like to know why.
Also the FAQ still says they use wx.
P.S. Azureus is cool but a memory hog whereas screen ctorrent is mighty nice.
Canadian English
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
I recall some time ago, the author of BitTornado penned an open letter to University IT offices, to the effect of, "Stop blocking bittorrent, or else the next version of the bittorrent standard will be next to impossible to block."
Do any of the new features provide for this non-blockability? I'm particularly interested, as mine is one of the Universities which dislikes BT in general. (Official quote from our OIT dept: "Sorry about Bittorrent. We have to block that site.")
Interesting claim that BT accounts for 1/3 of all internet traffic. My University OIT recently claimed that IRC was taking up 1/3 of their traffic, and blocked it. Apparently, OIT people like having piles and piles of unused bandwidth.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
You misspelled "Camino".
Wait, is that supposed to read
"Why bother with Camino when we've got Safari?"
or
"Why bother with Firefox when we've got Camino?"
?
I've been wondering, how can I make bittorrent firewall friendly. I think my setup is typical of slashdot: a nat firewall turning my IP into one of many behind the firewall. Sure I can forward the bittorrent ports, but only if I always use the one machine, a restriction that I cannot use.
What I'd like is a proxy that I can run somewhere. The proxy is bittorrent running on some machine on the network. My client isn't really bittorrent, it is a look-alike to the user that just tells the proxy to download this file. The proxy can then automatically remain a seed until space runs low. (I only download legal files so I don't care if the RIAA finds me)
Is there a better way? Has someone done this? What do you do?
This really ought to wave the red flag in front of the MPAA. A better, easier to use, BitTorrent. And all at a time when I would think they'd be better off keeping a low profile while the case is still in the courts.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
BitTorrent is written in Python. It runs on any platform that has Python.
The EXE and prepackaged OS X clients are merely clients that were compiled from the original Python. If you simply install Python and use the source distribution, you'll never need to worry about waiting for someone to deliver you a prepackaged compiled version.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The official mac client is close to release. There is a beta available here. Note that it might resume torrents running from the old client in a different spot, making them start over again. In that case you should stop the torrent, clear it, open the torrent file, and point it at your old download.
There isn't that much left to be done so release should be soon. Mostly remaining is localization, documentation, and a little more polish.
It's got an updated UI, uses a single port, resumes torrents without re-checking, fully customizable toolbar, torrent inspector/editor, and everything can be controlled from the keyboard. Also, the number one request has been filled: you can choose a location for all your torrents to go to seperate from your usual InternetConfig download folder.
burris
because obviously English is WRONG
No English isn't wrong. Just the idea that it is governed by rules.
wxWidgets is the de-facto standard on cross-platform ui's. Why did he change it?
Whatever, I'm still using ABC client. After all, the bittorrent PROTOCOL hasn't changed, right?
Me too!!
Mod me up! *g*
There is a beta available and release should be very soon. Mostly remaining is documentation, localization, and polish.
The new version might have global caps.
Almost all other BT clients already have them. BitTornado most definately has a global UL cap.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Plus, how would a 3D video card improve 2D performance?
Rules?
Will all the anarchist mathematicians gather in the larger half of the hall, please?
*Still* negative function...
Now if only Nethack would follow suit.
Er.. whatever site told you that is living on Mars.
...one of the funniest ones I heard recently was when I was on hold waiting to speak to someone over there. The message said: "Please wait, someone will be with you momentarily."It is unlikely that every American uses English improperly and that every Brit speaks perfect English.
After further research, I'll agree. I had never heard of a full stop before and my searching was limited. However, I will refuse to call it a 'full-stop' because it just doesn't work for me. I will however probably start calling it a dot since I don't like how the origins of using a 'period' started.
The proper term for the (.) is 'full-stop', not 'period'.
A full-stop is what you Americans call a period.
Your earlier comment was that Americans are incorrect in calling (.) a period. When generations of people in a country of over 200 million people call (.) a period, its not wrong, its just different. Your second comment reflects the facts: there are syntactic and grammatic differences between the countries.
There are countless ways in which the English language has been bastardised by America...
Yeah, I hate how we don't say "ye olde english"! I suppose the last grunting caveman was also upset that the others began using words and bastardizing his language.
As an aside, I guess I should be happy you call us Americans living in America, instead of USians in US.
Further, my wife just overheard a conversation (I live in the South; yes, they capitalize it here): The woman was complaining that she could never remember how to spell it. Was it with a 'y' or an 'i'? F-L-I-E-D or F-L-Y-E-D, you know like 'I just flied on over there!' My wife didn't have the heart to tell her.
I see that a few people have recommended QTorrent; I will second (or 3rd, or 4th ...) that recommendation.
:)
See, I am lazy: when I wanted to download something in the form of a torrent, and found that the client that's supposed to be integrated into Firefox on my distro (Mepis) didn't work, complaining about missing wxWindows or somesuch, I did what sanely insane people do. I fired up Synaptic, updated, searched for anything that had "torrent" in its name or description, and installed them all.
Then I used them, one by one. Azureus -- which many people seem to love, and on which I am obviously the farthest thing from an expert! -- I found mildly confusing because I couldn't get it working with a few minutes of futzing (needs more helpfiles, examples, etc, IMO), so went on to the next one, which was QTorrent. QTorrent was simple to get going (passed my 60-second test), so it's my new choice
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Which completely loses its point by namecalling at the front end.
My post was not meant as a jab at OIT people in general (although it was badly phrased to sound like it was). It was primarily targeted at my own university's OIT, who, for clarity's sake, are imbeciles. Just because you're intelligent, don't assume that all OIT people are.
And, backing up the claim that my local OIT are not quite on par, intelligence-wise: When I cited that claim regarding IRC, that wasn't entirely correct. They claimed that 1/3 of their traffic was occuring on port 6667, saying that IRC was causing this. DCC transfers don't take place on 6667. It was later shown that they were lying about the bandwidth issue.
Further, the kiddie-porn thing is a non issue here. There's too many other methods of obtaining such content that P2P isn't the real contender.
So, Scott, apologies to you and your fellows, but please don't stand up for other OIT people just because they are OIT people. They could be OIT and still be jerks/morons/malevolent demons from a dimension of suffering.
Of course, this still leaves the original question ("Is bittorrent 4.0 mostly unblockable?") unanswered.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
you know what your problem was? you were trying to distribute legal content. next time try a movie. it will go faster
All major ISPs use policymaps on their 'edge' routers to groom user traffic as per their internal network QoS model. What this means is that *all* incoming packets have their IP TOS field rewritten to predetermined values...low pri for home users, med pri for business DSL and VPN users etc. Whether BitTorrent marks a packet as bulk or not will not matter, heck, for that matter, all users would mark ALL their traffic as high priority and then where would the ISPs be ? Try long distance traffic tests and measure latency and traffic loss with various TOS field values...you will not notice any difference.
Perhaps you had it misconfigured ? I would expect little DSL/cable links to take a while to download but the T1s should have done a much better job. One question is whether those T1 machines were actually uploading anything to the others ? There is a leech criteria - if a machine is downloading a lot but uploading very little (or cannot upload because no one can connect to it because it is firewalled), then it will be throttled waaaaaaay back. That's why I suspect a configuration issue. When the Tsunami videos were posted to BT, nothing worked expect BT links, and there were 1000s of peers up/downloading so everything ran great.
Will this change by Cohen affect how the other BT clients communicate with it?
Here's my observations on BitTorrent 4.0. It's a slight-edited version of something I sent to a colleague of Cohen's.
Overall, the new version is a vast improvement over the 3.4.x line for those of us who prefer using a console client (I keep btlaunchmanycurses.py running all the time under GNU screen). A global --max_upload_rate is much appreciated for everyone who doesn't have bandwidth shaping in their router (I do now, but for a long time I didn't). All in all, many very welcome changes.
The below comments are based on use of just btlaunchmanycurses.py 3.9.1/4.0, not any of the other console clients or the GUI clients, and are sorted in order of seriousness.
* --saveas_style absolutely, positively should not have 1 as the default. Stripping file extensions from downloaded files' names, and changing downloaded files' names at all from what's encoded in the torrents, is very bad form.
* I can cause a semi-reproducible crash by running more than about 70 torrents at once at a time.
* On my 80x40 screen, there often isn't enough room to completely display the second line in each torrent's section. "17 peers 5 seeds 0 dist copies" could easily be shortened to "17p/5s/0d."
* Ctrl-L ought to redraw the screen as in other well-behaved Unix console apps.
* Saving the hashes is very appreciated. How about also saving cumulative up/download byte totals across sessions? (I wonder if the data/metainfo directory is meant for this; it seems unused at the present.)
* While the scrolling torrent listing is much appreciated (and incidentally also takes care of the notorious "exceed available screen space and instantly crash the client" bug in the 3.4.x series), I'd prefer the scrolling be controllable. I'm thinking a static list that the user can page up/down in manually.
* The version notes are far too skimpy. Speaking of the previous, I can't find any documentation on (for example) how 4.0 differentiates between "peers," "seeds," and "dist copies." The figures don't seem to correspond with what the trackers report.
* Shouldn't the total up/downloaded bytes readouts appear directly under the "Download" and "Upload" column headings, instead of being switched? Perhaps even better would be to preserve their relative positions but move total uploaded bytes directly under the "Size" column heading. (I always try to keep a torrent running until I've uploaded as much as I've downloaded. It's possible the "dist copies" indicator is an easier way to learn when I've achieved this, but again, I don't know due to the lack of documentation.)
* --parse_dir_interval probably ought to have a default lower than the current 60 seconds (I use 3, but would be happy with 3.4.x's hardwired 0).