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BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash
gollum123 writes "There is an article on washignton post on bittorrent where the author discusses why BitTorrent is here to stay. According to the author it is being increasingly used to distribute software and entertainment legally. It also mentions that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn't amount to a token minority. It's central to this program's existence. It concludes by saying that the MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."
Over at Empornium...
150k member max, and still beating them away with a stick!
No leechers rocks!
Just as long as admins remember to lose those logs... I just *hate* hardware failures...
dont you?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.
Well, at least someone realizes this, instead of tacitly - or overtly - arguing that it's okay for them to be unabashedly ripped off, coupled with myriad ridiculous justifications and semantic acrobatics about how it's not really "stealing".
Frankly, the content industry convincing major ISPs to enable multicast on their networks may go a lot further toward efficiently distributing non-"on demand" content than something like BitTorrent.
But backing up a bit:
One reason for this change of heart may be that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn't amount to a token minority. It's central to this program's existence.
Not that I don't recognize that BitTorrent is currently used for many legitimate applications (whereas that was extremely difficult to argue with a straight face with P2P), but I think this statement is a little overboard. I'd say that, currently, "legitimate" use of BitTorrent is a "token minority" of its use. The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).
Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.
Note that I agree wholeheartedly that BitTorrent isn't going to go away. Neither did P2P. But the content owners will continue to rightfully go after people and sites who distribute copyrighted content unlawfully, no matter the mechanism (please, no fringe examples of 83 year old grandmothers and dead people). But yes, I get the point - and agree with it - that BitTorrent could potentially have much more legitimate use than traditional P2P.
The point is valid: the fundamental distribution mechanism of BitTorrent is a novel and good one; there is no reason that BitTorrent couldn't, for example, be made even more robust and further "protocolized", and integrated into browsers and other download clients, allowing content distributors of any stripe to take advantage of its clear benefits. And in order for it to be a compelling solution for real content providers, that's exactly what will have to happen.
as it doesn't mention the plethora of brilliant '3rd party' clients like Azureusand BitTornado which have been offering a variety of these features for a very long time.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Where are the sources, now that suprnova has been closed ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I've noticed a distinct speed decrease in torrents lately. Surely the only person who's had a decrease in torrent speed when they upgrade to 2meg. Seriously though, I don't know if my ISP is catching on to torrent use but I've gone from 100k+ to 20/30 average.... Not good.
BIYC Records
The funniest thing I've learned from reading slashdot is that innovation never stops. Some bastard that never sleeps will make bittorrent look like a joke within a year from now. We'll all refer to this article a year from now and laugh, lol. I love technology.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
BitTorrent is a very powerful protocol. It's a shame that so many businesses automatically associate it with illegitimate filesharing. They miss out on a nearly-free way of distributing large files. Not to mention that most corporate networks block BT traffic making it impossible for employees to take advantage of legitimate torrents that are available.
...You think a protocol that contributes a third of all internet traffic is being found useful? Hmmm... yeah I think so.
The MPAA will still want to charge about the same price for a download as a store-bought movie.
Unless they prove me wrong, their torrent distribution model is not viable.
But the Washington-based lobby hasn't sued BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen of Bellevue, Wash., nor has it gone after individual BitTorrent users.
;-)
How could they go after him? The software is open-source and its intentions are nothing less than noble. If Cohen was looking to *directly* make money on BitTorrent he wouldn't have released the source to it.
As far as going after individual users... They rarely did anyway. BitTorrent isn't as easy as Kazaa for finding "mass sharers". Most people are maxing their upstream on a single torrent instead of offering up their entire personal library in one place. That is why they are going after the sites linking to the trackers.
Independent musicians can also use BitTorrent to provide free samples. The Web site of the South by Southwest music festival (2005.sxsw.com/
geekout/sxsw4pod/) uses BitTorrent to offer a 2.6-gigabyte compilation of songs by artists playing at this Austin event. (In an unplanned demonstration of how BitTorrent doesn't always function at top speed, that torrent was more of a glacier Tuesday night, with too few users to serve up bits of the file.)
And the author of this article just proved how posting links to torrents on a highly trafficked site will get him his music faster.
The MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.
And what? Put all those popcorn salesmen and ticket rippers out of their after-school jobs? Nope, at least not for now.
Am I the only one here who has a problem with bittorrent being used as a distribution medium for legally sold movies & albums?
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE bittorrent and don't mind using it for isos or distros. The problem I have is with someone makeing a big profit out of me AND using my upstream to limit their bandwidth costs.
Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
For the MPAA and the RIAA to demand the entire Internet be taken down to "protect their property". I mean, if you take the entire net down, then that stops the flow of illegal downloads! Sure, why not.
Also, demand that anything "digital" be destroyed as it can be copied and copied without loss of quality like the old days of analog recording. Hell, while they're at it demand that all recording devices be banned from the world! Why not?!?! They're crazy I tells ya! CRAZY!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
One of the things for which I love BitTorrent is the ability to get movies and television programs not available in the 'States. I'm studying Japanese, and don't like most of the Japanese media that is available in the US, as it is marketed, by and large, for the otaku crowd. I mean, yeah, there's some good stuff in there, but most of it is crap.
Having access to BitTorrent means that I can download regular TV shows, dramas, historical programs, and recorded news broadcasts, all of which would be completely unavailable in the U.S. I can download anime that I like, but which isn't popular enough to make it into the U.S. market. These are all very effective study tools, and have helped me improve my listening comprehension markedly.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
There is no "the BitTorrent"- no single point of failure. If you have a copy of the tracker, you can torrent anything you want and only what you want. Set up a complete torrent infrastructure on your own site and use it to serve only your (legitimate) content. It's just another type of server that anyone can use independent of anyone else on the net. They may as well try to kill FTP.
It's increasingly likely that in the years to come it will be possible to rent videos by having a set-top box coupled to a DSL or Cable broadband pipe, which downloads DRM-enabled video files from a central server.
What better way to save bandwidth - the single killer cost when each film might sum a gigabyte - than by having the box download the film using a restricted version of bittorrent, and use a proportion of the available upstream bandwidth on the local connection to supply other people renting the same film? As the file's encrypted piracy wouldn't be a concern as the key to play it would only be issued by the central server, over an encrypted channel.
This would have the effect - exactly opposite to a DVD-rental shop - that popular videos would be available more quickly than rarely demanded ones. The system has the same priorities as the company behind it.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The irony of bittorrent is that while the technology is designed to be somewhat decentralized, from a piracy standpoint it actually works better when everyone goes to one site. In order for a file to remain healthy for an extended period of time, a minimum number of people have to be always downloading/uploading that file. So if you want to download a ten week old episode of The OC, the only way you're going to find that is if the 8 other people in the entire country are looking for it in the same place. A real replacement for suprnova has yet to emerge, indicating that the lawsuits are working.
BitTorrent is a really big change, because with it we can finally upload data directly to "the network". The physical location of the data is immaterial. It's a really distributed database, where the schema is determined by the content, unlike the previous top-down schema designs. And it works - especially well on large media objects.
It's just getting started. A few changes will make it the global distributed computing system we've each been coming at like blind men at a seeming menagerie that's really just one elephant. Distributing the catalog, so any centralization is redundant. Ensuring that any bit is always replicated at least once. Implicit hyperlinks among data chunks for content-specified traversal of the infospace (like HTTP/HTML/URLs). Search engines full of metadata. Asynchronous, realtime streaming protocols layered atop the application - including multicasting.
Maybe it won't be "BitTorrent" that gets these revs - after them, it would hardly be recognizable as BT. But BT has gotten us across a major watershed, the way the CERN HTTPd v1.0 did in 1990. Like anything else that hundreds of millions of people are doing simultaneously, throughout the day and night, it's too late to stop.
--
make install -not war
Next week on
I could see the people using it for illegal downloads just working on a version that isn't centralised around trackers and therefore is a more effective version of kazaa.
Exeem kind of did this when it was implemented, but did not provide encryption like Winny does.
Business Voyeur
Yay, bittorrent is here to stay!
http://onticfusion.sytes.net/
If Debian and others are putting their ISOs out on BT and I and others are relying on them, then it's hardly 'token'.
BT is becoming the distribution method of choice for plenty of legitimate stuff. Sure there's vastly more illegal stuff, but the legal stuff is definitely not 'token'.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I'm surprised that the MPAA hasn't learned from the RIAA's lessons. We have the iTunes Music Store, the Napster store, and others, all proving that people will pay for downloads. Would they be better without DRM and if they also offered Lossless music? Sure - but there are some third party independents that are doing that, so perhaps they'll pressure the other "major" stores to do so.
So why hasn't the MPAA tried it? Open up an online store with a bittorrent back end much like Valve's Steam: able to distribute data to the hard drive that uses Bittorrent like technology to speed up the downloads, encrypt as it writes to the hard drive and let people watch it from there on their computers or portable devices or stream media (like Tivo, for example). Charge more for higher bit downloads, so if you order the HD quality movie you'll pay more for the download (but you should be able to have that compressed down onto your portable devices without having to buy again), or if you just buy the portable device only version you can pay less (but will look crappy as hell on your TV, so you get what you pay for).
There's no good technological reason why someone hasn't done this - only fear of loss of control and fear that someone will replace their distribution model from production companies -> theaters -> DVDs -> TV. But if they don't replace their production models themselves to production companies -> theaters/home use downloads (expensive, spending more for "just released" movies) -> DVD/home downloads (less expensive), someone else will do it for them, and they'll be worse off for it.
The author makes some good points about how currently MPAA/RIAA fights are to keep technologies down or even products off the marketplace (see the mobile carriers and the Motorola iTunes phone as an example), rather than embracing the technology and being the service company that makes it work for you.
Maybe that's the problem. The MPAA/RIAA/mobile carriers see themselves as seller of widgets, instead of services. They can make a lot more money by providing services with less costs of widgets (cost of pressing DVD and shipping is probably greater than bandwidth and creating once, in the long run), but it's that fear of "new" that keeps them from seeing that they're killing the goose that keeps wandering around their yard looking for food - without realizing that it keeps squirting out golden eggs.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
its here to stay if the internet stays true to its roots, but i can think of a few ways the labels can stop it (or at least marginalise it). Its all a mattter of $ and strength-of-will...something the 'labels' appear to have in abundance.
1. Make it illegal. Sponsor bills over and over and over again until something sticks. This may or may not work. It at least can pollute the atmosphere enough to slow bittorrent adoption...a 'chilling' effect among users.
2. Buy up as many ISPs and digital communication carriers as possible. Or merge. Or become acquired by these networking/communications companies and prove the merit (e.g. profit) of your media rights. After that you customise service offerings to filter bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent isn't very useful if you can't get out of your subnet. Nothing illegal here, just users can't use the tool.
3. Continue the strategy of pummeling bittorent portals into oblivion with legal paperwork. Yes there will always be distribution lists, usenet, etc...but you can kill off 50-75% of the mainstream traffic pretty easily by eliminating the main portals of entry into bittorrent trading.
4. Buy anti-virus vendors, spyware vendors. Offer the product for free, but identify any bittorrent code as malware and remove it. This is the 'trojan horse' method... market to parents, OEMs for ready made systems, try to get Microsoft onboard.
5. Buy or sponsor bios code for retail/consumer highspeed modems, wireless cards, routers, etc. Get filters put in place on these devices.
Yes, all of these techniques aren't 100% effective and some are more reasonable than others...my point is a creative RIAA/MPAA lobby focusing their efforts on a multi-tier strategy can really reduce the availability and adoption of bittorrent in the future. Uber-geeks will always have backdoors, hacks, etc, but this is a much smaller portion of their potential market. I think they can live with the slashdotters trading warez...its the other 95% that they want to cripple.
PS Note that I never suggest the labels will be smart enough to discount their products to improve uptake/sales.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
If they can set up a BT distro then anyone can.
Unless these files are locked up in some with (in)effective DRM, one person can download it and start up an alternative torrent.
Convenience trumps Free, someone said on Slashdot. But what if Free is Convenient?
The creators, whoever they may be, get fucked. And that's -already- happening now.
BitTorrent may be an ideal way for the corporate media to distribute its crap, but they hate everything open source, right? All such software licenses need revising to charge the MPAA, RIAA and the rest of the leeches a billion dollars for each use. Why give the enemy your tools for free?
...recognise that, and don't give them a big profit!
If the movie houses give us a decent mechanism (DVDs with lovely artwork, delived promptly to the door), which we can then loan to our friends without DRM crap, we'll pay the fifteen quid/twenty-five dollars they want. If they want to take advantage of cheap distribution costs and expect us not to loan them around (DRM), then they'd better expect much less money!
As the guy in the article about music downloads was saying: when the price goes below a certain amount and the store works well, it's easier to dl legally than to steal.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
With the new version, 4.0, now available
. as p
http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html
for both Windows and Linux (MacOS real soon now), it's a lot easier for both users and network administrators to manage the protocol's bandwidth hungry ways. It's so much easier now that I think that you'll be able to talk organizations, which have banned its use, on the grounds that it eats up too much bandwidth, into rethinking their positions.
Heck, for that matter, I think that since BitTorrent bandwidth use is now mindlessly simple to manage, it will become a popular tool for businesses that need to move large data files back and forth between offices.
For more on all this see:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1775223,00
Steven
if the bittorrent protocol would be updated to look like HTTP or FTP or something else, to make it impossible for ISP's to filter it.
Do you really want this web site down? (or maybe this one?)
Until I blinked which brought me to my senses and I realized A) they'll never do it anyway and B) if they did i'm sure it wouldn't be mandatory for you to use it.
No sig for you!!
I don't think 'token minority' means what you think it means.
Legitimate users may be a minority -- maybe even a tiny minority -- but they are not a 'token minority' by any means, in the sense of only there for symbolic purposes to legitimize the non-legitimate use.
I use BitTorrent *all the time* legitimately. Whether it's for some student movie or a big whopping disc image (like X-Plane). I might be in the minority but my uses are not token.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
How hard can it be for BT to spoof its packets? Can't it just put them inside some kind of bulk data wrapper?
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Mostly it's just un-obtainable. I mostly download Fansubs, but I am happy to curtailed it as outlets like Fry's and Best Buy started carrying Anime is quantity in their stores. The Fansub ideal was share until it's released in English then start buying it. That is a good plan in so far has it brings Anime into the US market. The Anime companies are not seriously going after the Fansubbers who use P2P almost exclusively, attacks are token at best. They are promoting the product in a market the Japanese Anime companies can't reach.
Video on Demand as been a success because the shows and movies that people want to watch are at their fingertips. I time society will digest this and we will see iPods w/ Movies on them instead of just mp3s. (Please no examples, I know there are ways).
This article has generated examples of just these points.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
And yes, someone could have cracked the encryption, but they've cracked dvd anyway. Point is that this could be used by the common person who just wants to download a movie, and doesn't want to have to get out of his chair. Because heaven forbid we actually get out of our houses, or have to actually go *get* something. People pull back muscles doing that sort of stuff, right?
as long as that's reflected in the pricing. Is it xandros where you can buy an FTP download iso for $30 or a bittorrent one for $15? That's the way it should be.
I am trolling
It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web
Now why would it be in their best interest to distribute movies and music so that everyone else could get it without compensating them for it? Is this more of the silly "free advertising" argument? Seriously, how would you expect them to get paid if they did that? I guess a recording artist is expected to spend three months renting out a studio and equipment, just to have the music blasted onto Bittorrent where he won't get paid for his work.
Are you telling me the Bittorrent system has DRM or some other way of preventing people from getting the material without paying for it? If not, is there a way to graft on such a system? Only then would studios even consider using it. Otherwise, it's silly wishful thinking on the part of people who are, shall we say, used to the convenience of downloading whatever they want and so invent reasons for everything to be on P2P.
When you see more and more companies using BitTorrent to distribute eval versions of their software or other bandwidth hungry files, it will be hard to irradicate. I just downloaded the Xandros' Linux Desktop distribution (the free version) and it was a torrent download. Doesn't look like it's going away any time soon.
You might want to forward and use a set of 10 consecutive ports starting from an arbitrary number between 50000 and 60000. Some ISPs use packet shaping or throttling on the standard ports. A number of Other people I know have noticed a marked increase after following this advice.
It may also be the lever ISP's use to raise rates. Face it 3 mb/s down is cool and easy to over commit when the end users are surfing the web and readin email.
Central to Bit Torrent is maxing our your pipe, then leaving it up long enough to let others have what you've got. That kind of allocation wasn't planned for when broadband was originally mapped out.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I don't think so, lest trading of copyrighted content becomes uniformly illegal. Otherwise, BT remain a source for copyrighted content.
[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Actually this is not at all how it works, BitTorrent downloads chunks of the file in any order. The 90% you reffer to isn't the first 90% of the file it's just 90% of the file, the reason this happens is the seeder may disconnect before giving out a complete copy of the file and the sum of the stuff the connected peers have is only 90% of the file.
Who the hell modded you up?
I used BitTorando for a while but have switched to G3 Torrent. G3 has a number of really useful settings and I recommend people give it a peek.
Considering that BT uses a system of upload/download to transfer files for each client, will the orginizations give some money or benefit to individuals who upload in excess or have superior upload than others? It would only make logical sense...
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
After all, from the point of view of downloaders, if the original Napster wasn't too good to quash I don't know what would be.
Fundamentally, people want free stuff and the content providers will do what they can/what it takes to stop them. Therefore, the more successfull something is (what I think most users would term "good") the more likely it is to be quashed.
I wasn't even AWARE BitTorrent was being used for illegal stuff - I thought of it primarily as an anti-slashdot effect tool. (Hint, hint to the editors, by the way.)
The real solution to this is to have people start putting up good, free music and videos. If that can be done, then the RIAA/MPAA can and should die as a result. If the open model doesn't function for those things, then stop being a leech and pay people who are selling what you want.
I still hold out hope for something like iRate http://irate.sourceforge.net/, which given a decent client and critical mass could ignite a revolution of its own. If the freebies get organized, get their own critics and fan bases, and word of mouth gets out that something good can be had for free that's all it will take. But content creation is NOT easy, at least not for software geeks. Let's get busy, clone some high end multimedia apps, and let those with artistic talent do their thing.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
BitTorrent isn't ideal for the distribution of foy pay content. Namely because, I'm not going to use my bandwidth to distribute content that I had to pay for.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The Halo fansite Halo.Bungie.Org has recently been using BitTorrent more and more often to distribute Halo videos to the community. Since the number of people downloading these vids has increased dramatically, BitTorrent has become necessary.
10100111001
I don't think Debian ISO's constitute even a minor fraction of bittorrent traffic.
Woohooo... this makes me happy...
Okay, I admit I do download a lot of crap... well, not crap, but general stuff... this is fortunatly not illegal in sweden... Yet.
But I must also admit I am really looking forward to the day I could legally for a nominal fee download music, videos, and other crap.
Why? Well, because I am one of those who download because of poor distribution and high pricing of whatever it is I look for. I dont want to pay the shipping from Uzbekistan for my latest dvd of "grown men whacking of in a circle while wearing starwars costumes" and I sure as heck dont want to pay the sales taxes for the crap, the distributors of the crap, and the nosy mailman that always gives me that quirky smile when he hands me the latest package of crap. I'd much rather pay the makers of the crap a buck or two which could probably feed them for a year, and download the crap torrent.
So I am definatly one of those that gets really happy by every step taken in the direction of online purchases of crap made easy (and eventually cheap).
Hmmm... reading through my post I seem to realize (almost) that most of that stuff is.... Crap.
Maybe I would rather not pay for it after all =P
still, happy days for the BT people of the world!
That's just wrong, sorry. Bitttorrent grabs bits and pieces of the file from points all throughout the file.
Here's how to prove this to yourself: download a song or an episode of a TV show or something, and try to play it when the progress bar hits 50%. If you can make it even 5% of the way through the file before getting to a chunk of information you don't have, I'd be impressed.
In fact, the bittorent protocol is specificaly designed to send different pieces of the file to different users, to maximize the effect of sharing bandwidth.
That's true. BitTorrent uses rarest-first policy to choose chunks to download. That works well in most cases. You can't finish your downloading at 90% because of no seeds (and all the other leechers don't have the 10% missing part). That's the fundamental problem of BitTorrent: no incentive for seeds to stay.
I do not believe this is true at all. I'm pretty sure that bittorrent preferentially seeks out the least common "bits" among those downloading the file in order to ensure that there is a complete copy available, sometimes allowing a complete file to be downloaded even though there are no seeds. I've completed downloading (legal) unseeded files quite frequently. They do NOT load "from the beginning of the file to the end of the file," IIRC.
http://sailes.co.uk/sy22/bittorrent.htm
What you said is completely false. BitTorrent uses either Random First, i.e. selects a random chunk to download, or Rarest First, i.e. downloads the chunk that the fewest clients have. It definitely does NOT go linearly from beginning to end of file. If it stalls around 90%, this is only because there are some chunks which are much more rare than others.
bittorrent is very powerful, but as far as I know the packets are received randomly, and scrambled into the final file until finished (at least so it seems). Is it possible to use a bittorrent like approach for streamed contents?
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
to admit to copyright infringement in a national newspaper.
"(Full disclosure: For research purposes, I've used BitTorrent to grab two episodes of "The Simpsons" and Jon Stewart's famously combative "Crossfire" appearance.) "
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Well, at the rate people with a decent, say 2meg downstream connection, can download movies over Bittorrent I'd say that in the years to come, most people will already have more media in their own possession than they will be able to consume in their lifetimes.
So, if the big media conglomorates are going to do this in the "years to come" as opposed to next few weeks or months, then they might just be fucked because they'll be dealing with consumers that have more media tham they do. The US doesn't even have a cable hentai channel. Yet I bet many american bittorrent users have thousands of hours of it already. Conventional media distribution is asleep at the wheel and the bus has already gone off the road.
According to the BitTorrent Protocol FAQ, this is incorrect:
On part queues, before getting a part from a server peer that has the file, the client peer should favor the less popular part; it downloads it then start sharing immediatelly. This helps the entire network.
I don't know which client you've been using to reach this conclusion, but it must be a real crappy one, or you have no knowledge of the protocol at all. Most (all?) BT clients download the parts by a seemingly random order (again, most rare to most popular), so I have *never* seen any of my downloads start at the first part of a file and end at the last of it. This kind of order would be pretty bad in more than one way and thankfully it's not what BT clients do.
Never heard of the Washignton Post...
BT is really just p2p implemented well. Its an open source client without spyware that can be used for anything. People have begun to use BT for legal as well as "illegal" uses. But the same can be said for any great idea. Remember in 2001 when the monkey figures out he can use a bone for a tool. So he uses it as a weapon to hunt but also for killing. An great idea changes the way you view something. This shift can be exploited for good(tm) and bad(tm). It has been going on this way since creative thought itself, from bone weapons to smashing atoms.
The point is you can't stuff an idea back into the human mind. You can't hide or banish it. Once it is released you either deal with it or be crushed by it. BT as a well implemented p2p client is just that.
Bandwidth will increase, my ISP Comcast has increased bandwidth. This will only continue because the selling point of broadband is you can download movies, television shows and music. I mean Comcast tried to buy Disney.. there is a connection. AOL-Time Warner tried it and has failed so far. Microsoft is trying its best. But the future is one box, one line, and one remote.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
That's the fundamental problem of BitTorrent: no incentive for seeds to stay. This isn't really a *problem* at all. Sure, it means that your BT download might not go as fast as if they seeds stuck around. However, in the worst case, BitTorrent speeds simply break down to FTP levels (i.e. everyone is getting their chunks directly from one central copy.) Anyway, it's their bandwidth, they don't have to seed if they don't want to. To review, worst case: as good as FTP best case: WAY better than FTP
Your upstream has no value to you when it idle.
Putting it to use to distribute content you like means the content you like can be distributed to you without the vendor having to bundle in the cost to you of building a distribution infrastructure that duplicates resources you are already paying for in the form of your idle upstream capacity.
The article mentions that media folks (riaa/mpaa) take down sites hosting the torrents. Assuming the seeds themselves are hosted in countries disinterested in riaa and mpaa takedown notices or spread out across many individuals, what stops people from using p2p networks like kazaa to distribute the torrent files. It seems that this would be the next logical step. I'm not condoning this, I'm just curious why it isn't happening... yet.
-- john
It's only a problem if you're looking at it from a piracy point of view. As a legitimate user, the server that in a pre-BT world would have been an FTP or HTTP server is now always seeding that torrent. The incentive to keep seeding is to ensure that your customers can always get the content at full speed via BT, so that they don't demand money back or switch to an alternative download method.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
While having the P2P world stabilize on common protocols is surely a good thing, there's a down side as well. BitTorrent is nice and decentralized but doesn't do much to protect the privacy of those using it - unlike, say, FreeNet.
:-)
So, MPAA/RIAA evil plan:
1. Promote a P2P protocol that wasn't necessarily centralized but that makes it easy to discover who downloaded what. Do this "subtly": don't sue it, but sue anything else els; or "blatantly": push it into Windows and the Macintosh, market it to companies who distribute large files (ISOs) and so on.
2. In while (a few years), the truly "dangerous" P2P protocols would die off (since "everybody uses the same protocol that everybody uses"). Then unleash some reasonably effective system tracking users downloading copyrighted files (this is the point where the privacy-minded would insert "and the goverment unleash tracking of anyone it wants, which is everyone").
3. Go after anyone using a "dangerous" (non trackable) P2P protocol with a vengence: since "everybody" would be using the standard, trackable one for legal stuff, it is trivial to brand such protocols as illegal. No mercy to pirates, hanging is too god for them!
4. Using non-free music formats, and the ability to track P2P traffic, maintain the domination of the music market. Lucrative side business - offer a paid service tracking downloads of copyrighted material.
5. $$$ Profit $$$
From TFA, it seems they have finally caught on to this strategy. This isn't good news... Until now, we could have counted on the RIAA/MPAA doing us all a favor - blindly attacking each and every P2P protocol as it gets popular and thereby driving forward the evolution of such protocols at a furious pace, until we create the "holy grail": a system as secure as FreeNet, as easy to use as eMule, and as fast as BitTorrent.
To prevent their nefarious scheme, we need to push the RIAA/MPAA folk back to their blind attacks on everything P2P. The best way would be to start massively and blatantly using BitTorrent for copyrighted stuff - so much that they won't be able to resist the temptation to start the usual lawsuits campaign.
Anyone willing to be a martyr to the cause? Simply make available his entire CD collection as BitTorrents. Make sure to post them as widely as possible so I'll be able to download your music before they send you to jail
Blurring the differences between consumers and providers of data streams may not be the optimum model. Being new isn't the same as being better; just because you can doesn't mean that you should. Has anyone thought about that yet, hmm?
Seems to me that if we spent as much time in the programming community trying to defeat spammers and malware authors (by which I mean tracking them down, tying them to cement blocks and chucking them into the bay) as we do inventing new ways to distribute porn/movies/music in violation of copyright, that we'd be making some real goddamn progress. But hey, what's a few viruses and security exploits here and there compared to fast downloading free porn, right?
More power to those ISPs blocking BT, sez I. I got yer paradigm shift right here, buddy. Shift this.
No, I'm always this way.
Actually, an idle upstream does have value to me. It costs me US$7.50/gig of data coming across the pipe in either direction. So if I send a gig, it's 7.50, it I download a gig, it's 7.50. :)
:)
So, yep, an idle pipe has value, it's the cost savings of 7.50/gig!
I've recently discovered that it's actually _cheaper_ to go buy the DVD than it is to download it...
Jason Pollock
but this program isn't going to go away.
I thought BT is a protocol... Can they ban protocol?
1. Sell convenient legal downloads of movies that can be burned onto a DVD
2. Take down high traffic 1337 vidz sites, but otherwise don't worry much about bittorrent.
People will only respect intellectual property if it's offered for licensing on reasonable terms. These days, driving to store to just get some data is not reasonable. Amazon should ask US government for compulsory license to offer ISOs for immediate downloads to customers who bought movies or software.
This is basically what Steam does. ...and it's a crock, because it's basically paying the company to use YOUR resources.
On the general topic of media companies delivering content to you via Bittotrrent, and you using some of your upstream to distribute the file...
Yes, they are using some of your resources. However the way to look at it is not that you are paying them to use your bandwidth - instead realize that you are offering a mix of bandwidth and money for the services offered. To put it another way, they could also distribute the content via a standard means, but then you'd also have to pay more to support the far greater cost of bandwidth.
It's a win-win in another way - when content starts finally flying around in large qualities via a bittorrent like protocol, then said content companies and consumers will push for greater upstream caps instead of the measly 256k most of s with high-speed connections have now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's a great example of what the article is talking about...
I recently used Bit Torrent to "legitimately" release two super high-res versions of a Halo 2 montage that I created (M$ let's us create these as long as we're not making money off of them, so, yes, this is still legit). The QT was 200Mb and the WMV was 300Mb, which were way too BIG to distribute via traditional hosting for someone on a budget (or even for someone with money to burn) because once they got posted on the homepages of the largest Halo fansites (which they did), the hosts and mirrors would simply get crushed in minutes (kind of like the /. effect). But with Bit Torrent, the more downloaders, the more seeds/peers, the better off everyone is (OK, this is entirely true because the tracker can start having scale problems, but you get the point). Without Torrent, I probably would have only been able to release the low res versions, but now everyone can see my WIDESCREEN vid in all of its glory. THANK YOU BIT TORRENT!
So that said, please help out my seeds by downloading my "Tainted Love: A Halo 2 Custom Gaming Montage" at these TORRENT LINKS:
High Res / Windows Media / 290Mb
High Res / QuickTime / 217Mb
Low Res / Windows Media / 62Mb
Low Res / QuickTime / 65Mb
Thanks!
.
"(OK, this is NOT entirely true because the tracker can start having scale problems, but you get the point)."
I don't like the first line of the article -
"Isn't the most outstanding citizen" FUD FUD FUD
If the terrorist used global navigation sattelites and devices to help them guide and pilot the planes to the towers does that make the devices they use and the company that made them non-outstanding citizens.
BS - this is great technology and just because people use it illegally doesn't make it bad or a bad citizen.
Are all hammers bad and should be outlawed because one was used to bludgeon someone to death.
So please quit smearing open source with illegal activities like they go hand in hand.
>>It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web
If advertisements are added into the movie, just like it would if you saw it on broadcast TV, they could easily make a profit.
Remember that until the advent of cabel, advertisement was the ONLY source of revenue for TV stations. The signal was just pumped out into the ether and hoped that someone would watch and bring up ratings.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Reading through the comments I saw several solutions that would most likely succeed if they were to be implemented. Unfortunately, I feel from the *AA some strong conservatism... In the same way that they had to see themselves besieged by P2P before, I feel the same will happen with movies. Who knows, one day, we'll have efficient, affordable and convenient methods to watch films, however we want. Legally.
That is all i can say for the new client. Damn, that is *much* nicer to use.
:)
In fact - i'm finally pulling down Xandros to test with (both new bt client and Xandros itself). Very nice
It's VERY compressed. It may not be as bad as DivX, but it is still losing a lot of information.
I can't understand it. The HD is supposed to be a vastly higher quality but then they go and compress it to hell. Works well if there is a lot of flat colour, but if there is a lot of detail and movement, it WILL suck.
But I'm not holding my breath.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I noticed that after installing World Of Warcraft and signing on to Blizzard, their patch download application suggested that in order to improve my download rate, I open a range of ports on my firewall. These were ports similar (1000 off) to the standard range of BT ports.
People keep saying that bandwidth cost is a major issue. It simply isn't. Currently, hosting my site, I pay under $100 for over 1000gb. This is on a reputable major hosting solution. So if $1 = 10gb (it's actually a little cheaper), why do they even need the bandwidth? If it costs them 10 cents to send you a movie in high quality MPEG4, without the need for P2P networks, I simply don't see any bandwidth issues. I'm sure that they will charge at least $5/movie, 10 cents is transfer costs is nothing. And it's only going to get cheaper as the infastructure continues to evolve.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
The article claims "[BitTorrent] might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."
How many of you would honestly allow music and film distribution companies to utilize part of your bandwidth in order to more easily (and cheaply!) distribute PAID content to other individuals? I believe the author didn't put much thought into that statement. I can't see BitTorrent being used to distribute anything other than "free" content (be it legal or illegal). The "sharing" concept that is central to BitTorrents cannot be justified when you're actually paying for the content. Perhaps some arrangement could be made by which the distribution company refunds you a small portion of the purchase price in exchange for your continued seeding of their file(s). That scenario is fraught with possible loop-holes and exploits though... So, how would someone go about distributing "paid" content via BitTorrent?
All the interesting bits of the internet will be a cross between bittorrent, boinc, and stumbleupon.
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good... Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Does anybody know if BitTorrent has added network locality intelligence in 4?
The real costs in running an ISP are the transit costs of traffic at peering points. If data doesn't leave the ISP's network, it's as good as free.
BitTorrent should prefer peers that are "close" in the network-locality sense of the word. In the most extreme sense of such an optimization an ISP like Comcast could see the data for a movie only transit their peering location once, then be distributed across their network to tens of thousands of users for almost free.
This kind of arrangement would transform BitTorrent traffic from 'ISP headache' to the preferred type of network traffic an ISP would like to see.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This was news like 2 years ago!!!
I read about a building that already has this system installed.
I have to admit, its pretty darn cool though
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
I wasn't even AWARE BitTorrent was being used for illegal stuff
:)
Just crawled from under the rock did you?
"It's a shame that so many businesses automatically associate it with illegitimate filesharing."
Oh gee. I can't even imaging what group of people gave them THAT idea?
"Not to mention that most corporate networks block BT traffic making it impossible for employees to take advantage of legitimate torrents that are available."
Oh imagine that. Corporate networks for corporate needs. Maybe the people who really need BT for work, will already have access, because they either already control the network, or have been granted permission by those who do.
Stealing is a criminal offense
Copyright crimes are civil offenses.
Why do you think these people have been recieving no jail time?
Besides, theft kind of requires that the object being stolen actually be removed from the legitimate owner's possession.
Because you could just use USENET. Why try to reinvent the wheel with things like EMule, Kazaa, GNUTella or the latest craze, BITORRENT?
Folks, three reasons:
Maturity
BT: 2 years
UN: 25 years
Ownership
BT: Bram Cohen
UN: Not owned, Public Domain
Potential
BT: nodes (up/down) make availability
UN: ISPs (more reliable) make it available
Jesus H. Freaking Christ. Just dump everything else and use what we've been given. It works for 99.9% of the things you could want to use it for.
Sheesh!
Bittorrent is only beneficial when there are seeders. The problem with distributing paid for content via bittorrent is that while a couple of sales an hour may be enough to sustain your business, it is not enough to ensure good d/l speeds.
The customer would see just how good your product is as soon as they try to d/l it, at which point they would have already paid for it.
Bit Torrent should not be used as a distribution channel for commercial content that requires high bandwidth for distribution.
.512 (5.8 times more downstream than upstream) DSL is usually 1.5 / .384 (3.9 times more downstream than upstream). As was just demonstrated disparity between upload and download ratios over broadband connections. Recent trends indicate providers are increasing download speeds without a proportional increase in upstream traffic. As a result there is an inherent supply problem in upstream bandwidth. If this trend continues the gap between upload and download widens and the perceived user experience will worsen. Centrally hosted content will be delivered "faster" thus users will expect faster delivery via bit torrent. This will not be the case as the aggregate upstream bandwidth will not increase as fast as the aggregate downstream bandwidth of the network.
Blizzard has proven (unknowingly) that the distribution of content via Bit Torrent is a Bad Idea. The user experience for a bit torrent download is not comparable to a similar file that is delivered via ftp or http.
The first issue is the duration of time elapsed from the request of a file to the start of the download. BitTorrent can take minutes to ramp up to full speed. A similar file delivered via Http or Ftp usually starts within seconds and achieves full download speed in seconds.
Second, there is a major issue with reliability of transfers. Bit torrent downloads are subject to slowing when certain portions of the files they are downloading become scares on the network. The broadband user is effectively limited by the other people who are sharing the file.
Third, firewall issues. To gain maximum speed via bit torrent one must forward a range of ports to their computers. Generally this type of activity is beyond the ability of a normal user.
While this sort of user experience is OK for unpaid content, it is not OK for entities deriving revenue from the distribution of the materials over the network.
The issue is going to get worse too. For most cable companies the D/L U/L ratio is 3.0 to
In fact all programs that let you duplicate data should be looked at be the MPAA. Nero , cp ,copy, etc...
Just about anything could be used as a tool for "evil doers".
My point is that it should be the responsibility of the user, not the responsibility of the program (or programmer) to understand what can be copied legitimately.
This just isn't going to happen and shows a basic flaw in their greedy expectations of what they can get away with.
I just downloaded a new version of Knoppix by Bittorrent. I was happy to use my available uplink bandwidth to share with others and and still shareing it even after the download is complete. I even used a seperate computer so that I would not tie up my main desktop in any way and could keep the feed up longer. But I and most other users would not be willing to use our uplink bandwidth to let the MPAA or RIAA sell their product. I doubt that I would buy anything this way (just as I don't want to pay overpriced charges for lossy quality audio with DRM restrictions), but if I did I would certainly leech and not let my uplink bandwidth be used to further sell the product. I might even do whatever I could to corrupt any uploads. I expect that almost everyone would refuse to upload, so Bittorrent is not a viable business model for companies who have already demonstrated a hostility to their customers and to Bittorrent. I'll even gladly spend my time freely to make sure that others are aware of how the MPAA and RIAA are profiting from the use of uploading bandwidth that others are paying for if it ever comes to that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
i can't test this, being at work and lacking the ability right now, but i used KaZaa a few months back for .torrent files and found quite a few. give it a shot.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent or a derivation thereof to distribute all of its patches and updates. As popular as World of Warcraft is, this probably saved them a BUNDLE. As more entities realize these benefits, it might start putting some pressure on ISPs (especially the larger ones) to give in a bit on the upload bandwidth. The reason its limited is by convention. It's an arbitrary restriction put in place to limit costs. But then again, some major telcos are still trying to convince people that a 1.5Mb DSL connection is a good deal, when you can get twice the bandwidth for about the same price with cable. Hmmmm...it might be a while.
...just as when an mp3 is "overkill" for bt now, so will a movie in a decade.
will we need bt then?(yeah i know this question might connection speed increase vs. media density increase)
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
I agree that the legitimate use of bittorrent is probably a minority (although it's ~100% of my use), but saying that it's a token minority is a whole nuther story. In general, a "token minority" implies that it's just there for show ("look, we don't discriminate against blacks - we even hired one!"). The illegal uses of BT may be a vast, vast majority, but that doesn't contradict the claim that the legitimate uses go far, far beyond merely being token.
Hi Iamacat, I tried to email you about your rocketlauncher yesterday but it's likely the message did not go through. How can I contact you about a bug in the program?
BitTorrent packets are marked as bulk data to make traffic shaping easier
l
Read the release notes of the latest version from
http://www.bittorrent.com/bittorrent_versions.htm
Don't they use the terribly unwieldy, confusing, obscure, and almost entirely gay Jigdo to distribute ISO images?
Does anyone really think that bittorrent is "just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."? Does bandwidth really cost that much? Does a distributed network help that much if your clients can only download between 50-500kilobytes/sec?
I use bittorrent to download pretty well seeded dvd's. It can take days and days.
I think bittorrent would be an ideal method to distribute movies legally. Let's say the price for the movie is $5 for a single sitting. If you leech the movie and don't seed, it costs $5. If you seed to 50%, it costs $3. If you seed 100%, it's $1. If you seed 150%+, it's free. This rate scheme is obviously just for discussion, but I think something like that would be a great idea.
Piracy can be replaced by no-server or peer-to-peer.
As popular as bitTorent has become, it has garned too much attention for many peoples liking. Private torrent sites... and no im not talking about sign up sites that the public has access too, ala torrentbytes, pirate bay, are becomming the way to go. Some dedicated releasers, a host, your own forum, walla, your own private members bitTorrent club. It works pretty well, I myself am involved in two such places. They can continue to push BT further into the corner untill they embrace its ingenuity, but we will still be there in the corners, passing around data, and keeping who ever we want out. =]
Insert something witty here...
Yep, my bad... Sony came out with the Betamax recorder and was sued by Universal City Studios which owned the rights to many television broadcasts.
It was obvious from day one that BT was going to revolutionize large/high-demand file delivery, legal or otherwise. Overloaded sites have always been a problem and commerical server networks just can't cut it. To me, anyway.
What we need is a new protocol/software to replace http that can handle this sort of thing automatically, so the benefits can extend beyond specifically chosen files to entire sites.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It's simply a way for companies to save bandwidth. I've tried BitTorrent for various things and never understood why anyone liked it. For demos, places like FilePlanet are faster, for Linux .iso's, FTP is faster, and for everything p2p or the web has much more variety.
It's quite effective for large distribution of eclectic files, since everyone kind-of shares bandwidth.. but for truely mass distribution, BT is extremely INefficient. Since uploading is required at the same time as downloading, there is twice the traffic going over whatever backbone network is used for the bulk of internet transfers. This is not really significant now because BT is not being used as a broadcast standard and most people have asymmetric broadband anyway.
The most efficient way to send things to large amounts of people is to combine cashing with multicast. Cut down on duplicating the bits sent to the greatest extent possible. This is already occuring to a certain extent. My ISP (formerly Time-Warner (and it actually worked BETTER when it was.. go-figure)) has been cashing patches for many online games "locally" for some time now, and provides very good download speeds for things that are 'in-network.' The only thing they are missing is transparency: It would be nice if frequently accessed pages, and infrequently updated but high bandwidth (like patches or ISO's) were cashed more locally, rather than individually downloaded. Digital TV is a sort of multicast method as well.
Dividing up the bandwith among several users and then attempting to re-aggregate that bandwith is a waste of resources for high-volume, high-bandwidth applications. It does however appear to save bandwidth on the initial server, but only as the cost is (hidden) shared by the users.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I installed Azureus and started downloading things, and nothing warned me about leeching or tried to help me avoid it.
Bittorrent clients, and perhaps the protocol, need to ensure that (1) users are aware of how they are expected to behave, and (2) they help them (or even enforce) such behavior.
Right now, clients like Azureus are overly complex, hard to configure (in particular, behind firewalls, where I have not been able to get them to work at all), and don't address such important issues.
Distribution costs already are only a tiny fraction of the price of a DVD, and that's only going down even with non-P2P distribution models.
So, yes, I don't mind paying the few cents more for the cost of a direct download; I do mind my upstream connectivity being blocked for hours on time with movie uploads to other people.
BitTorrent is nice and decentralized but doesn't do much to protect the privacy of those using it - unlike, say, FreeNet.
Bittorrent is explicitly non-anonymous in order to make it less attractive for people interested in violating copyrights. Finding out who is hosting what is actually quite easy with Bittorrent. I fail to see a problem with that.
5. $$$ Profit $$$
If you don't like their business model or product, there is a simple solution for you: you don't download their stuff illegally and you also don't buy it. Sooner or later, one of those companies will figure out that they need to change their business model.
Gee, you think?
The irony of bittorrent is that while the technology is designed to be somewhat decentralized...
No, the *REAL* irony is that you were modded up to "5, Insightful" despite your clearly erroneous understanding of Bit Torrent, while none of truly insightful responses correcting your erroneous statement have gotten past 3.
Bit Torrent WAS DESIGNED TO BE CENTRALIZED. I imagine Bram Cohen purposely did this to keep himself out of hot water, which has proven effective, but that's just a theory.
BitTorrent 4.0 introduces new features to give BT packets lower priority than regular IP traffic, so if you only have a single computer, or if your router pays attention to packet markings (less likely), real traffic can always get priority over the BT traffic and you'll pretty much maximize the speed of both.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"You can obtain a cheaper price if you use Bittorrent, since you pay a part of the distribution costs (with your bandwidth)."
Well we're certainly making progress. Going from the previous "/." of, "I have unlimited, so I'll saturate the pipe" to the presnt "/." of "Bandwith has costs" since it can be credited against your "distribution costs".
Up next "/." admits that artists actually need to eat and have bills just like everyone else.
hey I'm starting to develop a script that will allow all of us create a supernova.org like website in seconds... heck it out at! WTcom
- - - - - .
It will greatly legitimize Bittorrent if Apple and (ahem!) M$ both switch to delivering their software updates via bittorrent. It'll save them a ton of money while getting their updates to their users much quicker. Why isn't this happening?
I work at a large Australian university which has an IT policy that explicitly outlaws any use of peer to peer applications, including bit torrent. Any violation is quickly identified with snort and we get kicked off within minutes of the torrent being started. Paperwork has to go through in order for staff to be approved to download a torrent - per torrent. Students need written faculty permission.
In addition, torrents are sucky here because they block all the high-range ports as a "security" measure (ever seen >1024 ACLs on an L3 Cisco switch? I have). This also prevents us from running servers on our desktops, or seeding torrents ourselves. The net result is that if we do torrent, the torrents will run so slow, that you might as well use a dialup modem to an external ISP.
As soon as you remove the server, BitTorrent breaks completely; the tracker runs on a server, and unless you're aiming to do an end-run around copyright law, nothing stops the tracker server also acting as a slow BitTorrent seed.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
I know BT is perfect for server-based content distribution.
It seems you never concern about the most popular usage of BitTorrent: no file server to serve as seed at all, all seeds are volunteered. Although it's not what BitTorrent was originally designed for, it's exactly what MPAA (or some other organizations) want to stop.
BitTorrent is designed to take over whenever someone would have otherwise offered the files over HTTP or FTP, but to use downloader's upstreams to increase other people's download speeds. I'm not bothered about other uses, since they're not what BitTorrent was designed for; it's no surprise that it sucks at things it wasn't supposed to do. Just because it's popularly abused doesn't mean it's bad that it doesn't work that way.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
In Soviet Russia you don't quash BitTorrent, BitTorrent quashes you.
It's all over teh place!!11!one
Read my sig. It has 4x amount of torrents SN ever had.
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