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BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the playing-a-game-of-whac-a-mole dept.

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."

10 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, We figured that one out... by ShadowBlasko · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Yeah, We figured that one out... by Slack3r78 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Most home connections are asynchronous and have a far higher download rate than upload rate. Leeching is when someone finishes a download, and doesn't seed back at least as much as they took.

    2. Re:Yeah, We figured that one out... by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 4, Informative
      With BitTorrent it's difficult to do this, because unless you upload (and peers report packets coming from you to the tracker) then your download speed is gonna suck.
      This is only the case when you are trying to download from a torrent where there isn't enough bandwidth available on the torrent to serve all of the downloaders. In that case, those who are uploading will tend to get better rates than those who are not (or who are severely limiting it.) However, when the available bandwidth starts increasing compared to the number of downloaders, they can start getting their downloads for "free." This often happens after the torrent is a few days old, and there are a bunch of people sitting on the torrent.

      If you have too many people with low upload rates, then the people who aren't restricting their uploads won't end up connected to each other -- and so will frequently end up uploading significantly more than they eventually download. That's one likely explanation for the parent poster's experience of uploading much more than he downloaded.

      One other thing that can affect this is that most of the popular clients -- the last time I looked at them, anyway -- normally try to take as much bandwidth as they can for each torrent that you are uploading/downloading. Imagine that you are on two torrents, one popular and one unpopular. A bunch of people are connected on the first, and only one on the second. Often, half of your upstream will be used to upload to the one person on torrent 2, regardless of whether he is uploading or not.

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
  2. Re:Sources ? by turtled · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sources are all over. Just do a google search for torrent, and you have pages and pages of results. I use
    http://isohunt.com/
    http://www.novatina.com/
    m y fav: http://www.btefnet.org
    or a shit load here:
    http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t =8690

    --
    "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
  3. Re:Sources ? by AnonymousCowheart · · Score: 4, Informative

    suprnova.org was used mostly for illegal content, this is about LEGAL uses for bittorrent.
    Check out legaltorrents.com

  4. Re:Thoughts of a "token minority" on slashdot... by garcia · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    Maybe that was true when SuperNova and LokiTorrent were around. We are sorta heading back into the "time before torrents" when stuff wasn't easily available on a huge online database available on the web.

    Have you take a split second to look at the legitimate uses of torrents recently? easytree, Etree, etc? HUGE repositories of legal music for download?

    It's obvious to me that you haven't.

  5. Use ports your ISP won't expect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:BitTorrent is flawed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  7. Re:I don't think so by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know where you're getting your music but the majority of the CDs I've purchased have anywhere from 10-18 songs on them. They were purchased for roughly 10-$20 an album, at $1 a song those are pretty even costs.

  8. Random First / Rarest First by Daverd · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.