Slashdot Mirror
Bram Cohen's Response to Microsoft's Avalanche
An anonymous reader writes "Bram Cohen has reduced Microsoft's proposed file-sharing application--codenamed Avalanche--to vaporware, dubbing its paper on the subject as "complete garbage". "I'd like to clarify that Avalanche is vapourware," Cohen said. "It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed-out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations.""
Sounds like Windows.
I cannot believe that we still do not use the Coral Cache and Bittorrent to prevent crashing poor servers. I mean, now we're just going to end up slashdotting that first link, uh, slashdot...
Forget it.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Sounds like it, and the first salvos have gone back and forth... having read both, I have to give the points in the first round to Bram. Microsoft won't find him so easy to push around, methinks.
"It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed-out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations."
Doesn't all software start off this way?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
"It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed-out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations."
Another interesting project from the Microsoft team then? Looks like they've made an entire department, dedicated to making ideas about things that they could make, but never intend to do.. Nice going
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
Hi Bram, just to let you know that Microsoft Software Development Life Cycle works a 'little' different. We market it first, then release it, then develop it and then design it. And maybe, just maybe we might make it work if enough people are using it.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Microsoft
PS: Note that I used maybe twice.
Free XBox, PS2
The question is: is it GOOD vaporware? Can the proposed algorithms deliver the results we want? That Microsoft has the manpower to turn it into real software is a given.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Does anybody have the torrent for the app?
But, yeah, like he said. Avalanche isn't supposed to take over the world. It isn't a product, and it doesn't exist in source code form.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
This really shouldn't come as any surprise...after all, Microsoft's goal here wasn't to actually come out with a product, but to create the illusion of one. Microsoft will design a P2P system if and when they're good and ready...until then, Avalanche serves as a satisfactory decoy.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I guess microsoft is just doing research, so they can patent their inventions. Those patents can than be used to make (other) fileswapping/p2p programs illegal due to patent infringement.
That's Bram Cohen, author of Bittorrent.
"Unfortunately, [the paper] is actually one of the better academic papers on BitTorrent, because it makes some attempt, however feeble, to do an apples to apples comparison," he said.
Then Mr. Cohen patted Microsoft on the head, gave it a cookie, and sent it outside to play.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Another pointless article. Troll me, but the fact is that this is addressing something that is behind MS's closed doors.
Ah, you mean like this research paper that Cohen is criticizing.
Or perhaps you are referring to these completely unfounded claims (from TFA):
The developer said Microsoft had completely misunderstood the way BitTorrent operated. The paper quotes "the tit-for-tat approach used in the BitTorrent network" as an inspiration for parts of Avalanche's own operation. Under the approach, a peer-to-peer client will not upload any content to another client unless it has also received a certain amount of content in return.
Cohen said, however, this was a waste of time and had been discarded long ago.
"I can't fathom how they came up with this," he wrote. "Researching either the source code or the documentation on the BitTorrent Web site would have shown that the real choking algorithms work nothing like this."
"Either they just heard 'tit-for-tat' and just made this up, or they for some odd reason dredged up BitTorrent 1.0 and read the source of that." BitTorrent is currently at version 4.0.2.
Cohen went on to say that the 'tit-for-tat' approach was used when BitTorrent was still being developed, but that the first real-world test with only six connected machines showed that it did not work well.
Yup, that's a guy bashing closed doors alright.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
They are marketing their IDEA, not the actual software at this point. Sure, what they have done is research and simulations, which is obviously just one part of their software development cycle.
Microsoft has a huge amount of resources that they can and probably will pour into the p2p projects they are working on. It is foolish to mouth off and bash their development procedure, treating it as something other than it is. Microsoft has a strong track record of eliminating its competition by integrating products into its OS. Dont be too suprised if you see Avalanche as part of Longhorn.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
BT is relatively new, I am sure within a few years some serious inadequacies will be found which will make this research from Microsoft more significant.
BT is NOT relatively new - in fact, it's relatively old, and there HAVE been a few years for any "serious inadequacies" to surface. What has happened in those years is that users of other P2P networks have flocked to BT by the millions, simply because it works much better at delivering maximal bandwidth for highly sought-after files.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Microsoft, on numerous occasions, has indicated that they have a(n) [ insert competitors product ] killer... with a cool code name and features that look very appealing. We find out months/years later that their product either doesn't materialize or doesn't deliver on the original specifications. Sure the 2.0 or 3.0 version might, but my point is, they fend off competition by using vaporware.
I'm tired of it... I'm moving back to my TRS-80
Longhorn is just one prime example. I wonder how many people didn't consider switching over to Linux/?nix/OS X/etc. etc. because of the overly hyped features of Longhorn... which now are disappearing left and right.
It takes years to make something like bittorrent, but it takes days for a marketing team to come up with a flashy code name and feature list.
Microsoft might just release it as an API, without releasing an easy to use client of their own. That way they don't promote piracy, but they can reduce the bandwidth needed for software updates and assist adware producers in delivering full motion full screen ads to unsuspecting users.
Bit torrent is 4 years old. They have been testing various configurations for the last four years.
I think this guy knows a bit more about how an effiecent torrent is going to work.
MSFT is once again playing catch up. In a few years they are going to end up duplicating the entire effort of bram just ot make a closed source version of the software, which will then fizzle out because msft won't make clients for anything other than windows. Yet Torrents can be had for any OS.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Good. The mud has officially been slung. We are in for a hell of a fight, it seems.
The "Avalance is vaporware" vibe is a true one, but let's give Microsoft a chance for a real-world test before we cast our lots. Not completely dismissing the paper demonstrates Cohen in a more rational and less infuriated moment, and is fortunate that he did so, as industry leaders who dismiss competition get burned all too often. This is not to defend the test model in the slightest, which is junk and atypical of typical Bittorent usage as Cohen rightly points out.
The Avalanche paper is a start. Microsoft will need to finish, refine, and check their facts about the product with which they are competing. The idea of building a file without all the pieces reeks of difficult implementation, for example.... that's one protocol I would love to see come into reality. Bittorent will need to flex and build upon the established track record of the protocol, and innovate on top of that. Decentralized trackers were a good step.
The Crimson Dragon
I just took a look at the MS paper and they propose using "network coding" to eliminate block scarcity. The idea is that each node transmits out a linear combination of the blocks they've downloaded, along with the coefficients used. When enough of these are gathered, the system can be solved and the file reproduced. This actually seems useful and is not "complete garbage".
Yeah, I know most of the posts here are bashing Cohen for bashing microsoft (and I was agreeing with them until I decided to RTFA - the summary is not a good one). Bram isn't randomly attacking them for having a vaporware product, he is specifically pointing out the many mistakes that they make in their paper, where they compare Bittorrent to their proposed algorithms. It seems that they made too many mistakes to make their research paper valid, so their simulations are crap... RTFA!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
So you think he's bashing them? Having read Bram's comments, what he seems to be responding to is the way (he says) they misunderstood and misrepresented BT; which strikes me as a quite legitimate response.
Research papers that are released, even by MS, usually aren't intended to get the attention of the broader market. They're intended to put forth ideas and let a few select people know what's going on inside the heads of MS engineers. That, and to raise the ire of slashdotters who don't read them and choose to automatically assume that MS persues every single research idea as a major project.
Look at it this way - MS can't afford not to be looking into the area of filesharing, because it's obviously something that their customers really, really want. There hasn't been any announcement of any product, there's just a whitepaper with no details. The not-so-sinister truth is that this research paper is just evidence that they are starting to think about the problem, not a representation of an imminent product offering.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
2) The paper also assumed that each client would only try to connect to 4 peers. Bram says that 30-50 is more realistic.
3) In spite of the poor comparison, the ideas might be useful.
The actual blog entry
Windows Media has been prepared for several years as a leading format for use in pay-to-view downloaded material. Microsoft even developed Windows media centre to run TV-connected PCs.
What's missing is the distribution technology. Even with modern 8mbit DSL / Cable connections, an HTTP or FTP download of a 900mb movie file is very expensive for the company hosting the software and files. However, if each set-top-box or WMC PC has a secure file-sharing system preinstalled, then most of the upload bandwidth can be shared among people who have already downladed the same file.
Consumers will hate it - especially as upload bandwidth is often slow and overall bandwidth capped - but the media distributors will love it to bits.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
RTFA! It's still there people! But if you haven't RTFA and want to spout off something please keep in mind the following: He invented Bittorrent, and his biggest problem is this "research" is based on massive misunderstandings of how Bittorrent actually works.
So, lay off! :)
You are not the customer.
"Avalanche," as a name for a product or project, would be just about the worst possible choice. As a P2P tool that would imply bandwidth problems and the potential for a single point of failure.
Um... Would it? Why? I don't see these implications at all. Quite the opposite, really. An avalance is (in popular imagination, anyway) started by a small cause and quickly develops into an unstoppable mass of snow. Just like a single limited-bandwidth uploader of a popular file to a P2P network can result in many Terabytes of data being moved.
Quite similar to the "Torrent" part of BT.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
you know, Cohen was referencing the algorithms that microsoft was using to design their p2p system. If the algorithms are faulty I don't see how the derived software is going to turn out much better. He was also commenting on their misconceptions of how bittorrent operates, and that their idea of how it worked was ignorant at best. As the author of bittorrent I think he has the grounds to say what he said, he wasn't just mouthing off.
twitter.com/gravitronic
I think you're overstating the case. According to the jargon file, vaporware is mere " Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place)", i.e. malicious intent, or even lack of intent to release, is not necessarily implied. Wikipedia elaborates that apart from the cases you describe, it can also be a "test ballon", with the project getting cancelled when there is not enough positive response, or simply the result of too much optimism.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I just took a look at Cohen's article and he responds exactly to that proposal and elaborates why it does no good and can actually be bad.
RTFA
This is not first time M$ is trying to steal other's ideas, and create FUD about original product. They have tried it with Office, LAN servers, Internet Explorer, SQL server, Instant Messenger, Java, IP (4 and 6 both) and recently iPod and now BT.
I can understand Bram's fear, if he thinks M$ is after his ideas to steal them and kill him.
hilarious
Jeeeez. Is someone a little defensive of his turf? (It's not even like Cohen invented the idea of peer-to-peer software delivery.)
Microsoft Research, and many other research labs and universities, publish papers on "vaporware" every day. Only, this is not vaporware because it is not supposed to be a product--even if some news media who don't know the difference between Microsoft and Microsoft Research make that mistake, Bram and others should know better. On the other hand, research on algorithms is fundamental to the development of the next generation of products, because no amount of pure coding can make the kinds of technological leaps that are necessary. To that end, it behooves us not to bash it, or at least only to evaluate it based on what it is.
Its not vapourware, in fact its going be desinged to use WinFS.
> "Either they just heard 'tit-for-tat' and just made this up, or they for some odd reason dredged up BitTorrent 1.0 and read the source of that."
... see this is why corporations HAVE corporate communications departments, to keep people from jumping the gun with embarrassing announcements like this. Though, did MS announce it, or did some random doofus just dig it up from MS research and start screaming like a nutter about it?
Considering that the only up-to-date documentation of the protocol IS the source, one is not surprised. The only paper of Bram's that really details the protocol refers to version 1.0.
Still, you'd imagine Microsoft would have a fellow or two who can read C or python (is the reference implementation still in python?) Contamination might be an issue, but you'd also imagine they could just cleanroom another implementation of their own prototype if they were serious about productizing it.
Nope
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Try using a legitamite source for BT.. such as bt.etree.org (and i don't care if you think that music sucks)
you will find that the popular torrents on there FLY, and that's because of the mentality of the userbase. they like to share, and don't hop off a torrent right when it's done. there is nothing illegal about it, thus no fear of the man knocking down your door. i've left seeds on there for months.
so.. if you are getting crappy speeds, i'd recommend finding yourself a better group of people to swarm your files with. bashing on BT isn't going to solve your problems, and niether is a piece of vaporware from microsoft
Bram may be right about Microsoft's paper, but he would have had more credibility if he had taken the high road.
Quotes like "The lack of any concrete numbers at all shows the typical academic hand-wavy 'our asymptotic is good, we don't need to worry about reality' approach" certainly don't earn him much respect from academics in system programming research who work very hard, thankyou very much, to ensure that their results are realistic. He has turned a simple observation about the paper (they neglected certain overheads) into a bigoted rant (academics are foolish). Not cool.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Actually, even as a research paper, the paper falls rather short. There has been prior work on P2P using forward error correction (FEC). FEC also means that you don't have to get every single chunk, but that you can reconstruct missing chunks from data you already have.
The authors should have demonstrated that their approach is better than FEC-based P2P protocols, but instead, they only compared it to simple P2P protocols. So, their protocol may actually not be better than the state of the art at all, and may actually be harder to implement in practice.
I work at a corporate F100 R&D lab, most of what gets written up is either
-prescriptive stuff that you'd like adopted
-things you built that you'd like the world to know about.
For a corporate group, a paper is only a half-success, depending on the ranking mechanism. A Popular paper is good, but not as good as getting into shipping product. And there MSR have the same problem I have -the gulf between research code and production stuff. Actually, their problem is worse, they have to go through the MS lifecycle, whereas our codebase is now open source (http://smartfrog.org/) so that we can have stuff in users hands in real time.
Summary: the presence of an MSR paper on its own is meaningless.
returning to MS and P2P, note that MS own groove, which has an excellent P2P filesystem, though one that will forever be windows only. They already do P2P products, they just are not as common as say, Exchange Server.
Yup. Bram's blog makes it clear that MS's approach to P2P is to reverse engineer an outdated version of his protocol. The result will probably be similar to MS's effort to reverse engineer the Macintosh: Windows 3.1 -- meaning that it will be buggy, slower and vastly more popular.
Keep reading Bram's blog. How far do you get before it starts going over your head? The dude has skillz that dust 98% of the wannabes here on Slashdot.
And as for motives, in my experience with autistics, it's common for those with Asperger's Syndrome to be quite guileless. They speak and act without consideration for other's "feelings". As a result they are more frank and honest than most people are comfortable with. Sorta like if Mr. Spock insults your work. He's not doing it to hurt you, or out of jealousy, he's saying it because it is the most logical observation.
Seeds do not use choking. Choking is used by peers without the complete file on peers that aren't sending them data. Seeds need no data and so do not perform chokes. Last I looked (admittedly an early version) seeds will send to the clients that dl the fastest and will only send to a small number of clients at a time for efficiency reasons.
Super-seeds are completely different (but still don't use choking, although they reward people who received a piece that the super-seed detects has been spread around well by the people who received it).
I can't believe you typed a whole rant about choking without having the slightest clue how it is used, however. You could have spent that time googling and a) learned something and b) not come across as an idiot.
I recall that a past article discussed Brams Asperger's/Autism tendencies. The presence of this trait in anyone would lead me to believe that what he states is pretty much legitimate. Folks with Aspergers/HP Autism don't typically react defensively. That of course and the fact that he is a decent, intelligent person and could pretty much be regarded as the leading authority on this type of technology.
Bram mentions that a malicious user would be able to poison an Avalanche based system by uploading bogus data. BitTorrent gets around this by precomputing checksums on each chunk of data and storing them in the .torrent file. Why would this approach not work for Avalanche? You would have to precompute the hashes on the FEC codes instead, but I don't see where it is fundamentally different than BitTorrent.
I read the internet for the articles.
Microsoft's standard operating practice is to release vaporware of a product long before any such products exists. They used to call it slideware because the product existed only on powerpoint slides. The idea is to choke off the air supply (ie: revenue) of any competiting company by giving people an excuse to wait for the Microsoft product.
Are you sure Theo isn't?
I'm also not so sure that those comments are related to his disorder...
(btw Asperger's syndrome is a very mild form of autism in case someone was amazed by reading the parent post)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
But it's true. As of today it does not exist and from what he says their tit-for-tat methodology will not work in the real world then it probably never will be real.
75% of all statistics are made up!
The question is: Will it be pulled from Longhorn?
(Yes, this is a joke, morons.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
He's calling it vaporware for two reasons:
1) It doesn't exist yet, early or not, which is a point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
2) As stated, it's not going to work as far as he can tell, which is the second point other articles on the subject might not have emphasized before they started talking about a "competitor" to BT.
In other words, vaporware does not depend on how old the vaporware is. Microsoft can announce vaporware five minutes from now based on an idea still in in someone's head, with no papers or anything, and it's still vaporware until you get to at least an alpha test product.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
i have my doubts about some (but not all!) of the research that people undertake in the academic world of computer engineering/systems. from what i have seen, some academics will rush to publish for the sake of having a paper, even if it means cutting corners on an otherwise interesting idea or application. while i won't say that this is the norm at the very best institutions in the world, things on the whole can seem less than perfect.
h tm
i imply nothing about the individuals in the paper that Bram attacks, since i haven't interacted with them firsthand. however, it might be interesting to note that the primary author is a grad student at Georgia Tech. according to his web page, his stint at MS research was just a ~6 month period, 2/04-6/04 & 7/04-8/04:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gantsich/biography.htm
the call for papers for this 2005 conference set a deadline of 7/7/2004:
http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2005/call_for_papers.
this does not leave a huge block of time for one student to brush up on the research background, flesh up the practical aspects of the idea, implement (and validate?) a simulator, complete a preliminary set of data runs, and write a paper draft worthy of acceptance. let's not forget any downtime that might arise at the start of an internship (moving over the pond, getting acclimated, etc.).
here, i assume the not unrealistic situation where the official research scientist principally serves as a primary investigator. he brews the idea, perhaps working out some more theoretical aspects of the problem, and handles all the headaches related to funding/approval/propaganda. this entrusts a good deal of the grunt work to the student. i tend to see this sort of behavior in the ivory tower, but it is entirely likely that research in industry is much more balanced!
time should not be an excuse in any case, but it does raise an eyebrow toward the paper-happy nature of some research these days. you make the call on what you believe is reasonable concerning those flaws in methodology that Bram has so derided in his blog.
does anyone have a clue about the timing of the media's spin on things? The Register's article from the first slashdot posting is one of the first according to Google News...
Don't be silly! BT is very new.
xmodem is old!
"I'd rather win in an ugly car than lose in a pretty car" - Jari Lahdenpera