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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.
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
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
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
Most software isn't spouted off as the best thing since sliced bread when it's at this stage. Then again, this IS Microsoft we're talking about (not a dig at Microsoft's coding abilities, but they're PR department).
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.
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.
I think he's trying to point out to the "bunch of people" that at the moment, Microsoft isn't exactly shipping the BitTorrent killer that he's somehow "got" to respond to. He might get less dismissive if they ship something that obviously works.... or if people didn't pester him.
(I've seen several people comment that Bram's "arrogant"; it's nothing to the arrogance of assuming they can force him to comment on something, or the arrogance of assuming that his essay was written straight for them, or the arrogance of saying since they don't like it it shouldn't have been written. This is just an addenda so I don't have to post again, not directed at CleverNickedName.)
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
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.
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
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
> Most software isn't spouted off as the best thing since sliced bread when it's at this stage
Who's the one who spouted off? This was a paper on the MS research website, not an ad on prime-time TV. It's loudmouths like the ones ACTUALLY doing the spouting that will cause MS to just replace that page with a static placeholder and reveal NOTHING to the outside. It's already gutted, it really won't take much more to turn it into a complete facade. Thanks a lot.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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.
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.