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Dvorak Sees MS Conspiracy Against BitTorrent
kilgortrout writes "Dvorak has an interesting editorial up, where he links the recent stories of alleged 'security problems' and 'spyware problems' bittorent has been having with the recent MS announcement of research into a file sharing app called 'Avalanche'. concluding it's all part of an orchestrated MS disinformation campaign against BitTorrent." From the article: "The problem is that no big company controls it, and Microsoft, asleep at the wheel, let it slip too long to do much about it. So now I suspect Microsoft is playing dirty to discredit the thing. There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events." Especially interesting in light of Bram Cohen's take on the situation.
Apparently Dvorak developed a taste for being correct after the Mac-on-Intel news (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while), so he has shifted from total-crackpot mode to state-the-painfully-obvious mode. Or, rather, a combination of the two.
/. goatse trolls with more insight than Dvorak's piece.
His main points:
- "Avalanche" is a textbook FUD salvo against BitTorrent. (MSFT TRICK ME? NO WAY)
- While spyware can be distributed through BitTorrent, this doesn't mean BitTorrent is spyware. (WTF R U SURE, J.D.?)
- "Avalanche" is vaporware. (F'REALZ? OMG!!)
The column isn't wrong, it's just a waste of bandwidth. I've read
Seriously, does anyone really care anymore what Dvorak's newest 'theories' are?
I think he's got something there.
Say it ain't so!
MS is just tired of downloading Bram Cohen's Bitorent off of sourceforge and getting a popup of him begging for money when you first run the program.
Dvorak finding something negative with Microsoft? It is truly the end of times.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Dvorak has an interesting editorial up,
Pull the other one.
Didn't he get spoofed in benchmarking some "new hotness" machine because the people giving the demo slowed down the mobo's RTC?
Since then (and that was in the 80's IIRC) I haven't paid much attention to what Mr. Dvorak. I daresay I haven't missed much.
Unless they were a... *gasp* coincidence.
Why would bittorrent be the P2P app that scares MS? What about Napster, or Kazza? Those were around years ago. This makes no sense to me.
If you can't get videos of boobies and cocks and vaginas and poontangs and sluts and bondagery using Avalanche, then it will never be used. End of story!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
A conspiracy involving Microsoft? No way!
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I get my Linux distros faster from ftp.sunet.se. All the stuff that my pals seem to trade are illegal copies of DVDs and CDs.
It's actually rather easy.
Step 1. Include support in IIS (via Patch)
Step 2. Include support for it in IE (via Patch)
Step 3. DONE!
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
From The Fine Article:
by early 2005 it was perhaps the dominant protocol on the Net, second only to TCP/IP itself
Wow - TCP/IP, then P2P, and then all those small niche protocols like http, smtp, ftp...
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events...except coincidence.
If /. penalty troll beaviors with -1, why the editors post professional trollers that write amusing articles to pump readers?
/. book?
Its bad or god to troll on the
-Woof woof woof!
why would microsoft make a program similar to bittorrent? With bittorrent you can download illegal copies of software, and help others do so. Hell, i found the halo 2 download, and it was only for bittorrent. I probably spelled a million things wrong in there.
"Dvorak Shuts Up."
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
How could anybody accuse Microsoft, who has been known for years as an above-board protector of digital copyright, freedom of innovation, and the American way...
<Irony = 0%>
Oh, crap, did I forget to set the Irony to 100% on that? I hate it when that happens!
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
...by early 2005 (bittorrent) was perhaps the dominant protocol on the Net, second only to TCP/IP itself.
I'll bet you it didn't rank better than third, what with that other protocol, "IP", stealing all our bandwidth..
twitter.com/gravitronic
My keyboard weeps.
I hope not. I read Dvorak from 1984 onward when he was in his PC Magazine glory. Fun times, stupid boldfacing of seemingly random characters and all. But man, has this guy gone downhill. Now he seems to be throwing darts at a board labled, "Insult Apple," "Insult Linux," "Insult Random Somebody," and then sit back and wait for the hits. Posting links to /. is to just fall into his lazy scheme.
Let's not make this a regular feature, that's all I'm asking. I know where to find Mr. Dvorak's words, and I know enough not to wander there.
Microsoft would never announce a product that wasn't in existence, promote it through marketing to the point that a competitor's product dropped in sales as people waited for Microsoft's uber-cool dingy-bopper thingy - then when it's released with half of the functionality promise that the next version will really be better than its competitors while supporting themselves with their monopoly!
I mean, they've never done that before, right?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I would be happy to never see his name again. I've yet to read a Dvorak article on anything that had any value.
This guy just keeps getting wackier. I think he needs to adjust his tin-foil hat, it's so tight it's cutting off the circulation to his brain. -Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
but, this is actually the very first thing that popped into my head. It's the standard MS modus operandi to publish something like this when they can't directly control something they perceive as a threat.
Imply it's something the boys at R&D have been working on, and either the customers wait for the MS product (which as often as not never actually arrives) or the other developer throws up his hands and abandons.
In fact, I have no idea what MS's R&D division actually does other than supply statements and papers as necessary to effect this. The commercial software comes from the commercial development teams, not the research teams.
KFG
I got my license in 2001, and then gas prices skyrocketed. US oil companies were waiting for me to start driving to raise gas prices. There is no other explanation.
-KD
It's not a difficult taks to get your opinions taken as gospel. It's just a matter of finding the right news stories, and twisting them to fit ones own opinion.
So, we start with a basic idea - MS is evil and wants to take over the entire software industry. Hardly a revolutionary suggesion, so we extrapolate a more radical viewpoint from this - Absolutely everything MS ever does is for the sole purpose of eliminating all competition.
As a result, after reading any story involving Microsoft, we must assume this is to further the above aim.
MS says bittorrent has - they want to turn everyone away from BT. MS says the sky is blue - they want to standardise the world on Microsoft's corporate colour.
There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events.
Except that maybe it is all just coincidence, just like he says. Not everything is a conspiracy, sometimes things just happen.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Why does MS care? They never cared about napter or Kazaa. Why Bittorrent? They were all super popular in their time. I just don't see how this is crushing any existing or potential markets for them. Anyone care to explain?
From the article:
The only defenders of BitTorrent I saw regarding this issue were buried here and there on Slashdot.
Huh?
Somebody must care, otherwise he wouldn't get paid to write his articles, editorials and columns.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yes, Microsoft research is funded by the rest of Microsoft Corp. but people who work for MSR are primarily academic researchers and have a wide latitude in their work. MSR is to Microsoft what Bell Labs was to AT&T, PARC was to Xerox and TJ Watson Research Center is to IBM.
MSR researchers publish in all the same conferences as academics at Universities and National Labs, go through the same peer-review process as everyone else, and have too much reputation at stake to publish junk papers or overtly push an agenda.
Yes, their research may be nudged in directions that MS wants to go, but it is real research and not a part of a conspiracy.
It's not like gnutella had a big corporation in charge of it. In fact, it's even less under anyone's control than bittorrent. (which has its protocol near-completely controlled by Bram, and as far as I can see only his and Azureus as really popular clients).
I am trolling
In spite of all the grief Dvorak receives for his "fortune telling" of things to come, he certainly has hit the mark this time, IMHO. While I'm sure there are some honest people in MS's Research division, don't think for one moment that Mr. Gates and Co. isn't looking for a way to discredit Bittorrent, just like they did with Netscape and Real and anyone else that gets in the way...
Why do you think Slashdot's icon for Microsoft is a borgified Bill Gates!
Kudos to Mr. Dvorak. Like they say: where there's crap, there's flies...
Seriously, there are so many slashdot stories referencing his articles that he may as well have an icon. It could be anything from a mentally challenged kid to a crazy old man. Those would probably be fitting.
Enough with the Dvorak stories. They're terrible.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
See it for yourself:
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide3.php
or ask anyone who works at an ISP. HTTP barely counts compared to BitTorrent and the other P2P file network protocols.
Steven
WTF? I find myself agreeing with Dvorak... and what is more (from TFA):
The only defenders of BitTorrent I saw regarding this issue were buried here and there on Slashdot. They sure were not in the newsrooms--or the blogs for that matter. All the stories I saw were disgraceful.
Hell hath frozen over... Agreeing with Dvorak... Dvorak lauding Slashdot...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
What security? What spyware? Just because the press SAYS there are security and spyware problems does not mean there are...
Okay, the only major point that Dvorak makes here is that MS is clearly up to something. Through each group of sentences, it's almost the exact same thing. When considering how old Micro$oft is, anyone can make a conjecture that M$ is up to some sort of conspiracy. Do you know what it's called?
Marketing
We all know the M$ hype machine and don't need any sort of self-proclaimed expert to tell us that something from M$ is not what it seems. However, I think there could be more to the idea of an Avalanche conspiracy:
How about the idea that M$ could strike a deal with the (MP | RI)AA to give them the info on people trading copyrighted files that had been hacked due to a pathetic DRM? I know it may sound like a little bit of a stretch, but Verizon DSL did something similar before, so I'm surprised that Dvorak didn't think of it.
Wait a minute...a squirrel just climbed a tree...M$ is behind this.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
There appears to be an avalanche of stories bashing avalanche today.
Sure, we're all mocking him, but we're still paying attention (literally, in terms of pcmag.com ad impressions).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I do think that there is a HUGE ammount of pressure to corall the IT industry to use a DRM model vs a free flow of information model for the future of the information age. These two models are completely incompatable.
Of course, on the same note, it's in our best interest to put a large amount of effort into relying on free information and non proprietary technology as much as possible.
are two of the very best things to happen to Microsoft in this regard.
If you are running a win32 variant, you basically need patches on almost a daily basis. The closed nature of the software demands you get these patches from Microsoft. (Which must have one hell of a bandwidth bill and could actually use a BT like technology for cost reasons alone.)
There is nothing like having a distribution channel your customers (read cattle) must make use of. Works just like our own government does. Attach something they don't really want or need to a spending bill (or totally important security patch) and you are off to the races!
Of course they can make it happen. The bigger question is will they get it right?
Blogging because I can...
In Sovier Russia, Microsoft download YOUR harddisk.
-Woof woof woof!
Dvorcrack any more. He's just irrelevant.
Just because Microsoft is out to borg peer-to-peer technology, that doesn't mean that every related event is the result of a Gatesian plot.
Spyware on Bittorrent was almost as unsurprising as a wiki editorial site getting graffitied to death.
sigs, as if you care.
He's starting to see things in the dark again.
Although Microsoft is indeed most likely using this as a smear campaign against bittorrent, would a tool such as this, backed by Microsoft, confirmed to be only for "legal" uses, not be a usefull tool for large corporations and businesses? A business that can obviously not allow bittorrent on their corporate networks might find a use for a Microsoft backed solution, especially assuming integration into their current Windows Architecture would be "simple"
"A war over religion is like fighting over who has the best imaginary friend."
I'm sorry, but this guy doesn't know what he's talking about - you can't make a meaningful statement comparing the usage of the BT protocol to the 'TCP/IP protocol'. If he's going to make such statements, at least he should compare it to something relevant, like HTTP or FTP.
Do we hate Dvorak on Tuesdays, or was that only Thursdays?
I'm sitting in the halls of Redmond right now, and frankly, this is laughable. Microsoft isn't a perfect company, but outside of a few people in Research, I doubt anyone in Microsoft cares less about bit torrent - I know my group doesn't care despite us being prime beneficiaires from any MS delivered BT style technology.
Take of your tin foil hat and get back to laughing about longhorn ship dates (a legit area for criticism!)
I really dont agree with a lot of what this guys says, but now and again, he's right. I do know that I have a "friend" who downloads much from BT and has yet to incounter one of these zillions of viruses running around. But maybe he's just lucky. It seems to me that when you have a system where by you register at a site to get the trackers, the trackers are rated, it becomes much harder to proliferate your malware. Normally these trackers are removed or rated down.....at least thats what my friend says.
MS is going to really freak everyone out. Has anyone considered that MS may be spreading FUD so other people develop similar software and then they embrace and extend. /. need to take business courses. MS COULD GIVE A DAMN LESS ABOUT MORALS. THEY CARE ABOUT $.
What people don't seem to get about business is this: MS doesn't care about innovation. They care about IP and $. If they can simply buy the IP and the talent, then more power to them. All the open source weenies that frequent
Go here to see that this is not true. Gas prices have never been stable.
Dvorak seemed to have an axe to grind w/ MVP Chris Boyd about associating BT w/ spyware. I looked at the referenced blog post and I couldn't find where Boyd was implying that Bittorent is spyware. Boyd was just be saying that bitorrent was used as a vehicle to transport spyware, not that BT was spyware. Oh and by the way, the research paper was jsut that, a paper, when has it been touted as anything more. It had some good points in my opinion such as the fix to the missing piece problem, or last piece problem which BT suffers from. If anyone is spreading FUD its Dvorak.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Dvorak should go die, nobody wants to hear from him.
so he has shifted from total-crackpot mode to state-the-painfully-obvious mode.
If you haven't noticed, the outsiders (a.k.a
Joe-Users, common people, ignorant sheep, etc) didn't believe Microsoft was insecure - at least until the most recent exploits.
They think that Microsoft is Good, and also that machines are just good because they have "Intel Inside".
They do NOT know about Microsoft's monopolic practices (and I'm not talking about embedding IE inside Windows), the FUD of SCO vs Linux, the danger of software patents, etc. etc.
But I remember one thing from my old days of computer user. My dad bought PC Magazine and used to read John C. Dvorak's columns. Who were written for common people, not for unix über-geeks.
Sure, his statements might be obvious to us. But not for the outside world. And I'm glad that he tells this stuff so common people can find out.
(Now if only he spoke against software patents...)
1a. Figure out exactly what the hell it is we're going to include.
Did anyone at microsoft actually say they were developing this into a product? Not that I'm aware of. People are calling it vapourware but was there ever any claim made stating it will be developed?
Some guy at Microsoft's UK research branch (iirc) got interested in file distribution and wrote a paper on how it could potentially be improved upon. Bram even said that this was one of the better papers, despite a few major flaws. Now the poor guy's being accused of being a part of a microsoft conspiracy to take down bit torrent? Give me a break. If microsoft wanted to take bit torrent's market share, they'd package a complete product, not release an academic style paper. Maybe one day there will be competition from microsoft but that day is not yet today.. And hey, even if they are developing a full product, isn't it good news that they're throwing ideas around and thinking them through in an intelligent fashion? So what if they're not real world yet? You have to start somewhere. It doesn't matter if you're banging out code for a shakey first version over the period of three days in your basement or if you're writing papers and doing simulations to get some ideas..
Alright, end rant... just calm the flame wars guys. You'd think writing a paper is a crime.. the media and these guys blogging are who's blowing this out of proportion.. keep that in mind.
All he did was read Bram's responce to MS's research theories and decided to play captian obvious. He's feeding off the work of others. While most people would be modded -5 Redundant in the real world and laughed off stage or camera, he's made a thing about it online - where people pretend to be something and fooling the "masses" of drones who call themselves smart and want to be kept "informed".
/.
He's just quick with the masses in guesswork, and riding off an unpopular "nerd" who programs "illegal" software (as it's been called around the net in uninformed, but unfortunately more popular than the truth, places.
He's a sham and shouldn't be placed on slashdot anywhere. I suspect someone's pockets are being lined here at
he's still trying to get hits on his column to drive up his salary from all us on /.
First MSFT tries to "replace" BitTorrent with a "safe" version (read revenue-enhanced). Then they help sponsor the Canadian legislation so they can sell it in both the US and Canada. Then they push the EU to actually permit software patents (which don't exist there yet).
Embrace. Extend.
But just because Dvorak is right doesn't mean he's always right - he's usually wrong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... I think this is a good article. It describes what everyone here think is "painfully obvious" in an interesting way (everone loves a conspiracy!) regular computer users will understand, the crowd that reads CNET, IDG etc.
Why is this important? This article will now be referenced on all the major news sites, and will work as counter-FUD. That's the good thing with sensationalist guys like Dvorak. He writes interesting and scandalous things (from a journalist point of view) and sometimes he actually get it right.
As soon as we started talking about what we were doing, suddenly Microsoft had a competing product. Not that they did, but they did have a plan. As soon as iFusion went under, Microsoft stopped talking about push.
emt 377 emt 4
As for Avalanche being FUD, it's not. Microsoft didn't announce it. Someone picked it up from an academic research conference. All sorts of stuff goes on under the banner of research, and no one that I know of at Microsoft is claiming that it will make it to market. BitTorrent has well known problems, and the researchers were presenting ideas to address those problems, but there was no message of BitTorrent is bad, don't use it. So Avalanche isn't FUD of any kind.
As for being vaporware, that's a bit premature. Since no one from Microsoft has indicated that there will be a product, it's not vaporware. I've thought about high performance web servers, but I've never announced the impending release of one, or even started developing one. Avalanche is no more vaporware than my high performance web server. Someone from Microsoft has to at least indicate an intention of releasing a product before it can be vaporware.
So I think you're dead wrong. JD isn't nailing the obvious. He's seen the broad side of the barn and thrown the basketball, but he sure didn't hit it.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
isn't "dvorak" greek for "tool?"
Since then (and that was in the 80's IIRC) I haven't paid much attention to what Mr. Dvorak. I daresay I haven't missed much.
He probably has a lot of coherent and interesting things to say; they just all come out as jibberish because he insists on using his goofy keyboard layout...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Why would MS seek to undermine BitTorrent?
Why would MS be interested in BitTorrent?
Because they are pretty good at seeing where the market is going.
BitTorrent is *not* a niche protocol. BitTorrent is the *dominant* form of net-traffic.
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide3.php
Ask anyone who works at a major ISP.
BitTorrent is currently the *dominant* protocol on the net, in terms of bits transfered. Yes, bigger than HTTP, FTP, all the normal protocols, and all the other P2P protocols.
In addition to *ALL THAT TRAFFIC*, BitTorrent is starting to see siginifcant corporate legitimacy. Blizzard uses BitTorrent in a customized downloader to distribute patches.
Valve uses a BitTorrent-like (read, licensed from Bram Cohen (infact developed by him, http://www.ferrago.com/story/2963) protocol for distributing their software.
One can imagine that the legitimate electronic channels of distribution in the future will uses BitTorrent or BitTorrent-like schemes. The cost savings on bandwidth alone will set companies that use it apart from the competition.
And right now, MS has no technology that comes close. This is from a company that once dreamed of making MSN synonmous with 'The Net'.
More likely than not, MS currently sees BitTorrent as a massive threat to their having a position in the content distribution networks of tomorrow. Why use a Microsoft solution if you can either write your own in-house OSS solution, or hire another company with a pre-developed, pre-test solution (steam), that crushes the MS solution in bandwidth efficiency.
In the realm of content distribution (which is a big, big place, and a place where 'visionaries' see a lot of growth (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary), BitTorrent is the 'big fish'. And Bram Cohen occupies a similar spot to Linus Torvald's position in the 'Linux World'.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Evil, vile, lieing Dvorak! He'd sell his own mother into slavery to get an article published! He never gets his facts straight, and is owned by corporations! He is a blight upon the technology journalism landscape!
*Someone taps Mr. Joe Slashdot on the shoulder and whispers in his ear*
What?... Uh-huh.... really.... ah.... oh....
Wait, he said something I AGREE with? He's bashing Microsoft?
Dvorak is a prime example of how tech journalists should be! We should lift him up on our shoulders and parade him around the square! Never have I seen a more fair, balanced and well-researched article in my life!
It's an academic research paper that was published at IEEE Infocom, a very prominent academic conference. Look at the URL:m
http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.ht
See the "research."? See the ~pablo? This is one of MSR's researchers publishing a piece of academic research. Of course, it's not a product, because it's not intended to be. Researchers often will build a prototype, but don't have the time or the inclination to produce production-quality code. Do you think Microsoft would be openly publishing the design details if it were intended to be a product?
There is no FUD and no vaporware and no conspiracy. This whole storm in a teacup over Avalanche is probably a good example of why publishing research papers openly on the web for other people (i.e. people who don't understand research) to see can be a bad idea.
1. Post crap that pisses slashdoters off. ...
2. Slashdoters rush to the website.
3.
4. Profit!
And some explanation:
1 - it's called "creating buzz"
2 - it's normal behavior of homo sapiens (actually homo stupidus slashdotiens)
3 - ads serving?
4 - the main objective for many people.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
They are going to tie it to their stuff where BT works with anything you happen to have on hand.
It's not a slam dunk for them because they have to build something, like BT, then market it while not letting people know about the other fine products that work today.
Besides, what savings are there for small to medium sized companies? Unless they are pushing lots of content out the door, they are going to be on the receiving end. Why not just use BT? Will they see lower software costs because the Microsoft bandwidth bill from hell is lower?
If they offer their version of this idea, without it driving sales of their other products, why bother when the free software is already there for the taking? What value can they add besides simply getting the idea introuduced to a wider set of users?
It's just not a slam dunk, that's all.
Blogging because I can...
Aol just needs to start renting/selling movies online - via DVDs and/or streaming/downloads. Time Warner has the largest movies archives in the world...use that content, drop all the other useless services...sell those to Earthlink...eventually aol becomes a media portal.
BT is not a very good intranet solution. I.e. conventional DFS trees (say, running OpenAFS) are better at meeting this need. For internet file distribution, they are good but somewhat limited.
Now, their recent attack against Samba was quite simply an attempt to maintain the status quo. Samba *has been* widely adopted in the corporate arena. So it is not as much of an attack as much as it is a competitive compliment ("We know you don't really need this and we know you will kick our a?? if we give it to you so reverse engineer it yourself").
However Microsoft has a problem, and it is a big one. See, upgrade cycles are getting longer, the growth of the computing industry is slowing, and piracy is still rampant in the developing world. At the same time, Microsoft shareholders want returns. So Microsoft has to be looking for new markets. They spend a lot of time looking for emerging markets so that they can get a foot in the door, but they are so big that even if a new market sees 100% growth the first year, that won't translate into any real growth for their company. However, they still have to try.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
But I see a conspiracy against MS here.
Ah! and Bittorrent isn't about conspiracy, it's about cons-piracy
The man basically fleshes out his /. posts a little, gets them edited for spelling, and calls it a column. Next to him, the sports columnists in the local paper provide us with thought-provoking, well-reasoned journalism.
The whole idea's to provoke a reaction, sure, I can live with that. But you don't feed the trolls.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
When did /. become an RSS feed for Dvorak and other tech writers out there?
Can someone tell me a real,legal use for bittorrent?
Providing access to slashdotted articles and downloads.
It's also often the only practical way to download popular shareware without playing the "wait for a download server and don't you dare leave the computer because you'll only have five minutes to start your download" game.
The nice thing about the Microsoft "crap" about Avalanche is that it ensures press about BitTorrent. Certainly, it's inaccurate to a fault, but it will make people look it up on the web.
Obviously sharing "other-people's data" is a common use for BitTorrent, but a growning number of companies distribute their wares via BitTorrent, and I'd like to see more of that.
Specifically, I would like to see purveyors of large databases (particularly public ones like those at the NCBI) start to embrace P2P as a distribution strategy. In the case of NCBI, every biotech and pharma on the planet is grabbing copies of those huge databases on a regular basis (they change frequently). This incurs huge bandwidth on their part, and promises slow delivery for those downloading. BitTorrent could drop their bandwidth usage 10,000-fold and fantastically speed up transfer rates to the downloaders. Everybody wins!
There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events.
Except for "coincidence".
MS was caught unaware/unprepared of this BT kind of data distribution, nothing strange in that. MS is a OS company that also produces products (dozens of lines). Their core competency never was file transfer (not to start a flamewar, but even file transfer/discovery mechanisms like SMB are pretty darn good). Now that this protocol exists, they just want to utilize it to distribute their data. Of course, in order to 'brand' it, they have gone to their usual way of doing things by embrasing/extending. What I dont understand is if MS extends it, it is evil, if anyone else extends it, it is for universal good
No, Im not a MS pawn, just would like to put things as they are
Maybe some of you remember the "old days" when there was actually an option which OS to choose for the workplace, e.g. OS/2, NetWare, *NIX, *BSD, etc. ?
M$ figured how to talk to the suits and convince them that "our product is not ready, yet. But it will be much better than the competition, you'll just have to wait a little longer." And lo and behold the PHBs fell for it! No big surprise here, but maybe M$ simply tries to get back to these wonderful times when telling a PHB that "Windows 95 will increase your productivity for sure! I would not use OS/2, I heard it is unstable." simply closed the deal and was deemed a believable statement in certain circles (hint PHBs, again).
The whole scheme worked until the late 90's, they convinced my, then, boss that replacing Sybase running a 1 TB database 24/7 with SQLServer was indeed possible and that even the released Beta [of SQLServer] was fit for production -- the poor guy never understood why I was laughing so hard. The application in question was Scopus, which would have simply ceased to work with the weird locking-scheme SQLServer used in these days (they came up with record-locking one or two releases down the road, though).
my 2 cents
I decided to check up on the Micrsoft's guy's research and discovered that BitTorrent isn't nearly as culpable as HTTP and SMTP. Yes, that's right, a vast majority of todays viruses, trojans, phishing, pharming, adware, spyware, malware, and herpes are all acquired through HTTP and SMTP. Thus, those protocols must actually be to blame and we should stop using them immediately.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Who would want to rent bits?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
with his head so far up his ass. Who listens to what he has to say and takes it seriously?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
In other news, Dvorak also suspects the sun has a predisposition to rise in the East. "How else can you explain this routine rising, everyday it seems to follow this blind path from East to West!"
This is really getting old. I mean, every new, remotely appealing technology gets mimicked by M$...er..."innovated" by M$.
Did anyone actually read the linked "security" article from the MS MVP guy he talks about? It blames BitTorrent for this spyware being installed, while showing screenshots of Windows Media Player asking the user to install codecs to play the file. Did anyone actually believe this guy in the first place?
I couldn't care less about Dvorak, and I don't much care about MS either. I use open source systems for most things. That said, bittorrent really frosts me. It's the equivalent of a DDOS for smaller ISP's, either up or down. It's a design typical of those who don't think of the downside consequences of the cool things they think up that have great upside consequences. Well, the solution is just get more bandwidth, right. Or make bittorrent just as easy for throttling download rate as upload rate. Or configure the ISP routers to limit bittorrent rates (not so easy with older cisco, though). Not a well thought out design...
Why does there seems to be alot of hostility towards him on Slashdot? I've read a few of his articles, he is a little high on his own vapors, but no more so than any other magazine writer.
Serious guys. You're getting on my nerves now.
Amount of MSFT software I personally run at home: Zero.
Why? Don't need it. Can we get over this MSFT bashing already? It's so f'ing weak.
Wanna show how good OSS is? Write good open source software. Because when it comes down to it the quality of your software is what influences people, not how much you can mouth off.
It's the same thing with BSD vs. Linux and the other distro wars. Mouthing off is just fine, but when I have no desire for your OS over my OS I won't be switching.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"The problem is that no big company controls it, and Microsoft, asleep at the wheel, let it slip too long to do much about it"
I would think Microsoft would be more interested/against bittorrent simply because of the amount of their pirated software people trade on it, not because they cant control it, if they were really interested in file trading, they would have bought one of the big name (non open source) companies all ready doing it.
TruePunk | Games
For those who are new to journalists like Dvorak, PCMag had a history of being critical of software companies. I remember their strong stance against software copy-protection schemes, hardware and software dongles, etc. For instance, witholding Editor's choice for software copy protection schemes. I've also seen Dvorak against patents, but I have not seen the level of agitation that was the hallmark of PCMag.
Dvorak may be over his head sometimes, but I think he and his colleagues at PCMag did a good job of defeating copy protection trend. But once they slipped and didn't come out strongly against patents, product activitation, and such hare-brained schemes, I stopped reading PCMag.
What worries me is that they will jump ahead of the Linux world with Avalanche and combine it with Windows Update and cause all sorts of patches and updates to be flitting about from node to node, possibly getting infected, code being changed, etc.
To picture this for you Linux people, imagine if someone combined rpm/apt-get/yum/tarballs with BitTorrent. Just connect up, jump into the data stream, and fark knows what is now going to end up on your machine. Just trust us. I wouldn't trust files from the wrong build repository on Fedora, I wouldn't trust files sent by any Microsoft product any more than I would executables via eMule/aMule.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Dvorak is working on an amazing editorial on why he writes random editorials once a while
"One of the most fascinating and popular protocols and P2P file-distribution systems on the Internet is BitTorrent, first released in 2001. Continuous improvements led to its emergence as a force in 2003; by early 2005 it was perhaps the dominant protocol on the Net, second only to TCP/IP itself."
Yeah, cos nobody uses http, ftp or pop3 any more... He sure has a penchant for overstatement tinged with immense lack-of-clue.
All these infected machines with BitTorrent, Aurura, spyware are running Windows!
...it's part of a conspiracy.
How many wareZed copies of avalanche will be distributed by bittorrent?
The original paper from MS Research is an academic-style journal paper. Where does it claim that it's a product, or is that misreporting by some news sites?
MS Research Cambridge is not a product development lab, they're a bunch of smart people who get to play with technology which might be productised *one day*. Taking an existing technology and innovating to make it better is a very important part of research. (but I hope they don't patent it!)
Given that Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a p2p document management platform, back in March and that Groove (the software) has been on the market for a number of years, I don't think that we can call Avalanche vapourware.
I also don't think Microsoft is going after BitTorrent. I think they're trying to create a new way of dealing with documents, kind of like what Lotus Notes was trying to do back in the 90's.
I don't know what's going to come out of Avalanche, but I doubt it will be teenagers sharing mp3s and bad porn (although it might work for that too).
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Is this news. Microsoft mode of operation seems to be to take open standards and extend them and make the extensions proprietary. Tie in the monopoly and the extensions become defacto standards.
Then you have an open protocol turned into an owned protocol. This time though I suspect a legal approach.
MS will try to get avalanche going, then can say there is a better trusted protocol for legitimate use and now bit torrent only really serves nefarious purposes...
Hundreds of people work at Microsoft Research, researching all kinds of things and presenting their papers at academic conferences. I know some of them. And two things are clear: 1) very little of what they do is relevant to the here-and-now of what Microsoft is up to, and 2) the marketing folks and other muscle at Microsoft as a rule don't play games with them or their research, because they know most academics would flee under that kind of brutishness.
You'll notice that the bogus TCO papers and other slams against Linux don't come out of Microsoft Research, for example, but rather from outside agencies. This is not an accident.
It's therefore extremely unlikely that this paper is part of a grand Microsoft conspiracy. And the fact that Dvorak thinks so pretty much confirms it's wrong, right? There are so many bad things Microsoft really is up to, can't we concentrate on those?
Please! Imagine that, another anti-MS post on Slashdot. Some people really need to get over it. So what if they announce a Bittorrent competitor? The better product and management will win. This is a part of a free competitive environment. And I know everybody will go crazy citing anti-competitive antitrust issues that MS supposedly committed. It seems that nobody mentions that there are really good upstarts out there that do beat the "evil" big conglomorate - a la Google, Bittorrent, etc, etc... MS is a company just like any other company, if they had inferior products, people would stop buying. It's that simple and I think it is a shame that companies like Netscape and platforms like Linux spend their time complaining and crying vs actually competing! [sorry guys, had to vent]
Pshaw. He may or may not be right about the MS conspiracy, but this kind of blantant intellecutal dishonesty makes me take his point with a huge grain of salt, since right there he demonstrates that he either doesn't understand things as much as he pretends, or that he's chosen not to relate as much as he understands. Either way, minus points.
There are plenty of other explanations for the "recent series of coincidental stories and events":
There you go. Three easy, plausible alternatives. "No other explanation," indeed.
Cheers
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
PC Magazine used to be the marketing arm of Microsoft with all their biased reviews of Microsoft products vs Product X.
But now that MSN is entering the content publishing area and directly competing against Ziff-Davis, it's nice to finally see that they've changed their tune.
... and kill people??
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
Doesn't he have his own forums?
Before somebody bitches that the only real legit use is for game demos and linux distros...even NASA uses torrent:
World Wind
And yes, they have normal download servers, but the torrent is a lot faster.
Bittorrent is a good way to distribute large files. Microsoft wants into the on-line movie distribution business in conjunction with Hollywood. The LAST thing they want is a distribution mechanism that they do not control and (horrors) runs on multiple (including non-Microsoft) platforms. Hence the current FUD attacks on Bittorrent.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I always thought Dvorak was a Microsoft shill.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
BitTorrent's worst enemies are the people who use it to foist monstrous spyware app bundles onto unsuspecting noobs who don't realize that they don't have to accept the installs to get the video file they wanted...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
...Dvorak said something pro BitTorrent. Whose side will slashdotters be on?!
(I imagine the scene from Star Trek TOS where the android couldn't handle the logic)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Last time I waded through a ton of Hijack This logs, the log was generated on a Windows PC. I use BitTorrent all the time under Linux, and have yet to get infected with Spy/Adware... Dumb writers :P
This was the IBM modus operandi during the heyday of the mainframe. Someone would announce a really great utility for sale, IBM swoops in and says "Oh yeah, we're doing that in our next OS release" - Company folds, feature is implemented in a half-assed way. Net gain: IBM.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
And Dvorak never said that Avalance is FUD. He said there seems to be a lot of negative spreading press about Bittorent at the same time that Microsoft's new project Avalance has be *leaked* to the press.
Frankly, I tend to agree with it. It does look like a textbook Microsoft FUDjob.
On a somewhat related note. Has anyone else noticed an increase in Pro-Microsoft sentiment on Slashdot? Has M$ infiltrated our ranks to spread FUD and astroturf Slashdot?
cat sig >
"If you haven't noticed, the outsiders (a.k.a
Joe-Users, common people, ignorant sheep, etc) didn't believe Microsoft was insecure - at least until the most recent exploits."
no, they think that is how computers work. Like in the old days when a tv would get an occasion horizontal bar. Thats just the way it was
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Vapourflame anybody?
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
Dvorak has determined that red apples are a conspiracy against green apples. "There's no other explanation for the fact that no red apples are green", said Dvorak in a recent interview.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
MSR has some good ppl working an cambridge on computer language research and type systems!
.net are not stupid ideas you know!
C# and
But do not take my word for it, go see for yourself: http://research.microsoft.com/ppt/
Thomas S. Iversen
The Register, which Dvorak referred to, said it had press material on Avalanche. So SOMEONE is touting it as a (potential) product.
I'd always heard that Gilligan's Island was a story about rage. Gilligan hates how he is treated by everyone else so much that he subconsciously sabotages every possible way to get off the island.
But you're saying that the professor was the real root of the failed rescues. The Professor knew that he could get everyone else on the island to treat Gilligan poorly, thus making Gilligan the fall guy. That's just evil. Brilliant, but evil. That TV show is so much more complicated than it seems.
No wonder I don't trust acadamians...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I have yet to find anyone to pick up on this, and it surprises me (unless I'm just hideously mistaken).
There are plenty of conspiracy points that are fantasy and some can be taken seriously, but what intrigues me is that Dvorak rags on M$ for making the claim that BitTorrent==spyware. However, it's quite the hypocracy to say that coming from the tainted maw of Micro$oft for one main reason. What is there to stop M$ from making Avalanche into a complete spybot with usage reporting? If they know that users can crack the DRM, then they could just write a self-updating element that constantly sends user stats back to M$ if that 'feature' isn't already built into the protocol.
This 'feature' already exists in the newer versions of WMP, which is why I don't use Windows' built in programs to do much of anything. Usage statistic reporting as the program calls it just seems like willfully installing spyware. Who knows what they do with this data? Regardless, they can leave my activity report out of it.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Microsoft is ALWAYS asleep at the wheel when it comes to any technology, which is based on the idea of sharing in a non-corporate environment.
Their corporate culture simply prevents them to be innovative in that field - they can't help it.
If M$ invented the Internet, it would be a Fortune500 toy.
Wake me up when he starts bugging Julia Roberts, and people start dying...
-- All Gods were immortal.
-- S. Lem
BitTorrent supports webseeding. You only need a script file on your server (such as PHP). No need to build a whole module into your web server.
Check out http://www.blogtorrent.com/ and "torrent webseeding" on Google.
A 'real' implementation would involve some additional P2P networking code, block management, and the matrix operations would be over a GF(2^n) rather than the linear matrix I've used...
I really wish Dvorak would stop writing. He's lowering the global IQ. :)
Why don't you switch to one of the methods of P2P that
a) requires less uploading
b) helps you identify fake files
c) uses a semi-anonymous networking protocol
???
Torrents are the maximum sux0r, IMNSHO. Sure you can get movies 15 minutes after the last frame is shot - but then again are you really sure you want to put yourself that far up the food chain?
Chill for a couple of days then launch eMule.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
There are two problems with the patcher, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, the less important of the two seems to be the one that gets the most attention.
BitTorrent, like anything else, requires open/forwarded ports in a NAT router for incoming connections. Blizzard (and helpful users) will constantly tell you to open the ports on your router/firewall if you're getting crappy download rates. This in itself is a pain, because the patcher isn't configurable, so you can only setup forwarding for one PC at a time. I'm sure it's faster to download the patch once and copy it to other PCs, but it's still annoying if you choose to download the patch with a different machine this time. Anyway, BT will still work without forwarded ports. However, you can only connect to peers that do have the proper ports forwarded/opened (neither unforwarded peer can accept incoming connections from the other), which limits the number of peers you can actually use. In theory that will hurt your download speed, but in a huge swarm like a WoW patch has, there should be plenty of working peers for you to use.
The problem that I've run into, and it seems like a lot of people are actually having, is that there is no upload control. There was one time where I actually had to use the patcher. It saturated my upload, causing all downloads to come to a halt (including the patch itself). As soon as I used a third party program to throttle the patcher's upload rate by a few KB, my download speed jumped up to over 200KB/s. This is not a BT problem specifically, as I've killed my own downloads with FTP uploads (from my machine as well as other NATed machines). Downloads simply require a bit of upload to operate properly, and BT will saturate your upload to the point of choking your download. I believe this is the problem that most people see, when they post that they've got a good cable connection, a brand new machine, and all the recommended ports forwarded.
Personally, I extract the .torrent from the patcher, and use my already-configured BT client to download the patch. I got the 50MB incremental 1.5.0 patch in 3 minutes during peak downloading times. I then got the 175MB full patch in 15 minutes. I got both patches directly from the Blizzard swarm in half the wait time for one file at Gamespy.
BitTorrent works amazingly well when configured properly. Basically as many people can download as fast as their connection will allow, and there's no server to get overloaded. However, when improperly configured, BT sucks just about as bad as anything can. BT simply requires some configuration, and some of that can't be automated. Unfortunately, the Blizzard patcher seems to compound the problem by not allowing you enough options to properly configure it, even if you do understand what you need to do.
from The Rocky Horror Picture Show...
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
That was a great article on Dvorak with obvious implications for warfare. RAND published a similar paper a while ago...
...spreading FUD. Some things NEVER change!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
That man is a lose canon!
He must be black flagged immediately and all his work taken off the internets! I bet hes a crazy columbian on cocaine!
Do it for the bridgestone-shod, troll fearing children
no, that's hindsight.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Most people are logged in with authoratative powers on their computers.
If you restrict the rights of the account you surf with then you probably won't get hit with much. No virus software needed. Hackers are different, but common trojans, worms, and viruses usually depend on being able to run with admin rights, or at least with rights to install software and schedule its execution.
Sure its a pain in the but to have to log off to even update your browser with a new plugin, but not as bad as gettin' hit with the alternative.
~too lazy to login
When I moved to the Bay Area in 1993, there was one gas station in Livermore that usually had gas for prices between 0.85 to $1, and prices stayed relatively low for a few years after that in spite of California's increases in gas tax. Then *you* showed up....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks