Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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
From the article:
The only defenders of BitTorrent I saw regarding this issue were buried here and there on Slashdot.
Huh?
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.
OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch. Heck you could even include a spot for plugging and playing DRM (or not).
The process would be to automatically replace all links to files which are larger than say 256K with a Torrent-ish link. This could be done on pagebuild as it the file is served up.
You would want to build the Torrent capabilities into the browser as well, so then you would goto Firefox and build them in there as well.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Or more concerning to Microsoft, hosting via BT means not having to spend money on big file servers and not being locked into a single OS for said serviecs. Given their recent focus on attempting to hobble Samba as well, I'm guessing that they may be realizing that a core part of their business model has the potential to implode very quickly if alternatives like these gain momentum in the corporate arena.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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
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!
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