Microsoft Reinvents Bittorrent

Anon E. Muss writes "Microsoft has a new Secure Content Downloader tool that sounds an awful lot like a Bittorrent clone. It's described as a 'peer-assisted technology' where '[e]ach client downloads content by exchanging parts of the file they're interested in with other clients, in addition to downloading parts from the server.' Right now MSCD is just a time-limited preview, intended to support downloads of select Microsoft beta releases (e.g. Visual Studio 2008). If this test goes well, Microsoft will probably start using MSCD for all their large downloads. How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?"

Comments

Microsoft are legendary innovators

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is jealous because Microsoft invented the series of tubes in the intarwebs.

How do I feel? How do I feel?

[kimvette]

How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?

Uh, let me see:

Microsoft treats paying customers like criminals with their recent (last five years or so) policies but it does nothing to curb professional pirates

Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies in the world.

Microsoft can easily afford the bandwidth for hosting their product downloads.

How do I feel about it? Sorry, I won't be participating. If they make their policies more customer-friendly and open up the source for Windows, or at least become more friendly to open source, sure, I'd use it to download and I'd let it seed for a bit.

When I download SuSE or Kubuntu or CentOS I let the torrent seed for at least a few days.

This makes me want to download Microsoft patches several times when I need them just so I eat up more of their bandwidth.