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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?"
People have no problem with this and blizzard. Expect the double standard to kick in in 3.. 2.. 1..
This will show that p2p/torrents have a legal use.
Microsoft, ripping off your ideas since the 80's, then repackaging them with prettier colors.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
BitTorrent didn't invent P2P. And the idea is used by many other applications including games. The last article with a premise this ridiculous I've seen was the "Hotmail drops 98.88% of all attachments, MS to be broken up and fined $10 billion dollars for fraud!" article.
Seriously, what is the point of this nonsense article, just to get the groupthink all riled up?
How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?
/. run on BT before? 47 thousand? And how many have had a comment like this? Zero?
Exactly how many articles has
How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's cost?
...
AWESOME! They're going to pass their savings onto me, right!?
Latewire
Microsoft developed BITS 3.0 many months ago and included it with Vista. It allows for what Microsoft calls "peer caching."
Rob
Aren't we already?
MS didn't reinvent Bittorrent. They built something better: Avalanche. It's more efficient and (I know this phrase is weird to use around MS, but...) more secure. Read the research papers (they touch on BT, its advantages and disadvantages). I imagine most of this stuff is on its way into standard BT, if it hasn't been worked in already.
"How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?"
Frankly I don't give 2 shits as long as they don't patent the hell out of it (and sue existing P2P solutions). But this came out of MS Research, so I doubt that'll happen (one of the only decent groups at MS).
By the way, MS has been messing around with P2P for years. How do you think Xbox Live works? Every time a game is played multiplayer, at least one Xbox/Xbox 360 is hosting. Not a single MS server hosts a game. Question this all you want (why pay $60 a year then?) but the fact of the matter is that from a technological standpoint, it works well.
How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?
The same way I feel about Canonical's. Or Fedora's. Or Gentoo's. Or Blizzard's. Or Demonoid's. Or iPodNova's. Or the eDonkey network's. Or ThePirateBay's.
It's P2P, remember, the thing everyone here loves? And now there's more of it! Must be a good thing. Although I'm sure if Microsoft started handing out free chocolates and flowers, before going on to start selling Linux distributions and releasing the entire code of the Windows kernel under the BSD license, you'd find some reasons to kick up a fuss about that, as well.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Since I downloaded the last MSDN library no less than 9 times and each time got a corrupted file (yes, a 1.9GB corrupted file), I would have welcomed an official MS P2P download route - one of the more useful feature of BitTorrent on large files is that each chunk is hashed, and thus has good integrity.
Instead, there was just an MD5 checksum buried in the small print on the page, which is no help at all. The checksum validation in the install routine can detect that the archive is corrupted. Ok, it's nice to be able to tell if you got a pirate zombie MSDN library (presumably with some pages containing subtle advice on how to implement code with security holes - now we know why Windows is so insecure....) But what I really needed was a download protocol that provides for more error correction than HTTP.
Go, I say. Even if everyone disables the ability to upload, and all the data still comes from MS, it's still an improvement.
> How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?
It's good that they are using their own protocol. That way those who have no use for anything from Microsoft will be in no danger of inadvertently doing them a favor.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Huh?
In bittorrent, no block is more important than any other.
And the only bottleneck in bittorrent is when a specific block is only available from a single seed with limited bandwidth. The moment that block is uploaded to another machine the bandwidth expands.
I'm not understanding that either. You need updates as to who has what. This will be changing constantly as different peers download different blocks.
Why would you need to? All the client has to do is connect to as many peers as necessary to find each block a minimum number of times. The only time there is a problem with this is when there is only one seed with limited bandwidth.
There is no way that a "globally rarest" will appear more often in your peer group than it does globally. This seems more of a seeder issue than a swarm issue. And it has been solved with the "super-seeder" enhancements. The seeder feeds more blocks to the guy who seems to share them the fastest.
Just imaging a huge P2P network of Microsoft software - and if someone figures out how to pervert it with trojans, viruses, keyloggers...
With Microsoft's lousy security track record, can you imagine the gold mine this will be for anyone that wants to mass distribute malwear? Nothing like lots of machines in the wild hosting "official" Microsoft software, patches, etc.
Think it can't happen? Think again.
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
"How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?""
Kinda dirty and used, but no different from how I felt after installing Vista.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Bram Cohen (Bittorrent inventor) commented on Avalanche on his blog two years ago and said that he thinks "the paper is complete garbarge."
However, the Wikipedia article on network coding lists a lot of fields where this techology might be useful, so I guess it's not really garbage after all, but neither the holy grail of p2p.
And what on earth does that have to do with the issue at hand? They are coming out with their thing here, they arent "Embracing" bittorrent. It always amazed me how people will use the whole embrace extend extinguish thing when they are talking about a new MS product. Embrace, extend, and extinguish is meant to refer to a company embracing a standard they want to destroy for whatever reason. If they were extending the bittorrent protocol you would have a point.
But again, what on EARTH does any of this have to do with it being acceptable for one company to use your bandwidth when you are streaming files from them but when another does it they are 'stealing' your bandwidth or whatever?
Its like some people on here think that because MS was judged to legally be a monopoly that means they cant do things that are perfectly normal for other companies to do. I swear one day I will read on here that MS shouldnt be allowed to be registered in a phone book or something because they are a monopoly and should be held to a different standard. Utilizing a swarming protocol does not equate to abuse of monopoly powers.
So far most of the comments on this story have been about the pros and cons of helping MS with their bandwidth. There have even been a couple talking about some technical differences. But for me, the biggest difference is none of that. The coolest thing about BitTorrent is that it is a known, open protocol. What this means is that there are something like 10 to 20 clients out there you can download, so we end up with great programs like Azureus and uTorrent. Of course I haven't read much about this new program from MS, but I imagine they won't be releasing the source code for it. (I may be wrong of course!) What this means is that to use their shiny new protocol, you have to use THEIR software. You will have _no_ choice, and there will be _no_ room for developing new features. I find this terribly limiting compared to what can be accomplished with something open and popular like BitTorrent. What will you do if the protocol is very efficient and useful, and yet you are forced to use a crap client that you don't like? Reverse engineer it? That's a pain in the ass compared to having a working, open protocol that is well-documented and there are several open-source solutions to reference. And I won't even begin to discuss the likelihood of seeing an OS X or Linux version of their client...
I think I'll be sticking to BT unless something better comes along that actually has a useful (i.e., open) license. One wonders about the motivation for developing this when they could have just used BT to distribute their patches and downloads. Is it just NIH, or something more?
Microsoft is charging a lot of money for their software; there is absolutely no reason anybody but Microsoft should pay for the bandwidth related to their software updates.
From a practical point of view, no matter how "secure" the protocol may be, if this thing is running on a host as part of a P2P network, it is essentially broadcasting to the world that (1) the host is running Windows, and (2) that it's not up to date with its patches. That's not a smart thing to broadcast.
They have this great new program going on where they will pay you for forwarding email. They will pay you $245 for every person you forward an email to, and then another $243 for every person who forwards that email, and so on. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check!
It really is not logical to look at things that way though. You can make a case against any large organizations ethics.
What you are doing is kind of like a democrat proposing a policy and then someone yelling "Well your party used to support slavery so I dont think we should listen to anything you say."
Or when Google tries to get its way with net nuetrality the telecoms shouting "Well you guys are censoring content in China so I dont think anything you want with net nuetrality should be granted."
Or when Apple tries to sell you a sell phone you could say "You guys had that options scandal where you defrauded shareholders, if I buy this iPhone I will be supporting corruption!"
See? Can you find any organization of any size that you cant use that sort of logic against? This is why the legal system and just about everyone with common sense looks only at the issues at hand rather than using their preexisting biases and stereotypes.
I'll simplify it the way I see it.
Microsoft has proven time and time again not to care at all about my needs or my well-being. Honestly they've cost me a lot of money not just by their lack of interest in my needs but the way they've crushed the products that actually did serve my needs, and they did so illegally.
So while the anti-competitive practices may seem unrelated, they really are. I have personally suffered on multiple accounts directly because of Microsoft, be it their neglect or their business practices. Since they don't care about my best interest, I have no interest in theirs.
If Microsoft takes my money but blatantly ignores my needs, I don't want to help them in any way at all, and that includes bandwidth. I'll give them the same attitude they've given me: you want to distribute your software? You muscle up and pay to get it distributed. Don't ask me for help unless you're paying me for it.