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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?
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AWESOME! They're going to pass their savings onto me, right!?
Latewire
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.
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
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.
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.