Slashdot Mirror
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..
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
Or, more likely, Microsoft will try to spin it such that it looks like Bittorrent == evil pirates whereas MSCD == fair and honest distribution system.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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. --
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Well at my last job, I wasn't allowed to install BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs because the more senior admins brought the FUD and said it's the same a Napster and all the other P2P clients. I argued that it was a protocol akin to FTP and it fell on deaf ears. I'm sure they will have no issues with this since it's officially sanctioned by Microsoft. SysAdmins can be just as bad as the PHBs.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
"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.
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.