Slashdot Mirror
The Uncertain Future of BitTorrent
javipas writes "The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker are working on a new version of the BitTorrent protocol that could become the successor to the current one, maintained by BitTorrent Inc. The company founded by Bram Cohen — original author of this protocol — now has decided to close the source for several new features in the BitTorrent protocol, and this "gives them too much power and influence". The new file format would be called .p2p, and would maintain backwards compatibility with current .torrent files."
Just keep using the existing protocol. You might miss out on the latest K-Fed release if all the kiddies are using the new format, but then again that could be a plus.
The PirateBay team is currently developing on a new torrent protocol that they hope will be the next-generation successor to the current BitTorrent file. They say that they're concerned about continuing to use the current standard since BitTorrent has closed the source and hope to be able to create an open-source successor that maintains backward-compatibility with the current .torrent standard. The new standard, currently named .p2p is still in the development phase, but the initial release is planned for sometime early next year. Among the planned new features are responses to the increasing number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations who currently abuse the BitTorrent protocol.
Seriously, would it have been that hard to have waited for a submission that was informative and grammatically correct?
Who did this submission ?
It's totally brain-dead, they removed "The Pirate Bay" from the source they duplicated, but forgot to the remove/alter the references to it....
"The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker"
Which one ? => TPB
When you want random-access to a file, streaming doesn't work. That's why BitTorrent is so good. Also, it means you can publish your own content and not have to send it to everyone, just some folks. Once it's out there, if it's popular, other folks can download it from others, saving you thousands in bandwidth costs. FLV is just a video codec - it's being served over HTTP, which is ages-old and not particularly suited for mass-dissemination of data in a bandwidth-effective way, anyway. FLV might be good for low-quality videos, but it sure ain't good for gigs of ISOs, DVD-quality movies, albums, libraries of pictures, etc. It's all about using the right tool for the job, and FLV is great at streaming low-quality videos to users at great expense to the server.
except cohen bought utorrent and adopted it as the official client. a lot of windows users use utorrent, so that argument doesnt really stand.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Manufacturers do not assume liability if their product is used to perform illegal activities.
That has never stopped the media companies from going after software that enables copyright infringement.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Hell, I think modern piracy would've taken longer to come to their attention if the dumbshits at Napster hadn't tried to make a business model out of it.
Which similarly never killed anyone, although some of the more famous stations DID broadcast from ships in international waters...
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Do you know something I don't?
;-)
Aw, poor Alice! She's so clueless and disappointed because she hasn't found Wonderland... yet
Yes, Alice, I do know something you don't. Freenet is for posting stuff, but there are OTHER similar (anonymous) networks around... some haven't made it to the public, and some are still in beta (but already working imho). They implement onion routing, and are very secure. Some are used for file transfer, others for general purpose (to host websites, forums, etc). Yes, they work.
Just search for the rabbit hole (hint: Steganographed text inside), Alice. Just keep it secret until the time comes.
The official client is now based on utorrent, which is written in C++, not Python.
They started a system that was incredibly slow but some very motivated people used it because it was supposedly more secure. The problem is those very motivated people were mostly pedophiles. Of course there were a tiny fraction of people interested in using it for posting out of oppressive situations but I don't think that was really very popular because there are other ways that reach a larger audience. So there never were really that many people using Freenet in the first place which made it even slower.
Then the nitwit developers had this "great" idea to convert it to a darknet. This is where you only connect into the network via trusted nodes and nodes only allow people they trust to connect. A totally broken architecture for a public system. So that basically killed Freenet. The old system is no longer supported and the new system sucks donkey balls.
And on top of all this, the Freenet client was written in suck-ass Java. It would eat memory like nothing else and after running for a few days people complain of it dragging the whole system down. Java is just too resource intensive (both CPU and memory) for this type of work. Why do you think uTorrent (C++) is way more popular than the official BitTorrent client (Python)?