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Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
well now the question is: does this refer to all bittorrent (the protocol) traffic, or just torrents approved by BitTorrent, Inc. (the company)?
BitTorrent the company is not BitTorrent the protocol. Bram Cohen may be working with Comcast to get the "legitimate" BitTorrent 6.0 (with its closed source code and protocol) operating cleanly on their networks, but don't expect that this will magically work for every client and tracker out there. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively collaborate to cripple the original, open protocol.
Interestingly, this news comes almost at the same time Azureus develops a plug-in to detect ISPs that cripple your torrents transfers:
http://gizmodo.com/372442/bittorrent-plugin-detects-isps-raping-your-torrents
Of course, a peaceful solution such as this agreement is always preferred, as it enlightens more and more people about the true nature of BitTorrent, and opens up the doors for more and more ISPs to do The Right Thing (tm).
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
First off they were getting BAAAAD publicity, and in this instance bad publicity is bad. When geeks start turning away from you and telling their friends not to use your service it begins to ahem... hurt. But I also think that perhaps the congress critters that are worried we are falling behind infrastructurally, may have hinted at dropping investigations and maybe even a little free gubmint money to help "upgrade" the public infrastructure. Indeed. And the other benefit is that .... AT&T is now the SPY ISP attempting to pick through traffic and block your downloads. We shall see, though, keep an eye on the broadband forums, we shall know soon enough.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
The new architecture from the Comcast/BitTorrent effort will be of great interest to content delivery networks (CDNs) who have been sorting out the best way that P2P can be used to assist in delivery of large files. Yesterday a CDN called Velocix announced a hybrid P2P streaming media service combining traditional caching with P2P delivery for live events. Velocix used to be CacheLogic, and worked with BitTorrent to develop the Cache Discovery Protocol, which lets ISPs cache the most popular torrent files, and then seed the files from servers within their network, reducing network traffic.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
If anyone doesn't get the whole picture, it might be Comcast. BitTorrent is based on peering and people seeding what they have. They can't exploit it unless they find a way to get their users to seed content for other users instead of coming from their ser... vers....
Oh dear. I guess they do have the big picture. I can see it now: all Comcast users must keep a background application running while using their network (or have bandwidth severely throttled on a per MAC address instead of per packet shape) and will seed data to other users using your hard disk space and electricity instead of Comcast's central servers. Diabolical.
*adjusts tin-foil hat*
All that "more to it" is the problem and Comcast needs to be clear about network freedom. They can rig all sorts of schemes to make BitTorrent a traffic cop or to be some kind of traffic cop but none of that is appropriate. Comcast needs to do it's job, which is delivering bandwith. Everything else is bad for them and leads to real censorship.
All of this nonsense about "unauthorized reproduction" and single file copies being a criminal offense represent a tremendous and wrong expansion of copyright laws. Copyright disputes should be a civil matter of who deserves money earned from works. Copyright protection of restricted files violates the limited time provision of the Constitutional establishment clause and the whole point of copyright is to insure a rich public domain. Censoring the press (aka the internet) in order to enforce this new and unwholesome copyright idea violates yet another portion of the US Constitution.
Money that can't be earned in a free society is money that should not be earned. It would be better to live without mass produced entertainment than to live without a free press. Comcast and other ISPs should be at the forefront of the battle to preserve network freedom. As long as they insist on port blocks and traffic shaping, they are an enemy of freedom.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
As an added bonus, it further makes the issue harder for non-nerds to understand. Obligatory car analogy: You own a highway, and I own a motor vehicle company called "Cars". You deny all access to motor vehicles (due to "congestion"), and when people start complaining that you're denying cars, you let my Cars-brand vehicles on and say "That's not true, we fully allow Cars!" Yikes, even the car analogy was hard to explain. This should get interesting...
In the words of Strongbad, "I like-a to say, 'Holy Crap!'"
This certainly is unexpected.
First off, Comcast is going to stop blocking or filtering or slowing down bittorrent traffic. That's bittorrent the protocol, not BitTorrent the company. From TFA, "We are working hard on a different approach that is protocol-agnostic during peak periods." Protocol. Not just torrents sanctioned by BitTorrent, Inc., but any torrents whatsoever.
Second, what seems to be even better, is that Comcast is going to be increasing throughput to its customers. "Internet Capacity" as stated in the summary doesn't really make sense, unless it's referring to an IPv4-IPv6 changeover (-1: Pedantic), but if that means what I think it was supposed to mean, then it's great. However, is it an increase in last-mile throughput, or overall throughput? Or both? Because overall throughput would simply mean that if your neighbors are torrenting, your connection isn't slowed down, whereas last-mile throughput would only increase your peak speed when no one else is downloading anything. It seems like last-mile throughput is generally already maxed out with today's (yesterday's?) technology, namely, cable, at around 6Mbps, and the bottleneck is in the shared line.
What I'm saying is that both should be improved. The shared line should be made so that everyone could attain peak throughput at all times, and the peak throughput should be about 10x-20x what it is now. That's right. The bottleneck should be in our own Cat5 cables or 802.11g networks, not imposed on us by our ISPs.
Of course, ISPs won't willingly provide this (it costs precious $$$s), but for what we're paying ($50 a month, or $100 with TV, which amounts to $1,200 a year) it kinda seems like we deserve it. Telecom companies are required to put most of their profits back into their networks, but I don't think ISPs like Comcast, which operate over cable, are. Maybe they should be. Seems like it might help.
Of course, most of that was just my incoherent rambling about one aspect of the state of technology in the US (don't get me started), so if you were expecting that to be meaningful, well, just forget what you read.