Slashdot Mirror
Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads?
Max Sayre writes "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
Until then it's a tool for nerds to get their porn faster.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Why aren't linux package managers using this instead of just leaching off of college servers and the like?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The more and more I hear about how WoW rapes your pipe and your wallet, the more I wonder how people are willing to pay for it.
Combine this with social networking to allow/deny access to your files and I think you've got a game changer. Files which require no server, and which are unknown/unavailable to anyone who doesn't need to know about them. I could share my mp3 collection or movie collection with only my friends list, which would be much more along the lines of fair use (like tape trading).
Why? because for small files (as I expect most software updates would be), downloading directly is quicker and safer.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Those of us stuck in New Zealand or Australia still have data caps to think about. If every download was a torrent there would be a lot more overhead eating into our precious data caps!
Please, think of the Kiwis.
... and the anecdote is right on. BUT... if it includes the word "torrent", it's frowned upon.
Sadly, too many people are uneducated/misinformed and they don't know the real statistics.
0 seeds, 0 peers. FFFFUUUU--
Because Bittorrent has a reputation issue, for one. The MPAA and RIAA attack it and call it the reason they are losing money (instead of their failing business model).
Large companies don't want to have to deal with the previous hassle, and even though the load might not be much for individual computers, if everyone on a company network was bittorrenting, other traffic would be interrupted (even on 2MB DSL, bittorrent interferes with my connections to many popular IM services and I don't even run it full throttle during the day).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
No, it won't replace standard downloads, if nothing else because bittorrent is "best effort", and there's no guarantee that the client receives a file within a certain time frame. And for small and medium files, the overhead of BT severely slows down the access.
Yes, it's useful for large files. No, it's no 100% replacement.
And that's the beauty of internet in a nutshell -- there isn't one solution that fits all, but lots and lots of tools and standards that can be used and adjusted to the specific needs. So stop looking for The One And Only Way.
1) because I'm a leech.
2) because I don't want legal liability FOR DISTRIBUTING if I download a file that unknown to me is illegal, e.g. a software package from overseas that someone inserted illegal-in-my-country pornography into the binary. Yeah, I'll take the risk for possession but not for distribution.
3) because my employer's lawyer made me say #2 when it comes to company machines.
4) because I prefer to get my bits from the official location. Yea, I know a checksum should be good enough but I'm old school here.
Seriously though, I can see torrents overtaking web- and ftp- downloads as the primary method for distributing large, popular files. However, there will always be customers who refuse to share and who refuse to get data from any source that doesn't have a reputation for quality and isn't blessed by the original publisher.
Oh, and seriously, I'll be fine using torrents to download things like well-known linux distros. I trust modern checksums. I probably won't use them for low-demand files or smaller files though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thanks to all of the people here torrenting on the network, I can usually get over twice my normal download speeds on major things that I torrent, due to there being seeders on this huge network.
World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients
Lower cost, for sure, but it is not faster. The fastest download is when you're downloading from a single server that is able to fully saturate your connection. Even better if this server is situated directly within your ISP as is the case for some content delivery networks (Limelight I think does this). Having to negotiate individual connections with hundreds of peers around the world and incurring the associated lag and protocol overhead can't even compare.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
When I was going to school they had to block the bittorrent downloads for people playing WoW because it was a commercial entity using a governmental funded school network. The way the rules(ToS) were written, that is illegal. Hence, they had to make it use the normal methods of downloading from their servers. Private business using the network for their benefit or something.
That's the one real problem with BitTorrent. If nobody is seeding the file, nobody can download. If the servers that would be hosting the data were instead used as no-limit seeders, that might make BitTorrent a more viable system for "real" downloads.
I call shenanigans:
I know I've seen first posts by "Anonymous Coward" before.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
the only way all downloads could do that would be by forcibly stealing bandwidth from their clients. which i see as an invasion of my rights, to you know, leech mercilessly from your(provider) pockets. of course it would be nice to get platinum status for 50mb of stream a month or something the likes.
similarly, what you suggest dear man, is communism
I gather BitTorrent can't be easily used from behind a firewall, which makes it of limited use in corporate settings at present. As well as built-in support from the major web clients, we'd also need support from the major http proxy servers.
Downloading is "just there", is point-and-drool easy and (mostly) "just works". Bittorrent takes a modicum of knowledge, effort and understanding to install and operate and most of the time offers no big advantage. Hence until bittorrent is "just there" as a trivial point-and-drool option people will continue to use the old method.
This is essentially the same reason so many people run "old" software and hardware long past it's expected replace-by date. It's there, it works, so why change?
It's only stealing if it's done without my permission or under duress.
If it says "would you like to be nice and share your bandwidth and download the torrent, saving us bandwidth in the process" and you say "yes" instead of clicking "no, use conventional download" then it's not stealing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I recall really hoping that a new distributed file transfer protocol would become standard in browsers. For one thing, it could virtually eliminate large loads on smaller servers caused by flash crowds (more colloquially known as the slashdot effect).
What I had envisioned is that every webclient currently displaying a web page would effectively act as a seed for the content (including pictures, embedded videos, etc) that the browser has loaded from that page for as long as the user has that page open, radically reducing the load required by the webserver where the original data was hosted when a lot of people want to see the content at the same time.
Of course, it never happened.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm expected to use it pumping out data to the rest of you slowpokes?
Damn you EPB! Oh wait, 1 Gbps...who cares, suck it down bitches, you know you like to swallow my fat pipe!
If this gets mod points, I'm slapping myself.
A start up I know of started out using peer to peer, but it was too much grief to get people to download a plug in, and then get it to set up port forwarding through their firewall, and at the price of CDNs these days, you are just not saving enough money for it to be worth while.
Now, when we get IPv6, and HTML5, perhaps it will be a different game (no NAT in IPv6, no need).
In the case of a game, you already have downloaded stuff, and can convince a fair chunk of your users to set it up.
Twitter uses it to push patches to their servers in 12 seconds instead of 10 min.
So it is part of the future.
Plato seems wrong to me today
There's a place for direct downloads (HTTP, whatever), but more "aboveboard" use of BitTorrent seems like a great idea; might help if it isn't seen as "mainly a pirate toy". :P
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
that I don't really see this as an issue. Sure, some companies may decide to save a buck and distribute this way, but as far as updates and patches go, it just doesn't seem like its worth the relatively meager cost savings to risk pissing off your customers, either through technical issues (like NAT, or downloading from hotel environments where all but port 80 and 445 are blocked) and the negative publicity that comes with the concept of big evil companies making money via distributing their software via *your* bandwidth. I'm not saying there isn't a future for BT based downloads, but when bandwidth costs are dropping year over year, who cares?
Some ISP do deep packet inspection and traffic pattern classification. With Bell Canada even encrypted BT traffic get throttled down to 30k/s.
I think the way Bittorrent works, it does especially well for some specific use cases and might not work so well for other ones.
As far as I understand it, Bittorrent works very well if a lot of people want to get the same download at roughly the same time because then the bandwidth-sharing aspect of Bittorrent makes it scale better in comparison to a direct download. Thus, it makes sense to be used by someone like Blizzard for their updates, because all the players want and should get the Update more or less as soon as it gets out.
But I think it does not work as well if you try to use it for less frequented files or if you use it during less frequented times. I might be wrong here, but I seem to remember that in such cases, the protocol overhead makes the direct download the better choice.
Also (and my understanding might be shady here as well), something like using a local mirror is not quite easy to do via Bittorrent, I believe and local mirrors (for example, the ones sourceforge uses) can be quite useful and give much better bandwith.
In short, I think Bittorrent can be pretty powerful, but does not give advantages in all use cases, which might slow down wider adoption.
In WoW I have to disable bittorrent if I actually want to download a patch. Otherwise it saturates my connection with upload data whilst only downloading at 1% of my max speed.
Blizzard use bittorrent simply because they're cheap. Instead of using their millions in profits to provide bandwidth, they make the players smash their quotas sending data to each other. I had to install a bandwidth limiter to get Wrath of the Lich King to install because otherwise the outrageous upload speeds stopped me actually downloading anything. You'd think $15 a month would be enough to pay for enough bandwidth to allow me to download the game I've just paid for, but no they have to chase every penny...
For many companies and schools that we manage, we have to block all BT traffic at the firewall level. It's simple to do in a SonicWall. If we don't, their Internet connection will get saturated to hell leaving high latency and dropped connections. People seem to forget about what BT does to a network. Even if you have an OC3 connection, the rest of the world will load-balance traffic over to it. It's the damned upload (serving) that kills it.
So yes, BT gets blocked. If we could just block BT upload traffic, we would prefer that method the best at the corporate level. For schools, it's always blocked for liability reasons. Period.
Life is not for the lazy.
Bit torrent excels when you have a spike of users downloading something. That is why it is a great way to distribute content like shows or, as in the case you suggested, a RECENT releases of an OS version. I emphasize recent, because if one is obtaining a legacy version (or any other content not in hot demand), bit torrent can actually perform much worse than a straight download. Not a big deal, but something to consider.
Most houses have more than one PC. It is stupid that they all separately download the patches from the source.
How about an option to share patch downloads across a local network.
Nominate one machine as a master then all the other machines check with the master for their patches.
The master is responsible for contacting the source.
I recall really hoping that a new distributed file transfer protocol would become standard in browsers. For one thing, it could virtually eliminate large loads on smaller servers caused by flash crowds (more colloquially known as the slashdot effect).
Why does everyone seem to want everything to be in the fscking browser? Applications already grow to huge amounts of bloat until they can send mail. What is wrong with having the browser open filetypes in some preferred stand-alone application which does the job and does it well? I really don't see the point in having some poor joke of a BitTorrent client built into my web browser when there are so many good stand-alone apps readily available.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
A few things need to happen for bittorrent to take over:
1. Allow people to manually disable uploading OR somehow make bandwidth caps illegal in most of the world (yeah right). Some people just can't upload, because they have ridiculously low upload caps and they'd need to be able to disable uploading if they wanted to use bittorrent.
2. Bittorrent is built into the browser and downloading files is seamless; as long as your browser is open, it seeds your files, until you go manually clear the seed cache or move the files.
3. The need for servers is still there, the problem of dead torrents is huge. If you want to download an old file, and no one is seeding it, you're fucked. This is unacceptable for official downloads from some company. WoW can get away with it, because it has MILLIONS of subscribers many of which seed without even realizing it.
A major issue with BitTorrent is that in general, clients are unaware of geographic distance, which can cause clients to pick peers that are unnecessarily burdensome on ISP's compared to a path that a CDN-backed distribution system would've chosen.
You forgot
5) Prevent companies from abusing the mechanism since they no longer have incentives to limit the size and frequency of updates.
For example, they might no longer research the best algorithm to compress a patch ($200 of engineer-time to them), even though that would save $10k in overall user bandwidth.
You could apply QoS policies to outbound traffic such that BT only gets left over bandwidth a.k.a. a QoS scavenger class.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Bittorrent does not work well with NAT. And pretty much every end-user network employs NAT these days. Therefore, only the nerds who know how to configure their routers will use bittorrent... until NAT dies the miserable death it deserves.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The way I see it:
If the protocol were improved a little bit, and ISPs were a little smarter, then everyone wins. If the protocol allowed preferred connection to big nearby pipes (and I know that some clients try to do that) and there was a way to really relay/cache/siren feeds (like http proxies), then ISPs *could* watch for 'hot torrents' and cache them to fee them to their customers at high speed - thus reducing their out of network costs (because they are feeding the data, themselves) and improving their customers' download speeds (by not going out of network), then 'torrent could absolutely rock.
I know that's a lot of if's and would require intelligent ISPs - so let's make an ice-skating date in hell. But it could rock and be more efficient for everyone...
Bittorrent is great for very large files, and popular files.
But for small files it's really, really bad. Many linux patches involve downloading hundreds of small files, not one big one. Most applications are so small that the setup and teardown time for bittorrent would dwarf the download time. Any download that takes less than 5 will likely have a smoother user experience if it is not done using bittorrent.
Even ignoring tiny files, there is the issue of bandwidth limited users, the significantly higher routing requirements of bittorrent (many home routers flake out when you get 50+ TCP connections going through them), users with heavily asymmetrical connections (5Mbit down/256kbit up), and the more complicated configuration required to get a good bittorrent connection.
In short, bittorrent is nice for its niche (large, popular files), but outside that niche it is often not the best solution. Wider deployment of bittorrent technology would probably help some places, but it's not a silver bullet for all Internet downloads.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
5: A college student like someone else mentioned. Some are lucky, they have seeders on their segment. However, most colleges do their best to stomp out P2P, some even banning proxy server URLs and using NAC to install anti-proxy software on all PCs attached to the dorm network.
6: A cellphone. There are cases where one might need to use a 3G connection and if one isn't lucky to be grandfathered by AT&T, they will end up paying a pretty steep price for those 4-8 GB "Linux ISO images".
7: In general. Here in the US, bandwidth is actually shrinking. ISPs are not upgrading infrastructure, and the only thing they are actually adding are additional fees. What is going on with tethering where every cellular provider is converting to a throttling or per meg model after "X" amount of data is starting to happen with landline ISPs (phone/cable).
I was once a visiting scholar living in an apartment rented for me by the university. And the ISP there had a fracking policy of banning ALL p2p software on its network, including all Bittorrent clients (yes, AND WoW), skype and whatnot (even streaming stuff, if I recall correctly). Apparently, they received some DMCA notices and this was their countermeasures: a fine of $45 and disconnect. Now go figure how convenient it would be in a totally torrent-powered world...
Seriously, I think using WoW as an example here is funny. While offloading your bandwidth costs to your clients is itself a morally questionable action doing it so poorly time and time again is just wrong. WoW's distrobution method has been plagued with problems since it's inception and at least 4 versions of the patcher are acknolaged to be just outright broken. Add to this the configuration problems and issues with multiple computers NATed to the same IP and I would say it has been less then a rousing success for them. I mean really, it took many people more than 4 hours (and 20-30MB of uploading) to receive a 10MB patch no more than a month ago.
Honestly, for free things with no clear distrobution channels I see no reason that torrenting should not be used. In the case of things that I pay for, companies should just man up and pay for the bandwidth/servers themselves.
How I feel about this depends on the files and companies/creators involved.
If its an open source project or an independent film done on the cheap or something like that, yeah, I'd be all for it.
But if its a commercial enterprise who's goal is to simply "make money" and they have the bucks to do it themselves, like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, or even, in this case, Warcraft, my first thought is "The cheap bastards want to leach my spare bandwidth?!". In my opinion, that does not reflect well on the company.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Yup, No2 is the killer, say your browsing your fav porn site, you see a nice movie you want to watch, click download. Later after watching the first 2 sec of it you find it to be rather illegal in your country (due to whatever reason) you delete it. Too late, you were not only in possession of but were also a distributor of...
...
Why has no one mentioned this?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's SHA1 hashes of fixed-size pieces, so the only bits you need from the official location are the piece hashes.
I know a couple of ISP's that will immediately drop you as a customer for firing up bit torrent for any reason.
Got Code?
To start with, the Blizzard downloader is a horrible piece of crap that has trouble working with NAT or firewalls and it's often faster to just turn off peer to peer. At least it /lets/ you. The FFXIV client is an even worse piece of steaming fecal matter that doesn't even let you do that and won't download anything successfully - stupid people in the beta, like me, eventually ended up having to go to third party torrents using real clients like uTorrent to be able to update even the most basic game downloads - only to find out that the game itself was just as bad.
I don't mind a torrent being an option for download as long as the client allows the following:
- port assignment
- upload/download speed limiting - it's okay if the DL speed is a multiple of UL speed, that's fair.
- upload/download # of connections limiting
- realizing you're behind a natted firewall
The Lord of the Rings Online client is not too bad except it installs the downloader as a service, so if you're not paying attention it runs all the time in the background sucking up gigabytes of transfer. Don't be abusive.
Really, just give us a damn torrent file and let us use uTorrent because it's better than anything you could come up with off the cuff. These things have years of dev time and problem solving.
Say you've got a CD or DVD that's scratched, or an .iso you spent forever downloading via ftp and discovered to your dismay was corrupted. Assuming a bit-identical image is available online via .torrent, you can 'repair' your data without having to download the whole thing all over again:
Start your bittorrent app and begin downloading a new copy of the image you need. Immediately stop the download and exit your bittorrent app. An .iso file (incomplete, of course) will have been created in the destination folder.
Now rip your [damaged] disc to hard drive, creating an [obviously corrupted] .iso. Copy/paste that .iso into bittorrent's download folder, overwriting the existing .iso.
Fire-up bittorrent and begin your download once again. Bittorrent will analyze the corrupted .iso and immediately download the bits needed to repair (i.e. complete) it. In most cases this will only take a few seconds, even over dial-up, due to the insignificant amount of data usually needed (except, of course, in the event of a heavily scratched disc, which can also take a long time to rip in the first place; having a high-quality optical drive with good firmware and good optics certainly couldn't hurt).
No thanks. They did some research recently on how easy it is to track users in swarms. As soon as you're in the swarm you can know every other IP transfering those files (depending on tracker usage ofcourse). It's easy to compile a list of IP adresses and the content they downloaded over time.
I like my privacy and I have no intention to let people know what software I'm downloading.
And as stated before, it's a security risk too. This doesn't only apply to software updates, it applies to any software that is downloaded.
For example: there is an outdated version of some application still hosted on the tracker of download.com and I'm someone who knows of a vulnerability in it. I join into the swarm, collect all IP's and eventually just exploit them as I go.
Hell, I don't even have to scan entire ranges for this application port anymore!
The problem of dealing with failures is completely independent of the protocol. NCFTP will continue from where it left off if the ftp fails. Browsers could have this kind of error recovery if someone took the time to add it in. One wonders why this kind of error recovery isn't built into the download process.
Bit torrent is useful if the download source site is unable to handle the bandwidth requirements. Companies that use distributed services such as Akamai usually provide fairly good download speeds, that are comparable or better than bit torrent.
There is a reason why "disabling peer to peer checkbox" increases your speed in the Blizzard downloader from 200kbs to 1200kbs. Peer to peer networks suck, sure they scale well enough -- but that's it. A mass distributer for a PAID service should never use something as lame as BitTorrent. The Wow patching is a great example of why BitTorrent sucks.
BitTorrent is the poor mans file distribution system.
Because the browser is the new OS. And the OS is all.
If you become a seed for a popular file, you can peg your upload bandwidth. If your upload bandwidth is fairly small (Most users probably still have 1.5/384 or even 512/128 in the US), and you are trying to download something at the same time with TCP (HTTP, FTP, etc), the upload will clobber a lot of the ACKs that the download session is trying to send, and the download bandwidth will get clobbered as well.
You can work around this with QoS to some extent. Some cheap-ass DSL routers might now or soon even support a scheme where ACKs are prioritized over everything else.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Every friend of mine who has tried to load a full software package from Blizzard with their new torrent system (say, StarCraft II) found the straight download to be on the order of 4 - 5x faster than the torrent version.
In recent memory I have not downloaded anything that failed which required me to start all over again. Most servers and clients have supported resumption for quite a number of years.
I purchased SC2 online and it had a p2p downloader that allowed me to turn p2p on and off during the download. The p2p version was actually several times slower than the centralized hosted servers. I was a bit ticked off when I figured out what was going on.
When downloading ISOs for linux distributions on release day have found using bittorrent is sometimes much faster. However usually downloads from kernel.org will easily reach the limit of the link to my ISP.
The overall question for me is what is better for the network as a whole? Download servers are currently globally more effecient but does it have to be that way?
If P2P technology was intelligent enough and understood the underlying network topology and costs for communications between peers then at some critical mass of willing P2P users for a given file you essentially have yourself an ad-hoc akami and can actually reduce overall global load on the network.
Anyway to answer the question there are several reasons that come to mind.
1. Bandwidth costs for hosting content approach "free" at large scales. IE google pays for infustructure but virtually nothing for connectivity because everyone else wants to peer with them.
2. Actual control - The performance of P2P networks may be hard to characterize or control. It does not help that most broadband users have crappy upload bandwidth. How much can the networks performance be negativly impacted by a few bad actors? What is the complexity for successful collision or 2nd preimage of the hash function used by the BT client?
3. Preception - I would not want to download an operating system patch from my neighbor regardless of the technical risk or safeguards employed. Business especially would never accept it. You could not restrict access to resources by source address. You would be leaking information about files requested by other people which may raise privacy concerns based on the situation.
4. Cost - In many regions throughout the world the user pays by MB/GB. My total cost will be raised significantly because I am using more total bandwidth to accomplish the same goal.
5. Takes Longer for patches - by the time you've joined the P2P network enough to start downloading an operating system patch you would have already been done downloading from a central server in most cases.
My recommendation is to come up with a hybrid P2P approach like a traditional http proxy server hosted at an ISP where the ISP can choose to act as an aggregator of popular files in the hopes of reducing their bandwidth by deduplicating downloads internally while improving performance.
Quite frankly P2P gives politicians and copyright police an entry point to generate policy that is harmful to the overall operation of the network because they have the ability to monitor it by participating in the network. For this reason alone I would rather see bit torrent use go away rather than increase.
Content delivery networks already solve a lot of the issues that bittorrent addresses - You can distribute large files without consuming a huge amount of backbone bandwidth, with a lot of regional servers.
It also helps with some other things:
1) Guaranteed level of reliable local service.
2) Customers don't know who each other are, a data privacy issue (Say, I notice someone at ip 4.5.6.7 is downloading this particular security patch)
3) Security (yes I know torrents are checksummed but it's not impossible to defeat).
But basically, it's all about a known level of quality for customers, which CDN's deliver and which are more of a case by case thing for torrents.
Also, some customers could be angry that companies are using bandwidth to send files to other people - I've been surprised that Blizzard gets away with that with as little complaint as they do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DHT doesn't even require a tracker
I thought DHT did require a centralized server, called a bootstrap node?
We also have small monthly caps in Canada.
And don't sing that stupid "just switch ISP" tune, there's zero competition except in the major cities. It's your choice between either DSL/cable (only one, never both) or dial-up (this isn't 1990).
Make Bittorrent indispensible, and it cannot so easily be blocked or dismissed as 'illegal'.
If only a few Linux distros make torrents the only method, it won't work. If some heavyweights choose to, or even if some software patching becomes torrent-only, it might work. Add in some undeniable users (Akamai, Microsoft?) and you have critical mass.
But any outfit that does that risks isolation when the *IAAs and *PAAs and the rest try to punish them.
Maybe it works... May be not.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Everyone IS doing it, they are just not admitting to it!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Sounds a bit complicated to me. Why not just download the file to replace the damaged one?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Why don't we have a generic TCP/IP transfer protocol which caches things at every hop it passed through?
That way, if a million people download a file, it gets uploaded once from the server to that server's ISP, stored once at that ISP, transferred once from that ISP to every other ISP that requests it, stored once at each of those, and then transferred once from each ISP to every LAN that requests it.
You know, the way Usenet used to work and still could if anyone bothered to resurrect it.
Seems like this would be the sensible, distributed, long-term solution to file distribution?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Both FTP and HTTP can fetch at offsets other than 0 and ftp at least has been able to do that for well over two decades. I haven't had to start a download over in a long, long time.
-Matt
When I had cable connection at truly shit speed (56-128k), it was better to look for it on overnet or get an edonkey link of the file. Any single connection would be always work out super slow and had high chance of disconnection. With p2p, I knew that if one connection drops, I would get another. And the built-in checksumming ensures I don't have to worry about corrupted downloads.
Well, because while people are viewing the website, they happen to have the browser open anyways.
But why should a browser understand the ftp protocol? Why should it bother to embed videos into the webpage instead of launching a separate application when you click them? The idea is that since they are using the application anyways, it might as well be used to help present the information.
My idea was not driven by any particular desire to put everything into the browser, but because it is the browsers themselves, in particular when many of them happen to be hitting a website simultaneously, that would threaten to put a high load on the server in the first place, I figured that the browsers should also help offset some of the load from the server via distributed file transfer protocols. Once they close the browser or navigate to another page, it no longer needs to be a seed for that content, since it wouldn't be placing any load on the server by trying to download it either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because your on a bandwidth quota? or a slow connection? as the person you replied to stated?
Say its a 4.7gb ISO of Debian.. you have gotten 4.2gb of it.. by using his method you can download 500megs rather than starting over with a 4.7gig image?
That said this rarely if ever works since most of the images of ISO you will find are "different" in some way to the other attempted DL... or unavailable at all..
My house has crappy upload speeds which are just fine for everyday browsing, but not seeding. Additionally with a larger number of connections my router tends to slow down. Finally, I'd prefer not to get caught up in MAFIAA dragnet lawsuits. Even if everything is legal, the burden of disproof against mercenary "experts" is time out of my day and pocketbook.
This all being said, as soon as I can provide a reasonable upload speed without fear of lawsuit I'll be glad to just leave my machine seeding for the benefit of humanity.
When a torrent starts up it gets the data for the tracker, talks to that to get a peer list, then has to go and start saying "hi" to peers. Also there isn't a list of "These are the fast ones," or anything. So it can take awhile to ramp up in speed. I've had BT downloads that were going like 10+ megabytes/second by the end (Liunx distros usually, they have lots of seeds) but they start real slow. This is not a problem with a regular download from a fast site, just connect and download.
Under a certain size, and I don't know what that is should probably be studied, BT is nto a fast or efficient way of doing things.
Ideally you'd have a running torrent for a distro, and then as updates came out they'd replace the old files in the torrent.
Except the current bittorrent protocol doesn't allow those kind of updates. Some relatively straightforward modifications to the protocol could allow it, but they don't exist yet. So you'd wind up with thousand of torrents to manage, PIT torrents, obsolete torrents, etc. I got some good input on the Fedora list about this a couple years ago.
Another enhancement to make this valuable would be to preferentially unchoke network-near peers, even lower performance ones for these kinds of low-priority torrents. Then the ISP's can keep the majority of the traffic off links they pay for and prefer (and support?) this model.
This would make a fine thesis project. Have at it, boys.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Any download system that does not support resuming downloads is broken. Especially with the invention of resuming-download systems such as HTTP/1.1, Getright, and a whole ton of download managers.
And that includes both Chrome and Mozilla.
my bandwidth is minimal. I'm sure it is a good solution. I suppose I hope I'm never in such a situation where a direct download is not viable. Not meaning to take anything away from your tip.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
That said this rarely if ever works since most of the images of ISO you will find are "different" in some way to the other attempted DL... or unavailable at all..
It obviously has to be the exact same image file, which of course rules out movies and most entertainment. However, it's incredibly useful when you need to replace a bad Linux (or even Winblows) install disk or corrupted .iso and are stuck on dial-up out in the country (which I was for three years). :)
Not meaning to take anything away from your tip.
I appreciate your interest and your courtesy! :)
Pretty soon Bittorrent use will get you disconnected from the Internet.
Not to mention that with all that 'net neutrality' stuff ISPs are going to make torrents go at one byte per second.
No sig today...
Yes, and apt nicely resumes them afterwards. Even Windows does it, since like XP. kthx
And it's seeded well.
There is no free market for broadband in the US. Virtually all US broadband is run by companies who were granted a local monopoly on either telephone or cable. That system created a situation where usually at most two companies offer broadband in any one area. The more a business is regulated by the government, the less power the free market has over it.
No, I have never had an issue with a HTTP or an FTP download. Most of the times I use wget -c and that is only so I can stop the download myself and continue when I want to.
Compare that to the numerous times I was unable to complete a torrent download and if anything, I would say that bittorrent is the lesser quality and one could wonder the advantages of it over FTP. (I know what they are)
When a new version of openSUSE comes out, I download with FTP first and then start uploading with bittorrent. Download with FTP because it is much faster. Upload because I am willing to share.
So why should we replace standard downloads? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
FreeBSD has continuously offered bittorrent downloads of their release ISO's over the past several releases.
They are well seeded. As is PC-BSD. Both are worth a try.
1) Direct download starts immediately and does not require others doing the same download to be more effective (all the contrary, in fact)
2) Direct Download does not require Mister I-Am-Not-A-Geek to fiddle with router or firewall configuration, opening ports and so on
3) Direct Download can go through your enterprise http proxy
My employer does not allow the use of bittorrent at work. Running a bittorrent client on a work computer is a good way to get your network drop disabled and a visit from the network security fairy (which by the way doesn't leave money under your pillow like the tooth fairy).
IANAL... But I play one on
So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?
In other news, why isn't everyone using facebook and twitter to communicate? Is it finally time to see all email replaced with social networking sites?
For fuck sakes.
I don't want this. Why should I have to expose an open port to download something? And opening an outside port is not even possible for a lot of people.
You're missing the point of Torrent, much like a lot of judges do. A .torrent file doesn't contain any information about who to download from, or any parts of the file. This is what makes a torrent sharing site "legal" i most normal thinking countries. Simply getting your hands on the torrent file is much like getting your hands on the local directory information services (411 in the states AFAIK). You have to actually DIAL the number in order to get information about who shares the contents of the file.
Now imagine in a private tracker (or directory service to maintain the imagery), that you have to give it your password BEFORE it will give you information, much like the operator asking you for a customer number, so she knows who to charge.
Similarly the .torrent contains information about the trackers which tracks users. A private tracker, thus you need to login to in order to download from any of the users that are tracked. You may even need to present a validated IP for the tracker to present you with peers, depending on how private it is.
Obscurity and privacy isn't the same thing.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
You could have just gone with "mess with the best, die like the rest".
Balderdash!
Yeah, but the built in download manager for Firefox sucks. Yes, it *can* resume... if you paused the download first. Even when it's told the file size, if your connection dies in the middle (which my connection too often does), it thinks it's "done" (which is absurd, because wget reports an error code) and you can't resume from within Firefox any more. Oh! I got an RST packet, that must mean that the last 300 MB transferred instantly!
I gave up on that piece of crap and used an add-on to make Firefox use wget, which at least has the decency to know when files have *actually* been fully downloaded, rather than giving up and deciding it's good enough to hand me a useless half file and no error messages at all. Seriously, have the devs never tested large downloads on a link that dies? It's not even hard to test: you can emulate the connection dying by pulling the damn ethernet cable. It just ignores the error and continues blindly. Does it really think that the other server going silent is an indicator that the file has been fully downloaded, or what?
Surely corporate networks are the big one. Even on our "less sensitive" developer network we're not allowed BitTorrent. During the day we're not even allowed downloads over 200MB. Large downloads have to wait until out-of-hours. In that situation, how is BitTorrent ever going to take off?
Would be nice if this were integrated in to Apache, Nginx, etc. The server could seed and serve as the tracker so any file could be grabbed via http -or- BT. That would make it more widespread.
Metalinks should be the way to download big files, they might include a torrent, might not, but it works better. It just needs more adoption in browsers. Standardized as RFC 5854.
you're right when regarding linux distribution. Even more so as some use only delta packages (containing only the updates and to be combined with the (already here) full package).
But think "Windows" : updates can come in huge monolithic chunks : Service Packs, updates of Internet Explorer or Direct X (and other situations where a single package contains a whole sub-system), etc.
these package can range between several dozens of MB (when a smart installer tries to get only the portion relevant to your needs) up to several hundreds of MB, if you try to download the on-size-fits-all to burn on a CD.
now if you factor in software sold / obtained online (stuff from MSDNAA, for example) and the number of huge P2P-worthy files significantly goes up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...then they can't assume all traffic over it is illegal and send out pay us or else letters.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
No thanks. Many ISPs throttle P2P downloads at peak times, or even all the time. At least in the UK, BT and Virgin, the 2 biggest ISPs, do this now. Bittorrent is not a viable option for me at most times from my home computer, and even if it is, as people have said, it takes too long for a torrent to get up to speed for it to be practical for anything but large, popular files. Not to mention the large amount of extra bandwidth it uses with uploads, which again causes issues for many people on more restrictive ISPs. Storage and bandwidth is so cheap these days, that I don't understand why so many companies are shifting to P2P solutions. Especially when they use some form of built in torrent implementation that doesn't allow you to alter anything such as ports. The need to set up port forwarding properly is another thing which can limit the average user from using Bittorrent easily
You can still be a leech. I dont see it as the originating article does, as an either/or situation. ;)
However, if the original content provider (say the game manufacturer publishing a patch) offers it as a torrent, WHICH THEY SEED, and as the regular FTP (or if you're really unlucky, some bandwithcapped 3rd party distro) download, then you as a consumer can choose both options. And for some remote locations, disconnections are frequent. For example a few years ago companies selling OS'es to various African governments, were required to harden their OS (and software) to be able to handle power brown-outs. Another reason why MS doesn't sell well in Africa
Also the bandwidth CAN be higher (but rarely lower) if there's more than one "download location" in a torrent. This is rarely the case with FTPs, so you're more likely to be able to find a faster seed, ofcourse depending on the popularity of the file.
If you look at some of the research into torrenting, there's actually been a larger network component seller, who has looked into the possiblity of segregating torrent peering by clustering people on a larger network together (essentially overriding the peering inforation shared by the tracker), in order to keep bandwidth on your local network if possible. Essentially creating a local swarm sharing, and only one or two members of the swarm exchanging bits with peers outside the ISPs network. I know this will only work with popular files (or very large ISPs), but the reason for a bandwidth cap is usually that the ISP pays for traffic leaving his network, so the more they can keep in house, and in caches, the better. This would also include torrented files, which to my understanding is now reaching a noticable percentage of a lot of ISPs traffic.
A well developed peer-2-peer protocol supported and correctly used by all involved parties would be to everyones benefit. (except ofcourse competing distributions channels).
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
This would be the main reason this would fail. BitTorrent ports are closed at most corporate firewalls, and I don't see them opening up another set of ports. Plus usually they mirror packages/updates internally, so 1 download only... why not this download from the 1 "trusted" source (the vendor, as far as you can trust them).
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS?
The OS is the least of worries. NAT configuration is the biggest problem. Having to forward ports to systems is a pain. Certainly if you have more than one system behind your NAT. And I'm not even taking dynamic DHCP into consideration.
We'd need one of
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Probably 'cos everyone (!) remembers the P2P version of the BBC's iPlayer http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/08/isps-to-bbc-we-throttle-iplayer-unless-you-pay-up.ars and the wonderful effect it had on many an ISP in the UK.
Using P2P distribtuions for very large traffic usages is still a bad idea for the same reasons as it was three years ago.
Perhaps because ISPs like to rate limit torrent traffic, making bittorrent downloads uselessly slow (while downloads over http are much faster).
Or perhaps because torrents hog your upstream bandwidth, and most end user connections have massively less upstream than they do downstream. And because most consumer routers have large buffers, uploading flat out results in ridiculous levels of latency.
Or maybe because many ISPs cap you at a certain volume of traffic per month, and this include upstream as well.
Or it could have to do with most people being NAT'd and thus reducing the efficiency of torrents (and causing higher load on those of us who aren't natted).
Or maybe because bittorrent has a reputation of being used for copyright infringement.
In this context it's actually far more efficient for the ISP to just keep a local cache of all the frequently downloaded content.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It's been a very long time since I last downloaded a file over 100MB without using a torrent. Most of the really massive downloads seem to be provided over BitTorrent alongside traditional HTTP, both because it's more robust and because it puts less strain on the server.
You could well be scoping it out for ACTA, trying to find counter arguments for outlawing other protocols to then control torrents.
Internet should be free, if you don't like it, switch it off
Another thing I note is that Australian colleges prefer their internal users to use their internal mirrors as the colleges are charged for external downloads. Bittorrent may end up downloading from external sources, so they actually prefer the current situation.
Note that having apt-proxy installed by default would violate Ubuntu's "no open ports by default" policy. It would be nice if it were a bit better supported though.
the firewall at work blocks it
...and if you don't like them? Well, I have others. /Groucho
They can use my bandwidth to distribute their software if they pay me. And if they pay me more, I'll even "prioritize" their packets.
You don't need bittorrent to have proper support for resumable downloads. Why isn't this standard? I feel like I'm stuck in 1992.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
One issue is that customers may not want to give away their bandwidth to the companies that they are paying for a service. Game patches are a good example...The player pays a monthly fee for access to the game. That fee should be paying for the bandwidth used to download patches. Why should the customer have to give their upstream bandwidth to other players trying to download the patch? The server load and cost issues for the game company are not his problem. I've encountered several "downloaders" that load themselves into Startup and will proceed to seed the game or patch that you just downloaded indefinitely, stealing your bandwidth. The only way to stop it is to kill the task and manually remove the program that's seeding the content. At the very least, seeding the completed download needs to be opt-in, not opt-out. That would break bittorrent distribution, of course, though, unless there were dedicated seeds. But the source company should be the primary seed, anyway.
4) because I prefer to get my bits from the official location. Yea, I know a checksum should be good enough but I'm old school here.
Actually, from a strictly security-POV, a checksum and a distributed distribution model is better, because it makes man-in-the-middle attacks considerably more difficult.
Of course, only as long as you have a trustworthy channel to get the checksum through and actually bother to verify it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Most ISPs in canada throttle bit torrent traffic with deep packet inspection making any torrent transfers useless. Rogers for one, dont effect download speed but render upload useless with a max of a 5k burst every now and then. Bell I think throttles in a similar way.
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
"Old school" is downloading from your nearest mirror (official or otherwise) and validating the checksum anyway. So what's the difference?
Or you could just go get lunch while it downloads. You're making it too difficult for yourself.
complete with recovery archives!
I mean I can barely understand torrenting a zip or rar file, but you don't need all the extra recovery stuff.
I suppose it's pure lazyness.
I don't read AC A human right
Recent versions of the popular systemimager software (used to replicate Linux installs over many nodes, often in HPC clusters), allow bittorrent to be used to accomplish this, rather than rsync, which is standard.
The documentation states that "SystemImager has been used to image a cluster of 1190 clients (IBM Blade LS21) over a 1Gb/s interconnect link: a 2.7GB RHEL5.1 x86_64 OS image has been delivered to all the clients in only 15min!!! (Note: this means that after 15 minutes we were able to ssh and submit jobs to the nodes)"
Pretty amazing, I'd say...
There's no place like
BT traffic is seen as "illegal filesharing" in many major corporations and blocked or flagged as likely abusive. I received an email from my IT department (hint: large company and the company name starts with an "O") indicating that I was flagged as having a system which participated in BT traffic and requiring written explanation within X hours or things would be escalated. A couple written email exchanges with the corporate IT police and the issue went away, but BT clients are not even permitted on company systems.
I thought URLs were supposed to be able to tell the application what type of resource it's requesting?
I mean, if I "activate" a link that starts with http:/// (Two slashes: Slashdot's parser makes it three slashes...) then my OS should know that it's a browser file. If I "activate" a link that starts with ftp:// ...
I remember Unreal Tournament did this for joining games. They registered a protocol with the OS and any time you clicked on a link it would launch your game and connect to that server. ( I think it was ut2004:// )
Why not have torrent://tracker/guid ?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Good points except #4
The entire file on each peer and each individual piece are SHA-1 hashed. They ARE all exact copies of the original.
The whole download vs upload thing when it comes to legal action is an interesting issue though.
4) because I prefer to get my bits from the official location. Yea, I know a checksum should be good enough but I'm old school here.
Don't discount the power of #4.
I can see a lot of juicy social engineering attacks becoming possible by providing certain items via bit-torrent only. Bit-torrent doesn't stop someone else from posting a "patch" or "security fix" to your product. Such not-quite-from-my-distributor patches could be responsible for disrupting operations, possibly stealing data, and definitely overloading the customer support lines.
1) because I'm a leech.
2) because I don't want legal liability FOR DISTRIBUTING if I download a file that unknown to me is illegal, e.g. a software package from overseas that someone inserted illegal-in-my-country pornography into the binary. Yeah, I'll take the risk for possession but not for distribution.
3) because my employer's lawyer made me say #2 when it comes to company machines.
4) because I prefer to get my bits from the official location. Yea, I know a checksum should be good enough but I'm old school here.
Seriously though, I can see torrents overtaking web- and ftp- downloads as the primary method for distributing large, popular files. However, there will always be customers who refuse to share and who refuse to get data from any source that doesn't have a reputation for quality and isn't blessed by the original publisher.
Oh, and seriously, I'll be fine using torrents to download things like well-known linux distros. I trust modern checksums. I probably won't use them for low-demand files or smaller files though.
#1 is perfectly normal for all torrents right now. Besides, you're gonna upload some as you're downloading. If you set the default ratio to 2:1, the average user won't bother to change it, so it'll work out.
#2 is a stupid argument. Malicious torrenting is offset by the established checksums, and even if someone tries to put something illegal into your upload, it won't be in any image format and it will be erased as soon as your application notices the checksum is wrong.
#3 has been mentioned already in various forms, and there's not much we can do about that. For personal use, however, it's not really an issue if you maintain bandwidth caps and upload ratios.
#4 is fine, sites can offer both options.
This got modded up?! Obviously you've never had to calculate your download times in days (or even weeks!) but unfortunately not all of us here can say the same.
When my HTTP or FTP transfers fail I just use 'wget -c' to continue them.. No need to switch to torrents.
I don't know, but any submission where half the sentences are questions surely demands answers!
Towards the Singularity.
Why do people argue against good ideas on Slashdot.org so much? Is the contrarian attitude of nerds so overriding or are they paid shills who are required by contract to show that there is no use for bittorret etc.?
Bittorrent as its uses. It can help off load some of the traffic to your customers so you increase bandwidth without having to pay for it.
BUT there are some HUGE downsides:
A: You cannot rely on your customers to host your data, meaning you still have to supply a copy of the data AND serve it at expected speeds.
B: Customers might come when nobody else wants it, meaning you are STILL providing all the bandwidth. Customers will have little motivation to seed your content.
C: Many customers will not have the right setup to share data. Either firewall restrictions or ISP limitations.
D: You need to bake the bittorrent into your application (like WoW and other games do) or face endless questions by customers who are barely able to download in the first place.
E: Some content you don't want shared. How can you watermark content and tie it to a user if every user has the same file? Blizzard don't care who gets their patches since only legit users can play the game anyway and Linux torrents are of course free to start with.
F: for small files, bittorrent costs to much overhead. If I share a million MP3's the changes of finding anyone else with the same, willing and able to share it are tiny and the overhead will be more then the saved bandwidth.
So, this question is asked by a person who clearly hasn't understood the web, users, copyright or usability.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... for the distribution of various large files - such as ISO's for Linux DVD's and CD's. It's also the recommended method for downloading various tools distributed by the US government to it's various sites aroudn the globe. The reason is simple, the ability to get the final encrypted package through almost inspite of poor network quality and bandwidth at some sites. While it's frowned upon within certain facilities, it is the primary method for the distribution of large packages. Since it can operate transparently over a dark-net, it is ideal for certain uses.
...I think part of the reason torrents aren't used like this might be that the various media corporations that supply ISP access would be exposed on their data throttling practices, and bad PR gets to be an expensive proposition when it builds sufficient critical mass.
Sorry but torrent technology is way overhyped and overrated. I've nearly always found that torrents are very significantly slower than just plain ol' FTP/HTTP downloads even from busy servers.
Blizzard is given as an example of good torrennt use, but in practice, setting up WoW is a pain in the ass that literally takes hours from scratch, which wouldn't be the case if they invested in a simple HTTP or FTP server.
Many times I've had to wait for hours or even days for other torrents, occasionally even a small one annoyingly and for no apparent reason just refuses to complete even though there are seeders.
Meanwhile if its also available with FTP/HTTP, I can often get the same file, even large ones, painlessly and in minutes with conventional download techniques.
I'm very sure that my firewall, router etc is configured ok. I guess my ISP (Cox) could be limiting my bandwidth just for torrent traffic, but I do occasionally get a fast torrent which suggests they dont (at least they arent doing it universally).
These days most servers and browsers support 'resume' for HTTP and even FTP transfers anyway so at least one of the big 'advantages' of bittorrent claimed in the article is actually moot.
"Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over?
No. Many downloaders support restarting downloads. Get DTA (Down Them All) for Firefox, which can do that and a lot more.
You don't need torrents for restarts, and many people couldn't meaningfully participate in the distribution anyway and would just have to disable uploading. That said, I think Ubuntu ISOs are available as torrents.
Is the contrarian attitude of nerds so overriding or are they paid shills who are required by contract to show that there is no use for bittorret etc.?
Mostly the former, I suspect; us nerds have a lot more negativity bottled-up than we usually realize and this is one of the way it manifests itself. I've been guilty of it myself, more often that I care to admit. Pretty sure I get it, at least in part, from my parents: they still do it every chance they get and they don't even hear themselves.
When A bit-torrent user gets Linux ISO's or Creative Commons movies or what not they are more willing to let the torrent seed because that is the price you are paying for the downloaded content.
So for any other paid content Why would the user give away their paid for bandwidth to some company which is already charging them money.
Now if we got a discount for our share ratio maybe that would be a game changer. For every 100% you upload you get 5-10% off the price of the content. I would sign up immediately.
Basically the advantage of BT is that the popular torrent clients that people like and use have good download management features which gives BT a reputation for good download management.
Both FTP and HTTP have a way to resume an interrupted download, so if you are annoyed by having to start HTTP downloads over again, that is not a reason to switch to Bittorrent.
A FTP or HTTP client could implement the same download management, as well as bandwidth management features as a BT client.
What you don't get with FTP or HTTP is the swarming (obtaining pieces of the data from other downloaders). You also can't download selected portions of an archive: FTP or HTTP make you download a tarball, whereas a torrent can represent a directory structure from which you can pick and choose (since the torrent format reveals which files occupy which blocks).
BT also has better integrity checking than just a whole-file CRC. With HTTP or FTP, you have to validate checksums manually.
BT supports upload and download so you can "pay" for your download by passing it on to others, thus offloading the original seeders. HTTP downloads don't have anything like this; to contribute to the effort, you have to host the file somewhere. If you host the file somewhere, you can't just let the world have 120% of it and then stop; the only ratios you have are whole numbers: let one person download it, let two people download it, etc.
So those would be the main reasons for using BT for getting an OS image: the swarm effect, sharing with flexible upload ratios, picking and choosing archive content, and built-in block-level data integrity.
I like that the example given was VERY well suited for an obviously legal operation (fixing a corrupted Linux ISO) and NOT well suited for grabbing a movie. It's a genuinely useful and neat trick.
The page has been blocked because the content has been deemed unsuitable or harmful to your computer.
Reason: This category is filtered: Peer to Peer.
That is why Bittorrent will never replace standard downloads - the average home user will be able to get to them fine, but the corporate users will be locked out.
please spam me jfred438@gmail.com, I want as much as possible http://jfred438.myopenid.com
PCs in libraries and corporate break rooms are more likely to have Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Flash Player installed than to have a BitTorrent client installed.
An excellent idea! But I think getting an identical hash match is a bit harder than that. One bit of difference (literally!), and it won't work...unfortunately...
Now, when we get IPv6, and HTML5, perhaps it will be a different game (no NAT in IPv6, no need).
Before Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows kept plenty of dangerous services open and listening on the network. So NAT router appliances were marketed to home users as a security component because of its implicit firewall by default. The IPv6 gateway devices that replace them will likely include both a NAT on the IPv4 path and a non-NAT firewall on the IPv6 path. And a lot of users in libraries and corporate break rooms still can't punch a hole in the firewall to use BitTorrent.
uPnP
This depends on support from the IT department if your network administrator has disabled UPnP as a security measure, which support may be hard to come by.
As Z80xxc! pointed out, let me know when WSUS officially comes to Windows Home Server. The last time I checked, it was an unsupported scenario. Has this changed, and if so, when?
what about a bittorrent type decentralized architecture for webpages. Could be useful for the infamous "slashdot effect" or for open content like Wikipedia.
If Bittorrent-like technology were implemented into every web browser, it could bring about a evolution of the internet.
I'm imagining the internet like a real spider web. I don't think "bittorrent", exactly, is a good idea, because that implies that after you finish a download, you'll be invisibly seeding it. What I'm imagining is that if you click to download a file, it first starts downloading it via http, like normal. While it's downloading, your browser will check in the background for other people who are downloading the same file at the same time that you are, or it will check for additional servers that it has been provided. If you are able to download from other users who are downloading at the same time as you are and at an equal or greater speed than the HTTP download, it will give priority to downloading from those other users.
Basically, what this is doing is it's downloading via HTTP from a server (e.g., ubuntu.com). Ubuntu.com is the host of the file and that will not change. However, if there is a large burst of activity (e.g., new canonical release), there will likely be other people downloading it at the exact same time as you are. There will also be multiple servers hosting the ubuntu release. Your web browser will download from one of those servers, but it will also try to download chunks from other users and the other servers to distribute the load. It will give priority to downloading from users, such that it will download as much as possible from other users so long as downloading from users is faster than downloading from the server.
As soon as your download finishes, the connections will close and you will stop seeding to others. This kind of system would mean that smaller files would usually be downloaded by http, but it would have the added benefit that larger files that have many users simultaneously downloading them (new releases, maybe even extend this to watching videos online) would download faster through multiple, sometimes closer connections, and servers would have reduced load because of the users sharing with each other.
In short, the kind of system I am describing of would mean that the servers still host all of the data all of the time, but users or would supplement the servers by offering some of the data some of the time.
The entire internet would be connected to each other like a gigantic spider web, with any given piece of data being downloaded from the closest, fastest point at any given time.
You can also maybe describe it as some kind of internet bandwidth-sharing collectivism or communism, but I like spiders better. :-)
I have never gotten BitTorrent to work. Today I am behind an ISP's router that I can't reconfigure. So I can't share. My attempts at downloading fail because everyone in the swarm got what they wanted and disconnected. BitTorrent has no way to recover from that.
I use Firefox, but for serious downloading I use wget. Just copy the link from Firefox to the command line, and leave it alone overnight. Wonderful. It continues, it retries, it will keep plugging away no matter what. Recently downloaded the Sintel movie using wget.
Lastly the firewall issue isn't as significant as many make it out to be on home networks.
In some cultures, children and young adults routinely go away to live at school for months at a time. College students also happen to be among the most technically savvy users. But a lot of school IT departments deprioritize BitTorrent peer-to-peer communication in favor of HTTP downloads, which have a more clearly demonstrated reputation for use related to the students' course work.
Other young adults get called to serve in the military.
Finally, some homes are behind region- or country-wide NATs due to population expanding faster than availability of IPv4 addresses. Remember the time when a Wikipedia sysop accidentally blocked everyone in Qatar from editing, not knowing that all legit users from that country were behind the same proxy as the targeted vandal?
Ubuntu always makes their new releases available via torrents because it spreads the load across a bigger part of the internet. It works well. Most places, like YouTube, won't restart file transfers (although that's upload I know, I just wish it worked as well as a torrent transfer). I wish they would. torrent transfers don't care about losing connections, they just pick up later. Much more resilient.
As someone who has been trying for some time to offer BitTorrent as a download option, I think a big part of the problem is that the server software is lousy. Many of the trackers out there are slow, flaky, fragile, and horribly documented. You also need a seeder, and again the server-side seeder software is consistently poor.
If you could go to bittorrent.org, download a couple of programs, and set up bittorrent distribution in an hour or two, that would make a huge difference in adoption rates. As it is, you have to REALLY want to set up a site because of the crappy distributions you have to wade through.
As I see it, that's the major issue.
The 2nd major issue will be the perception that such 'upload' ports being open, is required, to make it work (even if the distributor uses server's that don't require or pay attention to connecting client's upload ability or even whether or not such ability is present).
The 3rd issue is that large corporations will likely demand a client where the upload channel is disabled before they will run it on their network. They won't just want the assurance that it can be prevented or that their firewall will block it -- more than likely there will be many that will want assurances about the program before it is given a green light to execute anywhere on their network. These are the environments were program execution policy has the 'Default' set to 'Block', unless it's on a list of permitted programs (most stringently controlled by some binary-checksum algorithm before being allowed to run). Some likely requirements:
1) They will want to ensure that such a program can't be configured to allow uploading.
2) It needs to work through in a firewalled, proxied environment (i.e. will it work through an http proxy? If it requires a specialized proxy program that will sit on their firewall, that's a security risk for such a specialized benefit that's already met by existing infrastructure. Can such a program, its evaluation and maintenance cost be justified given the added functionality.
3) Proxy needs to allow security by user/station so only authorized users can download programs.
4) Proxy needs to allow list of allowed sites that can be downloaded from -- and this is stickler -- as it forces bit-torrent using download vendors to provide a list of their download-servers that will be used to stream to clients. Not insurmountable, but a larger list than giving out 1 download address.
5) Perceptions. Even if the technical hurdles are overcome and security needs met, there will still be a large number of companies that may see Bit-torrent as a peer-to-peer protocol used primarily by pirates. They won't want to be associated with such -- and even if they allowed it, if the fact that they were using bit-torrent to perform system maintenance was released to the press and stockholders, then stockholders and the press would have to be convinced that due-diligence was being performed and that this was not something that would be sharing company data. That would require a complete re-education of how bit-torrent is perceived in the public arena -- going *against*, the current *propaganda* machine that tries to portray it as only being used, or at best, being used for 'shady' purposes, and certainly not something that can't be better replaced by other protocols.
Overcoming obstacle 5 will be the hardest, as it involves changing public perception.
Even though the majority of customers won't have such stringent requirements for use of a bit-torrent client, any publicly held company runs the risk of needing to convince the 'uneducated, propaganda-fed masses', so for the most profitable customers, companies providing downloads would still have to provide considerable resources to allow such companies to continue to download via current methods or risk alienating some of their most profitable customers.
All in all, a steep hill to climb.
Well if you are watching, read the troll I refer too, then read my "innocent" follow up regarding URL shorteners, all available straight from /. org's ~ webmistressrachel page!
Also, I love the Hackers reference in the first reply to your post... thanks hun!
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen