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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?"
Why? because for small files (as I expect most software updates would be), downloading directly is quicker and safer.
Safer? Bittorrent already has built in checksumming which most people don't do with regular downloads anyways. By that metric alone I'd say the BitTorrent is safer than a regular download.
MPAA said the same thing about the VCR.
Can we go back to not giving a fuck what the MPAA thinks?
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Because for security updates, this allows users to find others who don't have the latest patches yet. Just imagine the people watching leecher IPs every time a new remote exploit is patched...
Because when you download directly instead of torrenting a file, you aren't basically shouting to the world "HEY I DON'T HAVE THE NEW SECURITY UPDATE YET! ANYONE HAVE THE NEW SECURITY UPDATE?"
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.
Try running a perfectly legal BitTorrent tracker. You will find that the MPAA/RIAA criminals both DDOS your server and spam your ISP with DMCA crap regarding files you are not tracking and never heard of. They really dislike BitTorrent.
It's because it competes with them. Not as content producers, as distributors. If BitTorrent had a good reputation then indie filmmakers would use it to distribute their films to customers, perhaps as encrypted files with DRM, perhaps not, but in any event in competition with distributing them through official MPAA channels where the big companies get their big cut.
But if the repositories were themselves seeding, then it'd work just fine: Worst case is that it's still at least as fast as HTTP or FTP from the same repository (plus or minus some BT overhead), all else being the same.
Best case is that there's several repositories all seeding the same basic set of random apps, plus a bunch of users who have already downloaded the random app, and things turn both faster and cheaper than they otherwise would have been.
The hash checks performed by BT will do well to prevent errors and/or poisoned apps, as well.
Sounds like a win to me.
Kid-proof tablet..
This. People don't seem to realize that PDF, word documents, and flash will never take off as accepted formats for the layman unless they are baked into every major web-browser.
Wait, what?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)