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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 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
Hell, I'm on Shaw Cable in Canada, and if I don't limit my upload bandwidth to 5 kb/s, my download bandwidth drops to sub-50 kb/s. But if I do limit it to 5 kb/s, then download speeds go way up to over 200 kb/s.
And yes, they advertise that I should be getting an order of magnitude greater speed than this...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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!
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.
Have you enabled ecryption. MSE (Message Stream Encryption) is standard on most torrent clients however most clients have it disabled by default. In uTorrent I enable MSE and reject all non encrypted packets & requests.
Using MSE ISP can no longer simply shape based on protocol. Bittorrent uses a random port which makes shaping based on port equally ineffective.