BitTorrent Turns 10

Pretty much never? by Haedrian · 2011-07-02 05:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

"Just when will it be replaced?"

Never? Going distributed is THE way of stopping people from shutting you down. So far only the tracker is fixed (and there are stuff in place to discover clients by seeing the others who you're connected to). So I'd say this is here to stay.

Re:Pretty much never? by mrogers · 2011-07-02 05:39 · Score: 5, Interesting

Going distributed is THE way of stopping people from shutting you down.
But ironically, what BitTorrent got right (and it pains me to admit this, because I'm a big fan of pure P2P solutions) was centralising the hard parts - search and peer location - and distributing the easy part - content distribution.
Another area where BitTorrent struck the right balance between pure P2P and pure centralisation was in content curation. Gnutella made it incredibly easy to share a file, but the result was a ton of low-quality, badly-labelled, nearly-identical files. BitTorrent made it just hard enough that only a few, relatively dedicated people would create torrents, and everyone else would just redistribute them. I don't think that was a conscious design decision, but it happened to hit the sweet spot.
Re:Pretty much never? by wvmarle · 2011-07-02 05:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

Nowadays there is such thing as "trackerless torrents". No idea how it works, but it works. A while ago I tried to download some torrent, but the single listed tracker in the .torrent was down. Nevertheless soon the download started, like magic :-) And once one peer was found, many more followed quickly thanks to peer exchange.
BT has in a way been replaced several times already. The protocol from 10 years ago has evolved a lot (will the original BT client even be able to handle to current torrents?), with additions like peer exchange, DHT, magnet links and encryption. The idea behind BT is brilliant and simple, and as such will always live on. It solved most if not all problems from the original P2P protocols: the P2P issue itself (too many downloaders on a single peer), disappearing peers (now you have more than one - download will continue from other peers), and overall download speed. The protocol was found to have some problems itself, most notably the centralised tracker, which is also solved now. The problems that remain are the finding of content, for that there is still no solution to the current centralised databases (aka "torrent sites"), and longevity of the content: as soon as the last seeder stops seeding, the file is lost from the network.
And on top of it, it's not owned by a single for-profit organisation like Napster or LimeWire. When that company goes out of business, the protocol is out, and something new is needed. BT will live long I think. It's an open and free protocol, allowing for it to evolve and have people add features to it. There is no "single point of failure" - by design.
Re:Pretty much never? by klapaucjusz · 2011-07-02 06:03 · Score: 5, Informative

Nowadays there is such thing as "trackerless torrents". No idea how it works, but it works.
It uses a technique known as a Kademlia Distributed Hash Table (DHT). It's a rather tricky algorithm, which turns out to work beautifully for this particular application.
--jch
Re:Pretty much never? by CharlyFoxtrot · 2011-07-02 06:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

We're in the silver age of music piracy. The golden age was Napster: everyone had their mp3's in folders instead of managed by applications like iTunes and everything was shared by everyone by default. You could find the most obscure songs. To me it was like a preview of what the internet always promised: a huge library where you could access any data (in this case music) that was out there. A little glimpse of the internet's true potential.

--
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Re:Pretty much never? by The+Dawn+Of+Time · 2011-07-02 06:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

Shocking, Comcast follow the law and serve the notices. They should be on the side of the little guy who just needs to watch Game of Thrones for free or he might be bored! The ignominy!
Re:Pretty much never? by Kjella · 2011-07-02 06:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think the legal balance is just as important. The fact that "BitTorrent" isn't one service or one network but that each site offer their files individually and the Ubuntu torrent has nothing to do with those on The Pirate Bay. That detached the technology and those building the tools from the shadier uses of it. Oh, they've rattled their sables a bit but never really had an legal grounds to shut BitTorrent itself down, unlike Napster, Grokster, Limewire and so many others.
And despite the best efforts to shut down torrent sites, many of them still operate very much in the open. The fact that The Pirate Bay has been all over the media and is in the top 100 most popular sites on the web means they've walked a very fine line and come down on the right side - at least for now. You didn't have to look that very hard in the past either to find it, but it was not that obvious to everyone and their dog.
I think something like TPB model is there to stay, if necessary they'll just move it to be a TOR onion site, still centralized but anonymous. Not the content itself as that'd be sloooow, just the site itself. For the moment that is simply not necessary, but there's now other ways should the public torrent sites lose while still keeping the things that made it a success.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Pretty much never? by Tacvek · 2011-07-02 08:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

Combining multicast support which is certainly be bettter and more widely supported than it's today is. The reason is looming and it's HD-IPTV. Unicast HD-IPTV is a bandwith consumptive hog and the only practical way is to use multicast for it. That forces many organisations which did not previously bother configuring it reconsider and this will open doors to other applications using it too.
I strongly doubt that. Consider that AT&T uses multicast for their U-Verse service. The problem is that they provide no way to create your own multicast streams. They have no interest in allowing other applications to use it. Why would they? The multicast gives their service a serious cost advantage compared to other live streaming services. Because it is generally viewed as a separate TV service, most proposed net-neutrality regulations would not require them to open it up.
To the best of my knowledge there is no real standards for negotiating multi-cast between autonomous systems. Even if there were, the fact that the packets can multiply inside a network (when they reach a router with subscribers on more than one of the connected (sub)networks) makes setting up peering agreements difficult.
Transit agreements between ISPs generally assume that one packet sent in results in one packet leaving the network, or being delivered to a machine inside the network. With multicast between distinct autonomous systems, that one packet in could result in 100 packets being delivered to in network machines, and potentially one packet to each connected network. How should that be counted for billing?
If each resulting packet is counted, that would require network changes to track how many in-network machines it was delivered to. If it were counted as just the one packet for this network, plus one more packet for each connected peer or transit provider it reached, the required changes would be much smaller.
However in either case that would be really unfair to the sender of the packet, who has no way of knowing how many times an individual packet would be counted. It would also be rough on intermediate networks who may try to track usage and switch packets between multiple transit providers such as to minimize costs. They would only know that they sent one packet of some specific size to a given transit provider who may count it as many more packets.
The whole thing is very awkward. After all despite those issues, ISPs could benefit from the same number of users with the same style of usage resulting in many fewer total packets needing to be sent through the oversubscribed links from the core networks to last mile.

--
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Re:Pretty much never? by klapaucjusz · 2011-07-03 03:14 · Score: 2

F[ine] magnet links, how do they work?
The magnet link contains a hash of the .torrent file, which happens to be the key to search for in the DHT (it's in the btid field of the magnet link). The local peer consults the DHT, and finds some peers that participate in the desired swarm; it then downloads the .torrent file from those peers. After checking that the torrent matches the expected hash, the local peer just does normal trackerless operation.
-- jch

When... by smileygladhands · 2011-07-02 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

It will be replaced when our ISP monopolies makes it so difficult to use bittorrent, another way must be created. Destruction brings creation.

Re:File size range by Dyinobal · 2011-07-02 05:22 · Score: 3, Informative

Bit torrent can do large or small files with equal ease. It's just the distributed method of seeding really shines with large files.

Share ratio requirements by tepples · 2011-07-02 05:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

BitTorrent might not be replaced until tracker operators learn what an average is. A lot of private trackers require their users to keep their share ratios at or near 100%. But it's mathematically impossible for everybody to have a share ratio greater than 100%. Share ratio is upload divided by download, but across a whole swarm, the sum of upload will equal the sum of download, making the average share ratio 100%. One can't seed unless there's a downloader on the same swarm. So what are people who get in on the tail end of a swarm, where no downloader shows up for days at a time, supposed to do to keep their share ratios up to the tracker's standard?

Re:Share ratio requirements by Zironic · 2011-07-02 05:28 · Score: 2

Most trackers only require a ratio of 0.8 or 0.7 for that reason.
However I've never had a problem seeding myself into the positive.
Re:Share ratio requirements by Tynin · 2011-07-02 05:31 · Score: 2

I think this is actually intentional. Most of the private trackers I use that use ratios and penalize you for going below a certain percentage, also include the option to pay them some mount monthly/yearly for premium access where your ratio is overlooked.
Re:Share ratio requirements by limaxray · 2011-07-02 06:06 · Score: 4, Informative

You are correct - seeding torrents is like a P2P pyramid scheme and the people on the bottom are left holding the bag.

The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.

Sneakernet by tepples · 2011-07-02 05:27 · Score: 2

And with numerous ISPs capping home users' monthly transfer in the double digit or even single digit GB, "another way" is likely to involve sneakernet.

Re:Sneakernet by LordSnooty · 2011-07-02 05:57 · Score: 2

sneakernet
I still want to see some kind of interface between mass storage devices, wireless and content, enabling WLAN content parties. You rock up, your device sees everyone else at the event and starts sharing, perhaps intelligently based on your preferences, Maybe smartphones hold the answer to this, but they may not offer lots of storage. However this could work on a small scale. You could just turn up to the pub and your device would sort out the rest. It could share your own content and look after the security. Could even base it on bittorrent for max efficiency. That would be very cool. Someone make it happen.

Re:File size range by monoqlith · 2011-07-02 05:28 · Score: 2

Unless the files are zipped into an archive, a lot of clients will let you choose which particular files you download from the torrent and skip all of the other ones.

Re:File size range by sourcerror · 2011-07-02 05:30 · Score: 2

By the way, when you're starting to download a torrent that consists many files, you can select only the ones you want. You don't have to download the big stuff if you don't want to.
There's nothing in Bittorrent that discriminates against small files.

Re:File size range by tepples · 2011-07-02 05:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

once you've decided to download the torrent, why do you just want this one single instead of the entire discography in flac and mp3?

Because I want to be able to download other things during the same month without having to pay prohibitive overages.

Could be replaced by anonymous network by mmcuh · 2011-07-02 05:43 · Score: 2

The one thing that could replace BitTorrent as the major filesharing protocol would be a protocol that is more anonymous and harder to track, in case people would get more privacy-conscious in the future (yeah, right). Even then it would probably be something evolved from BitTorrent, like OneSwarm.

Re:Notice something about Bram Cohen? by zill · 2011-07-02 06:00 · Score: 2

Prince of Darkness: "So what do you want in return for your soul?"

Cohen:"An efficient peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that can't be killed by RIAA/MPAA. Oh wait, eternal youth too."

10 years & still only 1 broswer supports it, O by AmigaHeretic · 2011-07-02 06:26 · Score: 2

BitTorrent still doesn't seem remotely mainstream still. I know with Opera you can basically treat a torrent almost like any other download. I'm not sure why other browsers never took this approach. I know for the e-l33t around here you all want a separate client, but for those that just want to download the occasional torrent the browser seems like the logical place to support ahhh...."downloading" of a file. I don't know....

Re:Unlikely by CRCulver · 2011-07-02 06:35 · Score: 2

A buck per track is still too much. If the prices for audio files are so high, I'd rather pirate in the short-term and, in the long term, save up money and buy CDs for a couple of dollars more so that I get the physical artifact (looks nice on my shelves, serves as a backup).

Re:it already is almost dead due to ISP's by CRCulver · 2011-07-02 06:39 · Score: 4, Informative

It's more than a couple countries in Europe. I live in a small town in Romania, for years already we have fiber to the door and 1 Mbps down on torrents with no throttling. Of course, when I go to Finland several times a year for work, things get even better, but even the European backwoods is better than what you get in most US metropolitan areas.

Re:Unlikely by SuricouRaven · 2011-07-02 06:47 · Score: 2

You are mostly right, though there is still one area that I think you might want to concede: Staged releases. Pirates like to get things fast, preferably fast enough to see them at the same time as their friends. While you can legally download films now, you can't do it right away - first it's cinema time, and then blu-ray and online. If you live outside of the first release country it's a lot worse, as by the time you can see the film it's already last-months fad and you've heard all the spoilers and missed out the chance to complain about how much it sucks. If the studios are to have any hope of removing the non-financial motivation for piracy, they are going to have to drop the practice of region-stageing releases and just let every country see it at the same time.

Re:The following hand gesture is dedicated to Cox. by odirex · 2011-07-02 07:56 · Score: 2

Bro, your ISP is named "c**ks", didn't you think for a minute a company with that name might f*** you?

Re:it already is almost dead due to ISP's by mister_playboy · 2011-07-02 09:36 · Score: 2

With http download services such as megaupload, filesonic etc... I regularly max out my 25Mbps connection while downloading

Are you are getting 25Mbps download from those services as a free user or as a paid user?

--
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will

Re:it already is almost dead due to ISP's by Kjella · 2011-07-02 12:55 · Score: 2

Here in Norway the average is now 7.4 Mbps and the mean 5.3 Mbps. About 80% of all households have broadband, yet we are less densely populated than the US (12 vs 31 people/km^2) and the average Norwegian lives in a town of less than 20,000 people. Yet we're still envious of Sweden and Denmark. Last figure is 14% of the population on fiber, but 20-25 Mbps lines are generally available on both cable and DSL. Most new installations are fiber though, which usually means symmetric speed... P2P when everyone is on 25/25 Mbit is way different than 25/5 Mbit.

--
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings

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