Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

itwbennett writes "Geek advocate Wil Wheaton has written a blog post on the (legal) usefulness of BitTorrent, saying that the speed of his recent download of Ubuntu 12.04 should serve as a reminder that BitTorrent fills an important niche. Wheaton compares blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because bank robbers could get away."

Comments

BitTorrent was NEVER the Performance Problem

[davecb]

Over and above the claim that torrents helped pirates, there was the claim that it was a bandwidth-hog.

Well, it aint so! Jim Gettys researched it, and found what the network vendors were seeing was ... bufferbloat! See https://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/the-next-nightmare-is-coming/

Re:Not quite

[scdeimos]

For a large percentage of internet (gaming) users I'd say you've probably used BitTorrent without even realising it. Ever played one of these games: World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III? Blizzard's software update system uses BitTorrent by default with a fallback to HTTP, and they're not the only ones.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem... a lot of things that are technically illegal, people don't believe OUGHT to be illegal.

If I can watch, oh I don't know, Seinfeld reruns on TV over the air for free, why is it illegal for me to download the episode I missed last night? I use Usenet for time-shifting, the way that I used to use a DVR. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so, and I don't think that there OUGHT to be any legal impediment to doing so.

Re:Not quite

[Kjella]

Citation needed.

Here.. 89% definitively illegal, 11% probably illegal, 0.3% confirmed legal. And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.

Re:bittorent is not for speed

[Fred Ferrigno]

On the other hand, a direct transfer is never faster than the most congested link between you and the server. If you have a reasonably fast connection, the bottleneck is often not your connection. Downloading from multiple peers that are likely taking different paths to reach you lets you reach an high overall speed even if all the peers are congested.

Re:Not quite

[Anthony Mouse]

And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.

I guess you missed the link in your own article that debunks the study? Cliffs notes version: They only looked at the files with the most seeds, which already skews the results, and pirated stuff has a huge list of fake seeds to screw up lazy anti-piracy enforcers, which means that choosing the torrents with the most seeds invalidates the entire study because the ones with the most (fake) seeds are the pirated ones.

I would also add that relying on 'this one public BitTorrent tracker we found somewhere' is not statistically valid, because it's just one tracker. You have to get a statistically valid sample of all the trackers or you can't conclude anything. For example, if they included these these trackers instead, I would expect different results -- and by failing to consider them, they naturally get totally invalid numbers.

Re:Not quite

[Culture20]

A single user here, Using bittorrent since the beginning to download dead shows. But the majority of my usage is piracy. Whether or not you want to believe me, thats all you, but my use is almost all illegal.

That's you. There are plenty of WoW players out there. Every last one of them uses bittorrent for updates, whether they know it or not (most don't even know what bittorrent is). Other update programs are using bitorrent too according to the scuttlebutt.

Re:Not quite

[sosume]

"This content is not available in your region."

Re:Not quite

[TheRaven64]

And it's only available for streaming. My main use case for this kind of thing is having something to keep me entertained on long train journeys or on flights. Even if I have 3G Internet on the train, I lose that when we go into a tunnel or through a deep cutting. On the plane it's stupidly expensive. I don't want to stream, I want to download. I want to pay a fixed monthly fee to be able to download whatever I want (maybe with a limit of downloads per month) in a DRM-free format so I can watch it on whichever device I choose. The closest I get is renting DVDs, but if I want to watch them on anything other than my laptop it's a pain to rip and transcode them.