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Examining Bittorrent

Posted by michael on Sat Dec 18, 2004 06:17 PM
from the systemic-problem dept.
Software The Internet Science
ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.
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  • 35% (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mistersooreams (811324) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:22PM (#11126889) Homepage
    35% of all 'net traffic

    That's enormous!

    I guess this proves that BitTorrent is the perfect vector for the largest files, be they Linux distros or movies (public-domain movies, of course). As the article says, BitTorrent is not perfect and will probably be surpassed in the future. But the fact that 35% of all 'net traffic is being carried by one program is simple awesome, and a great credit to BitTorrent's creators.

    Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small.

    All of this is great news for BitTorrent. Long may it continue!

    • Re:35% (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:38PM (#11126964) Journal
      I have the complete statistics:

      35% = BitTorrent
      40% = Spam
      15% = Slashdottings
      10% = Porn Browsing
      • what about porn that is downloaded using bittorrent?
      • Retry:

        35% = BitTorrent
        35% = other P2P (the article tells you this)
        5% = plain old FTP (just a random guess of mine)
        2% = email / instant messaging
        23% (the remainder) = other (newsgroups?) / plain browsing, of which a significant portion might be pr0n.

        (All numbers about as accurate as the results of a Slashdot poll ;-)

        Slashdottings may be fun to note, but significant amount of all internet traffic? Don't think so. The low number for mail is because there may be lots of spam, but it's not that big

    • pr0n ...ok 64% *maybe*

    • The availability problem can be solved. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Guspaz (556486) on Saturday December 18 2004, @10:55PM (#11128035) Homepage
      It all comes down to two things: knowing where to host, and how to maximize your availability.

      35% of all net traffic belongs to BitTorrent traffic. The corresponding web and traffic tracker required to power that is inconsequential.

      I used to run NovaSearch.net, which was for a time the official search function of Suprnova.Org. I made up roughly half of all their traffic, something on the order of 300k pageviews per day by the end. Availability was indeed a large problem, and always my primary concern. However, my possible availability was much higher than actual availability. By this I mean that Novasearch had the POTENTIAL to be available much more than it was, due to reliance on Suprnova.

      When SuprNova went down, NovaSearch (usually, often it could be used as an out-of-date cache when Suprnova was down) went down too, because it didn't get updates. That accounted for most of my downtime, very little of it was actually from issues relating to NovaSearch itself.

      Despite all this, NovaSearch, during it's primary operational period, relied on only one dedicated server (A second was added for static content later on, but for transfer cap reasons, not actual bandwidth or load). This highlights the primary problem with Suprnova in regards to their reliability, they rely on donated mirrors, and that reliance has caused them to use an insufficient architechture (Last I heard the core of Suprnova was one single dual xeon server). Had they instead chosen to use a clustered solution that they managed themselves, combined with hardware firewalls and DDoS mitigation technology, the availability then and now would be significantly higher.

      Tracker reliability is a much lesser problem. Torrents can easily survive short to medium tracker downtime just by the shear momentum of the users. Once they have a peer list, they can continue communicating with those peers even with the tracker down. And the widespread adoption of various unofficial additions to the BitTorrent protocol have further improved that. One such improvement that enjoys almost universal support among third-party BitTorrent clients is the multi-tracker protocol, which effectively allows trackers to be clustered so that even if all but one of the trackers for a torrent is down, it can continue normally.

      Anyhow, this is a long post that sort of went off on a tangent and started rambling, but I thought that I should put a few words in because of the role I played.

      • Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:35PM (#11126951) Journal
        Poster wrote:
        Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit. You really think that the scheme will remain legal because of these few users?
        That's all it takes - see the Betamax decision. However, you might also want to take a look at the stats (below) for why people get high-speed internet.

        ... again ...

        BitTorrent and the likes will be shut down in 2005. Mark my words. Since most of the traffic I see (I am an admin) is illegal, I'll shed no tears. It's you who violate copyrights who are to blame for the crackdown and the eventual clampdown on the internet - not RIAA, MPAA or any other corporation.
        How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.

        From the article:

        A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems.
        Well, since, according to El Reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/brit_net_f ilth/ [theregister.co.uk] One in four Brits on net for Porn, there's a demand for "clittorrent".

        The stats:

        According to a survey conducted by British ISP Homecall, 23 per cent of Britons are getting broadband for the porn, and it's by far the most important factor in getting wired. 12 per cent cited access to music videos, 8 per cent access to movie trailers, and a gratifying 9 per cent for radio, which is undergoing a renaissance in the UK. Sometimes new media can be the best thing to happen to old media.
        All the above are LEGAL.
            • I would put the .torrent file in the same class as a hyperlink - it points to other material, rather than containing the other material.

              So?

              The issue is, for contributory infringement, whether it materially contributes to the infringement of another, with the knowledge of the infringement. As for vicarious infringement, whether the party had the right and ability to control the infringement, and directly profited from it.

              Both could include pointers. In fact, Napster merely maintained a database of pointe
                • The infringement is in the actual copying, to tangible media, and there is no mechanism that I know of to remotely disable someone's burner, so the "ability to control" is not there.

                  The infringements are distribution by the people who upload, and reproduction by the people who download. With BT, pretty much everyone is both kinds at once.

                  And tangible media includes RAM (see the MAI v. Peak case, which is widely followed) so as a general rule, following e.g. Napster, you have the right and ability to cont

                  • OK, we'll just steal your GPL software

                    You can't "steal" it. Copyright infringement is NOT theft. It's copyright infringement.

                    and use it in our binary-only software without giving back the modifications.

                    Unlike most people here, I don't think that's much of a problem. After all, we'll have the basis of any mods you make, and we can then work out a better version, even without your modified source.

                    • The Firefox team doesn't have the source for the latest version of Internet Exploder, and they seem to be d
                • Copyright was not always a bad law, when terms of copyright were reasonable and it served to protect small creators instead of the blood sucking parasites who feed of both them and us, it was a good law. Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good.

                  Problem is none of those things are true. We know that most media is overpriced and most actual content creators(artists, programmers, etc) are underp

      • Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lheal (86013) <lheal1999@@@yahoo...com> on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:05PM (#11127085) Homepage Journal
        • Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit.

        Yup. All it takes is any.

        The legal principal is this: if the {object, device, chemical, drug} has a purpose for which it is legal, then the thing should be legal.

        The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule. The pressure to legalize or ban something evinces arguments about its legitimate uses, and it's these arguments that are persuasive. Saying "We'll do it anyway" is unproductive.

        In this case, since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P, it's inappropriate to ban it even if that software is only a small percentage of the service's traffic.

      • Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit.

        Says who? Considering the popularity *and* size of, say, ISO images of Linux distros/*BSD releases/..., I actually would think twice before making statements like this. There is no study yet that examines the ratios of illegal vs. legal or illegit vs. legit BitTorrent traffic, and furthermore, not everything that you might think illegal at first glance actually is - copyright laws are quite varied throughout the world.

  • Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:27PM (#11126921)
    aside from movie and music piracy there are legal uses for bittorrent p2p too, like when Linux distros are released the demand is much greater than the file servers can handle and thats where bittorrent plays an important role, i prefer to get my Linux ISOs via bittorrent because it helps others get their ISOs too, for example FedoraCore-3 was released and it came on 4 CDs plus a fifth rescue CD making for a HUGE download, and also offered resume so if you have to log off or have a network problem you don't lose all that data and have to start your download over...

    • Sites that list legal torrents... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ghostgate (800445) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:10PM (#11127108)
      There are also sites that list legal torrents, try File Soup [filesoup.com] or Legal Torrents [legaltorrents.com] for example. These are just two that I remember offhand, I'm sure there are many others as well. Remember, BitTorrent, like any other P2P application, has plenty of legitimate uses. Don't get sucked in by the *AA propaganda machine (not directed towards the parent, just saying that in general).

    • Re:Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

      by koreth (409849) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:02PM (#11127343)
      There are other big legal downloads available via BT as well. For example, I set my web server up as a seed for the Project Gutenberg DVD-ROM and CD-ROM images [gutenberg.org], about as legal a set of files as you can get. So far I have served up over half a terabyte of those two images to people. I also seed a couple freeware games and some Creative Commons-licensed video to the tune of a couple hundred gigabytes of traffic, not a single byte of illegal or unauthorized content there.

      Hosting the 3.85GB Gutenberg DVD image would be a bit costly for the Gutenberg folks. Without BT or something like it, it would be much less convenient for volunteers like me to help them out by spreading the load around.

  • Such an unused potential (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vincob (247090) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:31PM (#11126936) Homepage
    There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms.

    But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time.

    My dream about a P2P PVR:
    http://www.oberle.org/blog/2004/08/02/a-p2p-video- recorder-box/ [oberle.org]

    • Re:Such an unused potential (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FFFish (7567) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:11PM (#11127392) Homepage
      Oh! how I long for the day when they finally realize I want to pay for the entertainment I watch!

      The fact is that their business model is d.e.a.d.: I have become an extremely selective media user. I refuse to purchase cable television; the cost is an order of magnitude more than the value I would receive. The same applies for movies; I do not derive fifteen dollars worth of enjoyment from all but a few very exceptional films (and the commercials at the beginning are, in fact, a significant reduction in their value).

      I rely exclusively on torrents and rental DVDs for my television entertainment now. I get the benefit of selecting the time and location (I use a laptop) of viewing. There are no commercials, saving me ten minutes of annoying, aggravating brainwashing, and at "free," the price is sweet.

      If the producers would simply skip the distributors and make it easy for me to pay them directly, I'd actually be willing to flow some cash their way.

      My price points are:

      Family Guy: probably a buck an episode if the quality of humour remained as surreal, unexpected, and edgy.

      Scrubs: about the same, especially if it helps them avoid becoming maudlin.

      Regenesis: a couple bucks an episode, but that's going to plummet if they don't start wrapping up some of the damned stories. Too many loose-ends, unless they're going to all come together in one brainfucking twist that scares the living bejesus out of me.

      The trick, really, is to ask me to pay after I've seen the episode. Sometimes I've been hurting from laughing at, say, Family Guy. Hit me up then and I'd throw a wallet at you: give me more, damn the cost!

  • Bartering? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hatta (162192) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:32PM (#11126940) Journal
    the downloaders of a file barter for chunks of it by uploading and downloading them in a tit-for-tat-like manner to prevent parasitic behavior. Each peer is responsible for maximizing its own download rate by contacting suitable peers, and peers with high upload rates will with high probability also be able to download with high speeds.

    Does this actually work? I find that when there are limited seeds, those first in line essentially transmit as fast as they recieve, and increasing upload doesn't really affect total speed much. When there are lots of seeders there's plenty of bandwidth to go around so it's always fast. Does anyone notice that restricting upload significantly affects download speed?
    • The only effect I've noticed is when I forget to tell my firewall to let BitTorrent connects through to my computer. Then I see a HUGE decrease in speed. Other than that, adjusting the upload bandwidth seldom seems to make a difference. I have a cable connection, 4Mb/512kb, and even throttled down to 50-100kb outbound I'd still frequently see the incoming connection at 2.5-3Mb. On the occasions when torrents were slow, cranking it all the way up (minus a bit for overhead) didn't help speed it up any. I
    • Very many people are effectively required to cap their upload. I'm on a cable connection where, if I don't cap my upload at 10kbps, it drops my download to staying near 6kbps when it hits 16kbps down (I stop it at ten so everything doesn't die while I use the other portions of the internet, such as the web).

      And, no, it doesn't do anything to your download speed. Yeah, I usually only average 30kbps down, but I also commonly get around 150kbps down, which leaves me with better-than-realtime download of compr

      • Re:Bartering? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AnyoneEB (574727) on Sunday December 19 2004, @12:04AM (#11128295)
        Unlimited upload on BT (or any p2p for that matter) is bad because it uses TCP so the upload interferes with the packets sent to tell the computer you are downloading that you are actually reciving packets from it. Since those packets do not get sent, the computer you are downloading from sends slower. It would also be interfering with your HTTP requests and acknowledgements to the web server. (There is a correct terminology for what I am saying, I am just to tired to think of it.) On the other hand, I have found that capping my upload too low does lead to lower download speeds. (If there are not a ton of seeds, my download tends to hover around three times my upload.)

  • BT is great, but: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ATAMAH (578546) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:32PM (#11126941)
    There are a few things that i would count as it's downsides. For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it. So unless you grabbed it while it was "hot" - you will have to deal with much lower speeds. Also i often find that i upload almost as much as i download, not being greedy or anything, but here in New Zealand broadband is still capped either on speed or on traffic. And quotas are pretty stingy, counting both uploads and downloads... but that is more isp/country specific i guess:)
    • For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it.

      You're right; HTTP is so much better, because when something is being downloaded by the masses from a single Web server you get about 0 bytes/s.

  • They missing the most important quality (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:33PM (#11126943)
    ...ability to withstand flash crowds

    How about the ability to withstand lawsuits? Isn't that more important than flash crowds?

  • I'd like another name (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:33PM (#11126945) Journal
    A few performance problems are revealed

    Yeah, performance problems should be fixed, but fix the name too. Name the next generation P2P client something like FuckTheRIAADickheadCunts. It would be interesting to see it get mentioned in the news each time RIAA sues something related to that P2P network. Call the "servers" instead "ejaculators" or something worse, and go on like that to introduce terms that violate various taboos. Soon enough, it can't get mentioned in the news anymore and (...now I get to my point, and now you will understand I'm not crazy, now you will see how this idea will triumph and free information once and for all...) RIAA's plans to scare customers by getting sue news in the newspapers won't work anymore!

    HA HA HA!

    Are you listening RIAA!?

    We have you now!!!

    THE NERDS HAVE YOU!

    • No, no no. (Score:5, Funny)

      by drxray (839725) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:55PM (#11127038) Homepage
      You're on the right lines, but we should call it something really positive, something they couldn't possibly want to ban. They're pretty hard hearted, they're already happy being know as people who want to ban sharing. But lets see them try to ban JesusKittenShare (the premier opensource implementation of the RespectYourElders protocol) and www.cutebabies.org, the popular .behappy listing site.

  • irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by bitspotter (455598) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:51PM (#11127021) Journal
    The irony is that a web site dedicated toward serving a p2p protocol expressly designed to rememdy the slashdot effect gets slashdotted.

    So why don't they just use Bittorrent to distribute their mirrors?

  • I don't infringe copyrights (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:51PM (#11127023)
    As a solid, upstanding citizen of the United States (a country which has the best government that money can buy), I firmly believe in strongly adhering to all the laws of this fine country.

    That's why I always go to thepiratesbay.org.

    They are located in Finland, of course, where US Copyright Law doesn't apply. So it's legal for them to offer files for downloading.

    And, of course, in the US it's legal to download files. What is illegal is to offer more than $1000 worth of them for uploading.

    So, please, let us all keep our Bittorrent downloads legal, folks. Thank you. ;)

  • had to be said ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by for_usenet (550217) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:04PM (#11127077)
    Anyone have a .torrent of the article ?

  • Attack of the sucking parasites (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AndroidCat (229562) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:26PM (#11127178) Homepage
    Only 9,219 out of 53,883 peers (17 %) have an uptime longer than one hour after they finished downloading. For 10 hours this number has decreased to only 1,649 peers (3.1 per cent), and for 100 hours to a mere 183 peers (0.34 per cent).
    Which explains why I frequently get DHCP IP addresses that are polluted with constant BitTorrent checks on various ports for days afterwards. The previous IP owner downloaded, dined and dashed. (And probably came back right after changing IPs and started his next download feast.)

  • Don't forget the psychology! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hoplite3 (671379) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:35PM (#11127214)
    Bittorrent did more than get the swapping strategy correct, it fixed the social psychology of p2p. Before, you traded files with other faceless users. This meant you had little investment in the uploads of others. People would join the network and not share files, cap their upload speeds, etc. Generally, this made downloading a slow and painful process. (Not to mention that it was difficult to tell if two similarly named files are the same ... there's too much diversity to get a good spread in file sources).

    But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Users can no longer leach. There's social stigma attached to it. Also, you have some investment in making sure others have a copy of the file. If you liked it enough to d/l it, you probably want to share. Better yet, the action of the users of the site are focused on the same files, so resources are allocated fairly. Generally, it works better all around.

    This leaves out the boost in nerd status of those who have large share ratios and upload lots of torrents. That helps with file availability too.

  • for those who didn't read the article... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:45PM (#11127254)
    from right below figure 4: In order to test the integrity of meta-data, we donated to Suprnova an account for hosting a mirror. By installing spyware in the HTML code, we have registered each .torrent download and could have easily corrupt the meta-data. We conclude that using donated resources for hosting meta-data entails substantial integrity and privacy risks.

  • Single point of failure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by danila (69889) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:24PM (#11127441) Homepage
    The study shows how vulnerable BitTorrent is to failures of Suprnova mirrors and trackers. Kill a large .torrent host and you effectively kill the network. Kill a large tracker and you severely cripple it. In comparision, ed2k network is much more resilient to attacks.

    First, you don't need servers to distribute ed2k links. A short ASCII string effectively replaces a large .torrent file that needs to be hosted on a large server. You can send an ed2k link by e-mail, IM or post it on Slashdot. Furthermore, ed2k has excellent search capabilities - both via servers (very fast and very efficient) and via distributed Kad[emlia] system (fast and efficient). With the ability to check the filenames and comments for a certain file, you are relatively safe against fakes even when you can't use verified links. Of course, here I deliberately ignore the fact that both networks need "community portals" to inform users about released files, to provide forums for discussion, etc.

    Second, the servers play only a secondary role, even if many servers would go down, that would have a small impact on the network because of source exchange. And using Kad it's even possible to operate entirely without servers.

    I do not hate BitTorrent, really. Even though I am a long time eMule user and even though I am very annoyed by the apparent popularity of BitTorrent here on /. and elsewhere (as if other networks don't exist), I still don't hate BT. Actually, I tried it again recently and was very satisfied with the download speeds. I don't wish BitTorrent bad. But with the recent developments with police raids on torrent sites and ed2k link sites in Europe the networks will be tested and I am not sure BitTorrent is best prepared for it. Suprnova appears to be safe because of its geographic location, but it still remains a single point of possible failure. I don't think ShareReactor was as critical to the edonkey2000 network.

    • Re:Single point of failure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Soul-Burn666 (574119) on Saturday December 18 2004, @09:16PM (#11127669) Journal
      Ah! But that is EXACTLY what was in mind when BT was written. BT was originally meant for speeding up LEGAL downloads when flash crowds appear. Therefore not needing anonymity on the tracker and can exploit the advantage of a central server to maximize traffic. In mind was that if an illegal file is tracked on BT, the website could be easily sued and the tracker taken down.
      Moreover, all those people that say: "please seed after you finish! Don't be a leecher!" are thinking in standard P2P terms, but this is NOT what BT was written for. It was written to aid standard http downloads, as numerous sites already do.

  • Interesting stats (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fizzl (209397) <.fizzl. .at. .fizzl.net.> on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:26PM (#11127452) Homepage Journal
    Here's a link for the central internet exchange for Finnish ISP's to link together. Coralized FICIX stats [nyud.net].

    Compare the stats from week ago, and today. Guess what changed?
    Most telling is the last graph indicating traffic for the whole year.
    The largest Finnish torrent site, Finreactor got busted by [p2pnet.net] Keskusrikospoliisi [poliisi.fi] (roughly the same as FBI of USA).

    I guess they weren't sharing just Linux images ;P

  • Traffic estimate is suspect (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burris (122191) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:37PM (#11127491)
    This paper and all of the recent news articles that provide an estimate for BitTorrent protocol traffic use the same source. A single slide in a presentation by someone from Cache Logic shows BT using 1/2 of all P2P traffic at a "tier 1 ISP." Other sources cite P2P traffic at 66% of all 'net traffic. Therefore, BT is 33%.

    I think any estimate made without measurements at many major routers would be suspect. While there is no doubt that BT is quite popular, the evidence presented thus far for the amount of traffic using BT protocol is extremely flimsy. I would take it with a grain of salt.

    burris

  • Slashdot effect salve (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:37PM (#11127493) Homepage Journal
    The real breakthru for distributed P2P tech will come when someone publishes a BitTorrent content distributor that can be plugged transparently in front of an HTTPD. So I hit http://www.whatever.com , and get my HTTP response, with cache and timing headers intact. But behind the scenes, the "www" host is really the entry point to a distributed server network, a pool of interconnected "torrent" servers that transparently balance the traffic throughout the capacitance of the protocol network. Those servers actually tap the "real" HTTPD behind that network only to check for updated content, which is distributed to the network on demand, to be passed through to requesting clients. The clients speak only HTTP, and can't tell the difference between the real HTTPD and the distributed network proxies.

    As long as I'm asking Santa, I'll be more specific. That "www" host has its DNS resolved by the nameserver at whatever.com , which hands out IP#s of the other "torrent" servers distributed around the "Web". torrent servers get the IP# of the real host at whatever.com, so they get content. There are problems: HTTPS requires each serialized object requested/replied to be encrypted with/for the actual private key of the requesting client, unknown until the request is made. And "CGI" or other dynamic content creates a huge space of permuted object states. But, Santa, Google figured out how to deal with all this in a centralized datacenter, and they're damn fast. Get the elves on this, and children around the world will sleep with visions of sugarplums streaming to their download directories.

  • My response to the author: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheSHAD0W (258774) on Saturday December 18 2004, @08:51PM (#11127553) Homepage
    I have a few comments on your analysis of the BitTorrent protocol... My main criticism is that you are analyzing BitTorrent in combination with pirate web pages as a P2P file sharing system, when BitTorrent's real purpose is to be a file DISTRIBUTION system.

    BitTorrent is designed to replace and enhance the performance of a standard http or ftp download server. Where even ten simultaneous downloads can slow the performance of most inexpensive server setups to a crawl, BitTorrent can easily handle ten thousand or more, and in this it is an enormous success.

    One necessary element of a true BitTorrent distribution is a dedicated seed server. This server ought to be always working, and should have a significant amount of bandwidth behind it; I'd recommend 30KB/s minimum, but more is better. You complain that seeders are "punished" and this is why torrents die, but while long-term seeders are nice, they aren't necessary. It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to. Having torrents die off when interest fades is an artifact of misuse of this specification.

    You worry about pollution on Suprnova.org, and so do I; there's no reason why it wouldn't exist. But as BitTorrent was normally intended this isn't a problem at all. People visiting Blizzard's website to download content via BitTorrent (actually Blizzard uses a modified downloader, but the concept would be the same if users received a standard .torrent file) would obviously receive a genuine .torrent file, and the data in that file verifies the data received in the download. It's only torrent file redistributors like Suprnova.org where you'd need to be concerned about pollution.

    You're also concerned about tracker availability. I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the .torrent file anyway, and a standard download would also be blocked.

    As a sharing method BitTorrent indeed has some deficiencies, but it simply wasn't designed for that. That BitTorrent is being misused for that purpose only testifies to its effectiveness. Perhaps a sharing system with elements taken from BitTorrent will someday arise; I know Suprnova.org is attempting to create one with "Exeem". But please don't badmouth BitTorrent. :-)

    • Re:I work for.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zebbers (134389) on Saturday December 18 2004, @06:56PM (#11127041)
      You work for....a company who is going to drag people into court and force them to settle under its mighty legal fund?

      Wow. Not really impressive. So-called "piracy" and more importantly, the RIAA's and MPAA's tactics are getting more and more press. To date, I know of few cases of people being busted. Sued civilly by greedy and useless corporations, sure. But not busted.

      I cannot wait until I am done with law school and can contribute, knowledgeably, to the defense of such bullshit and hopefully the creation of more realistic and fair and beneficial laws. This artificial IP shit is harming the American consumer more than ever.
      • The publicity is mainly what they are looking for. Like people say "you can't buy this kind of publicity". It's an effective way to demonize music downloading of all kinds, which is their main goal. They want non-computer literate types to think it is always illegal to download music, therefore they will go to the mall and spend $19.99 on the newest pop crap. But people are slowly starting to wake up to what's going on. Does the music cartel have a backup plan for the inevitable loss of the old way of doing
        • I was unable to see the evidence against me, and I was punished without being able to defend myself

          The problem here lies not in the "Copyright Cartels" but in your Terms Of Service with your ISP. The problem is that the contract you signed with them for acess lets them disable said acess arbitrarily.

    • Mod parent -1, misleading (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ghostgate (800445) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:02PM (#11127069)
      Whether or not there are any investigations against BitTorrent USERS for trading illegal files (of which there is no evidence at all yet... there is only evidence of them going after tracker sites, which makes much more sense anyway), that does not mean you avoid BitTorrent completely. That's the whole point of P2P. It has uses that are legit, and uses that aren't. By all means, keep using BitTorrent for legit uses anytime you want.

      To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful.

    • Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by glassesmonkey (684291) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:13PM (#11127124) Homepage Journal
      *HUGE* anonymous investigations!!

      I always listen to warnings like that! Y2K, update to SP2, don't download anything from the internet.

      BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one .torrent on one tracker. I'm not giving any legal advice here, but if you were to download one file for what you believe to be fair use, then they won't be able to come after you like they did with KaZaa users. Instead of the hundreds of shared files, your IP address is now only associated with one.

      Could they monitor EVERY tracker and EVERY torrent on those trackers and log EVERY IP address, maybe.. But don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that .torrent is being shared. Someone would have to look for all new torrents and connect to the tracker and start logging IP addresses for the lifetime of the .torrent, plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own?
      • BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one .torrent on one tracker. I'm not giving any legal advice here, but if you were to download one file for what you believe to be fair use, then they won't be able to come after you like they did with KaZaa users. Instead of the hundreds of shared files, your IP address is now only associated with one.

        Except the copyrig

    • Re:I work for.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by harlows_monkeys (106428) on Saturday December 18 2004, @07:30PM (#11127199) Homepage
      Two words - avoid BitTorrent. HUGE investigations are going on to bust bittorrent users

      Wrong. There are no investigations going on to bust bittorrent users. There are investigations going on to bust people doing illegal file sharing, and some of them happen to be using bittorrent.

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