Examining Bittorrent 451
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.
35% (Score:5, Interesting)
Such an unused potential (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Bartering? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
BT is great, but: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bartering? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I work for.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Mod parent -1, misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful.
Attack of the sucking parasites (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget the psychology! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:BT is great, but: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you don't want to share, don't use P2P systems. Get your files some other way.
As for getting things while they're hot, almost all forms of media have that problem. Published content has a limited lifetime, varying from seconds to years depending on the media. If you missed last week's Simpsons, it probably won't be on TV again for a long time. The media companies decide how long the episode will be available. At least with bittorrent, the users can decide how long to keep stuff around.
Newer systems are working on lengthening the lifetime of shared files, by making it convenient to "seed" a large number of files at once. Perhaps you'll like PDTP better than BitTorrent.
Re:I work for.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Such an unused potential (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Two questions - read programmers (Score:2, Interesting)
2. the average download speed of 240 kbps O_O. I've been working with 30-50kbps on average, and I have my ports opened too. Could it be my smutty upload speed?
Slashdot effect salve (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:2, Interesting)
Oops, my bad on the spelling. No, I'm not a lawyer.
However, in the Grokster decision [legal500.com], a lot of discussion went into how to apply Sony to that case. They knew that Aimster had put forth a proportionality test, but the Grokster judges finally held that there could be no arbitrary ratio of infringing to noninfringing use.
Any use is therefore enough.
I generalize that to weapons, drugs, etc., to fit P2P networks into perspective with the culture of freedom.
I think you have an axe to grind. Perhaps you are a record industry lawyer, Mr. AC?
Re:Bartering? (Score:1, Interesting)
Because no one can contact you, and you have to be the one that initiate the contact.
The net result is that you *cannot* be in contact with somewhat that is also firewalled, hence the nubmer of peers avalaible to you is much smaller than the amount in the smarm.
anonytorrent... (Score:3, Interesting)
of course passing all your data through an anonymizer proxy can slow down some of your downloads, but this might be the solution...
No direct contact with the tracker/seeder, all identifiable traffic stopping at some proxy, the proxy resending it to you on an know port...
easier than recreating a fully encrypted, non tracable p2p network from scratch, and only uses existing tech...
Now where can I find a nice, free, fast, anonymous proxy in the EU that can support a 2Mb broadband connection speed ?