Researchers Warn of Possible BitTorrent Meltdown 294
secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"
The market will find a way (Score:3, Insightful)
Might force more people to 'member-only' or subscription sites, for a short time, is all.
Meanwhile, isohunt (among others) is going strong.
Finally, could also push more people into IRC, which I'm sure the MAAFIA would just adore.
Tag this FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is resilient, and someone somewhere will pick up the slack that could be left by TPB going down. There's enough trackers out there to lend a hand.
Solution? Support The Pirate Bay. Don't download? Support them anyway for the things they do to battle the MAFIAA and other evils.
This is GREAT for bittorrent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably won't happen.... (Score:2, Insightful)
so even if they are all found guilty, it would be outside their ability to shut it down, even if ordered to do so by a court.
You can damned well guarantee that a jail term for failure to comply will suddenly make it possible. I doubt there's many torrent tracker site owners and admins willing to serve jailtime for it.
Re:So What? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is extremely annoying because I can't read articles at-a-glance anymore. I only click on articles for the comments and I only read comments and write comments if I'm heavily interested in this story.
Re:UI Design Fail. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am logged in, I still see that firehose crap. They're not just alienating new users, I'm getting sick of this crap too. I don't even let slashdot.org run scripts anymore. It stalls firefox, and doesn't provide any desirable functionality. Once upon a time Slashdot had the best forum software around. Now, it's the worst.
Not difficult to see the bias here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI Design Fail. (Score:3, Insightful)
Uncheck the box, and you can return to non-beta bliss!
Re:The market will find a way (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats an index >.
Aware of that - but check out the trackers on isohunt; plenty of options other than Piratebay. If it goes down, people will use the alternatives, simple as that.
How long did it take to recover from mininova? Not long...
Re:So What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Learn to use RSS already.
Re:Is it me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank you! /. is now usable for the first time in months!
Re:Is it me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tag this FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI Design Fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has really made me learn to hate CSS. (or bad CSS programmers)
Simple Design + Low Bandwidth + No Icons + No Boxes + Large Browser Font
and I still
get a narrow
story column
and a ton of
wasted
whitespace.
Re:sssssh! (Score:1, Insightful)
I think this shows exactly how good bittorent is. Organising 30% of worldwide data communications, using all of 8 servers. That would even make Google jealous.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tag this FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
Because all that traffic is now being divert onto the Internet at large via commercial usenet services and bittorrent. Having it local to the ISP means their network usage stays local to their own infrastructure.
Re:This is GREAT for bittorrent (Score:2, Insightful)
This is also compounded by people who deliberately seed to better than 1:1, because they're preventing other people from uploading their share!
Remember, across the whole torrent, the average must be a share ratio of 1:1
Re:The market will find a way (Score:2, Insightful)
There is already support for using multiple trackers for a single torrent. The issue is that the rest of the bittorrent ecosystem may not be able to cope with the load that pirate bay is currently supporting.
I guess it is an open question as to whether the resources devoted to bittorrent could support more traffic, but saying 'it should be better' isn't really a good way to demonstrate that it can be better.
Re:Tag this FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't understand the why of this arrangement (Score:2, Insightful)
This arrangement was made precisely to make sure that they couldn't shut Pirate Bay down even when forced or coerced by the judicial system.
Yes, the police and such can make your life hell, even if you're in the right. The people behind Pirate Bay know this, they are not stupid. They also know how easy it would be for the authorities to say 'we can make your life hell unless you shut it down'. Illegal yes, but easy, and fighting it in court takes a long time and loads of money. So they said, we have a long term commitment to keeping the Pirate Bay up, so we must make sure that even we ourselves simply cannot shut it down, not even if we wanted to.