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BitTorrent's Creator Bram Cohen Interviewed 455

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mega-props-to-this-guy dept.
Delta-9 writes "The New York Times has this interview (free reg. req.) with Bram Cohen, the author/creator of the widely popular BitTorrent p2p application." Talks a bit about BitTorrent, its implications, but also a lot about Bram himself. Interesting piece.
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BitTorrent's Creator Bram Cohen Interviewed More

BitTorrent's Creator Bram Cohen Interviewed

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  • Free Reg... blah.. blah... (Score:5, Informative)

    by trp642 ( 551059 ) * on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:29PM (#8260651) Homepage
    Registration is for wussies! Go Google...
    NY Times [nytimes.com]
    • Story text follows:

      File Sharing's New Face

      By SETH SCHIESEL



      Published: February 12, 2004

      EATTLE



      AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.

      "I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun," he recalled.

      Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first genera

    • What about... registering? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kinniken ( 624803 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:59PM (#8261011) Homepage
      I'm probably going to be -1 trolled into oblivion, but why don't all the people complaining about the NYT simply register and forget about it??
      I did that at least three years ago, and with cookies I only ever have to worry about it *once* each time I change browser. And if you are opposed on principle on giving personal info, just put false one.
      The whole thing takes about as long as getting the Google link, and you only have to do it once. And I thought geeks were supposed to be efficient ;-)

    • Re:Free Reg... blah.. blah... (Score:4, Informative)

      by hab136 ( 30884 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:21PM (#8261258) Journal
      BugMeNot [bugmenot.com] supplies free user accounts for sites like the NY Times. Their bookmarklet is especially useful.

  • God bless this man (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:30PM (#8260665)
    He's made distribution of media and data much more cost effective.

  • Pretty Cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pmaccabe ( 747075 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:31PM (#8260674) Journal
    BitTorrent is a nice creative alternative solution to what has generally been a Napster knockoff syndrome among P2P services.

    • Re:Pretty Cool (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      When will someone combine bittorrent and rsync? That sounds like the best way to upgrade from Fedora Core 2 test1 to Fedora Core 2 test2, or to update your Gentoo source tree.

  • let us not forget (Score:5, Informative)

    by sweeney37 ( 325921 ) * <mikesweeney&gmail,com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:31PM (#8260675) Homepage Journal
    Slashdot also had an inteview with Bram Cohen back in June [slashdot.org].

    Mike

  • Works for Valve now (Score:5, Informative)

    by S. Bolle ( 631631 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:32PM (#8260683)
    It's worth quoting from the article that he has been hired by Valve (upcoming Half Life 2) to use his expertise for their Steam content distributing system.

  • Dear Bram, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bz3rk ( 729797 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:33PM (#8260689) Homepage Journal
    Please make a "no uploading" option button on BitTorrent, because I am a leech, signed the Kazaa masses.
    • OR... I'm on a Satellite frigging connection and thus, BitTorrent is useless to me!

    • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:5, Informative)

      by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:44PM (#8260818) Homepage
      Please make a "no uploading" option button on BitTorrent, because I am a leech, signed the Kazaa masses.
      It's already there. It's just not in button form --
      --max_upload_rate <arg>
      maximum kB/s to upload at, 0 means no limit (defaults to 0)
      Setting that to 1 kB/s should be slow enough even for a modem user ...

      Of course, it's open source, so feel free to add the button yourself.

      • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:35PM (#8261445)
        That's what so great about BT. As soon as somebody does that, their download speed drops to a crawl or stops altogether.

        • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:3, Informative)

          by appleprophet ( 233330 )
          That's not true, otherwise ADSL users would not even bother. I must cap my upload speeds to 5k/sec, yet I routinely download at my max speed (150k/sec.) BitTorrent does have a swapping system that rewards you for uploading, but it by no means stops leeching.

        • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:4, Informative)

          by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:36PM (#8264710)
          No, not necessarily. The person with low upload speed has the potential of getting good download transfer rates as soon as there are enough providers of complete file chunks. Obviously, this will be a disadvantage in the early stages of distributing a file, but later on (or if there are enough participants who continue sharing after they got a complete download) it's not a problem.

    • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:5, Informative)

      by goon america ( 536413 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:17PM (#8261195) Homepage Journal
      IIRC, Bittorrent is tit-for-tat, and if you limit your upload rate, other peers will lower their upload rate to you. Leeching isn't possible.

    • Re:Dear Bram, (Score:3, Interesting)

      by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )
      Please make a "no uploading" option button on BitTorrent, because I am a leech, signed the Kazaa masses.

      Technically, there is no uploading with BitTorrent at all. Everyone downloads from everyone else. The only real upload is the uploading of the initial .torrent file to a public webserver, and even that can be not an upload if you serve it from a webserver on your local machine or otherwise created on the server without transferring the actual .torrent file.

      User interfaces should use terms relative to

  • If there are software awards... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:33PM (#8260695)
    This guy definitely deserves a big one. Bittorrent has forever changed how I get my large media files on the net. Not to mention linux distros (mandrake). No more waiting for crummy mirrors for me!

    Bittorrent is like the Athlon 64, other p2p apps are like a pentium 133.

  • Awesome idea #1425: (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Human Cow ( 646609 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:34PM (#8260705) Homepage
    Somebody needs to create a torrent of this interview in case it gets Slashdotted.
  • Then what did he think it was going to be used for? The popularity of Napster should have taught him that this was going to happen. Anything that can allow someone to get something for free that they normally would have to pay for, will be used for that purpose. Maybe he didn't intend for this to happen...but the best of intentions oft go awry. I find it hard to believe though that someone smart enough to code Bit Torrent is naive enough to not realize how it would be utilized.

  • Amazing... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blorg ( 726186 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:37PM (#8260751)
    "...when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind [...] BitTorrent really started to take off in early 2003 when it was used to distribute a new version of Linux [...] Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."

    ...a *balanced* article, in the mainstream media, about a p2p app, which concentrates on the technology behind the app, and the possibility of non-infringing uses.

    Now I've seen it all.

  • Good Days Already Gone (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aerojad ( 594561 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:38PM (#8260755) Homepage Journal
    The school [lssu.edu] I go to has already ended the party, limiting the crap out of BT connections, so my speeds dropped from 500-600k/sec to 3-4k/sec for each torrent. What's the speed something has to drop to so that driving to where the server is, burning a cd, and driving home is faster than the download itself?

    Any other schools out there get a similar clampdown?
    • What's the speed something has to drop to so that driving to where the server is, burning a cd, and driving home is faster than the download itself?

      Depends on how far away the server is.

    • Re:Good Days Already Gone (Score:4, Interesting)

      by C10H14N2 ( 640033 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:11PM (#8261137)
      A car leaves Los Angeles for San Diego at 60mph, stops in San Diego for fifteen minutes and returns by the same route at the same speed. If a single CD-R has the capacity for 700 million bytes and a byte has eight bits, roughly 5.6 billion bits in total, how many bits per second would you require to transfer those bits in 15,300 seconds? Answer: 366kbps.

      If each 1Mb/s/month of bandwidth costs $500 and one hundred people want to download CDs as quickly as a 240 mile round trip on a constant basis, how much bandwidth would be required and what would it cost? Answer 36Mb/s at a cost of $216,000 per year.

      Any guesses why they're throttling you?

  • Legitimate uses...?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by agent oranje ( 169160 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:39PM (#8260764) Journal
    The article is very thin on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent. Just last night, I wanted to download the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo... and despite the fact there were literally hundreds of mirrors, I couldn't connect to many of them, and those I could connect to were utterly hosed. So, I looked for a torrent for the file, and a few minutes later, I was done downloading it.

    Yes, you can use BitTorrent to steal stuff. But, all of the p2p programs are basically a mix of the roles of ftp and irc. BitTorrent is slightly different - it's a mix of p2p and the web, making a quick and easy means to find whatever you want. A great amount of content is completely legit, and BitTorrent is a dream come true for those times that everybody wants a certain file. I didn't expect NYT to focus on the good aspects of the program, but they didn't even mention how amazingly useful it actually is.
    • They gave absolutely no mention to the number one assertion of Bit Torrents Web site. That BT is designed to be used to distribute files from their creators who either cannot afford the bandwidth or whose bandwidth cannot possibly meet demand at release time.

      • Re:Legitimate uses...?! (Score:4, Informative)

        by orac2 ( 88688 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:11PM (#8261143)
        You and the parent should try reading the bloody article, in particular where it says:

        "Part of what matters to me about this is that it makes it possible for people with limited bandwidth to supply very popular files," Mr. Gilmore said in a telephone interview. "It means that if you are a small software developer you can put up a package, and if it turns out that millions of people want it, they can get it from each other in an automated way."

        It is utmost hyprocrisy to complain that journalists are lazy and ignorant in the writing of articles, when you can't even be bothered to pay attention to the actual words on the page.

  • Here's some torrents of legal MP3s (Score:5, Informative)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:40PM (#8260768) Homepage Journal
    Enjoy.

  • BT is awesome, keep it that way. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:40PM (#8260769)

    For his part, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent users are not anonymous and that their numeric Internet addresses are easily viewable by anyone who cares. "It amazes me that sites like Suprnova continue to stay up, because it would be so easy to sue them," he said. Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."

    That said, Mr. Cohen is not in the nanny business.

    "I'm not going to get up on my high horse and tell others not to do it because it's not my place to berate people," he said. "I just sort of watch it with some amusement."


    as well he shouldn't berate people for their usage of his software. neither should you. ..

    and what's this bit about the MPAA having BitTorrent on their radar screen??? give me a break! try the piracy and other infringement sources because the authors do not promote it, regardless of what they know is happening with their software.

    • Re:BT is awesome, keep it that way. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's actually wrong. Anonymous p2p can be this fast, in spades.

      We have an anonymous Bittorrent client in experimental testing right now, just to test our anonymous p2p overlay; it's not much slower - it's surprisingly fast given our rocky, big, test environment, and a great test of our overlay.

      But BT has a critical flaw, which is that centralised tracker. It can still be slashdotted, rather easily (BT places an immense load on a server compared to http; the limit with BT is the CPU and/or RAM, not the b

  • upload/download vs send/receive (Score:3, Funny)

    by product byproduct ( 628318 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:41PM (#8260783)
    they immediately start uploading that piece to other users

    Hmm, that would be "immediately start sending that piece to other users". "upload/download" are terms reserved for an asymmetric situation. How can the NYT get this wrong?

  • guilt (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beegle ( 9689 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:41PM (#8260787) Homepage
    Okay, how many others saw the article, felt bad about never paying for BitTorrent (esp. when he talks about not being able to make ends meet for a while), and sent Bram a few bucks?

    /me guiltily raises hand

    • Re:guilt (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TobySmurf ( 680591 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:58PM (#8260995) Homepage Journal
      I know how you feel, I did the same a few months ago when I realized that he had completely solved all my Gentoo download woes. You must admit though that it feels good to send him $20, especially seeing as probably only one person in 50000 gives him anything. Bram, if you lived here in Calgary I would buy you a beer or five any day...

  • Should be used for Linux Distributions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:43PM (#8260800) Journal
    As I sit here, getting packages at a mightily slow 8 k/sec via Fedora's Red Hat Network, I wonder why this must be.

    Why don't tools like yum, up2date, and apt incorporate BitTorrent concepts to download packages and files?

    If there was an option when installing Fedora or Debian to "share XX Mbytes at YY kbps" I'd be perfectly happy to donate 50 MB of disk space and 5-10 Kbps of bandwidth to the cause. That's be anough to reliably provide a few packages for redistribution.

    Multiply that by the number of Linux installs, and you have a lightning-quick package delivery system.

    Imagine apt-get or up2date ALWAYS able to saturate your broadband connection when doing an update!

    Why is nobody doing this? Security isn't an issue, since BT uses SHA1. Source isn't an issue since BT is open source. Isn't the RHN stuff already written in PYTHON?!?!?

  • Compiled client for linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Via_Patrino ( 702161 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:43PM (#8260804)
    I think a problem in BT is the lack of compiled clients for linux. Phyton is big and an interpred code can eat a lot of cpu time specially when handlig several connections at a time. I've seen a c++ client for linux but it isn't developed anymore.

    Another problem is bandwidth limitation not included in the software, you can use an external program like trickle (heavy) or the kernel, but that way it doesn't share bandwidth equally between users, it shares very bad indeed.

    Other is that eventually I want to share my bandwidth but don't want to download the whole file (don't have time/space). I may use some trick (download a part of it and after that limit my download rate) but I don't think that's the best solution.

    • Re:Compiled client for linux (Score:4, Informative)

      by FuzzyBad-Mofo ( 184327 ) <fuzzybadNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:00PM (#8261014)

      Check out Azureus [sourceforge.net], a cross-platform graphical BitTorrent client written in Java. It's highly configurable and works well on this Linux box.

    • What part of:

      --max_upload_rate X

      do you not understand?

      Bandwidth throttling has been in there since the beginning, if you use the command line client.

      I've run >5 BT clients on a "slow" machine (Pentium Pro 200), and it's less than 50% CPU load. Performance isn't an issue.

    • Re:Compiled client for linux (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:03PM (#8261056) Journal
      I think a problem in BT is the lack of compiled clients for linux.

      But that isn't a problem, really. I've used BT quite a bit on Linux. You can limit the # of uploads and the upload bandwidth. Presumably, with ulimit or something similar, the same could be done for CPU/RAM.

      If I allowed 10 connections, 50 MB of disk space, and 10 Kbps maxupload, even using Python, it'd run much less than 5% CPU time of my dedicated 600 Mhz celeron router/firewall system. I'd never notice 10 Kbps on my 1500/384 DSL. Yet, if thousands/million of people offered meager numbers like this to the world, getting package updates would be a SNAP.

      Assume that in my 50 MB of cache disk space were 5-10 packages. Heck, the way BT works, the files don't even need to be complete files! I could, for example, share parts of the Kernel package. Have the files being shared in my cache be based on popularity - so that more popular files get cached in more servers, and rotate out the less popular ones.

      With a system like this, the everybody on earth could conceivably update their systems simultaneously and everybody would *still* get a decent amount of bandwidth.

      The only issue is that there are trackers capable of handling that many connections, but this problem pales when compared to trying to do it all with FTP,

  • Interesting point (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mwheeler01 ( 625017 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `releehw.l.wehttam'> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:47PM (#8260855)
    The article makes an interesting point that I'm sure a number of /. users are aware of that bittorrent is not anonymous at all. Many less technically savy users made that mistake when using Napster and Kazaa and got screwed by the RIAA. Now while you're uploading and downloading you have no control over who sees your IP but I'm curious to know if trackers hold on to this information after you disconnect, or if sites like suprnova.org keep track of who downloads what torrent. Does anyone have some insight into this?

    • Re:Interesting point (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swilver ( 617741 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:06PM (#8261094)
      None of the file sharing tools currently available provide any kind of anonymity. You may be anonymous while browsing for files and doing searches as these usually flow through somekind of distributed network, but once the downloading (or uploading) starts the other side will know who you are as they have your IP address.

      The main reason for this is lack of bandwidth. If you want anonymity even while downloading, someone else will have to act as an intermediary (preferably more than one). Those intermediaries though will have to download some data, and then upload it again to you which gains them nothing (in other words, it wastes a lot of bandwidth). Everyone will need to provide some bandwidth for this purpose to make this even remotely feasible.

      Only Freenet currently does this that I'm aware of, and it's a lot slower for that very reason. Bandwidth however seems to be subject to Moore's law; soon there should be plenty of it, and then you can have real anonymity.

  • Hey Movie Industry! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo. c o m> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:47PM (#8260856) Journal
    Go worry about something else! I don't download movies because they are of poor quality, poor quality, and poor quality. Two apply to you.

    Why anyone would peg their bandwidth for 2 days to grab a flick when you can rent it and burn a copy is beyond me.

    Bittorrent shines for grabbing stuff, sure, but I think most people just collect crap, then burn it to disk or throw it on a HD and equate that with penis size.

    So, Movie Industry, I really can't see this costing you zillions, or hundreds of thousands for that matter.

    The people who want to will go to the theater, buy it on DVD, or rent it. The ones who don't, won't.

    Again, if you're going to hunt people down, go after the pressing plants making thousands of copies AND SELLING THEM!

    I highly doubt there are more than a few dirty whores who are selling copies of stuff they download. You know who you are. You suck.

  • Irony of timing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:47PM (#8260857)
    How perfect... I had just stumbled across this article [nccomp.com] which mentions BitTorrent and has some interesting insight on legally circumventing the RIAA.

    • Re:Irony of timing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tgd ( 2822 )
      Actually it seems like its full of incorrect statements for ignorant ways to convince yourself you aren't illegally circumventing the RIAA.

      And on top of that the fool who wrote it used the word "kewl".

  • fansubs and BT (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyrax777 ( 633996 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:48PM (#8260861) Homepage
    It revolutianed the way Fansubs are swapped No more waiting in endless que lines in IRC and dealing with the annoying ops and no more waiting for some kind soul to post it to usenet. Also made it alot easyer to remove once something got liscened just yank it from your tracker and boom the torrent is dead.

    • Re:fansubs and BT (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 )
      Amen to that. BT has been so successful with the anime fansubbing community that its been yanking people in DROVES off of IRC. Hell, I used to be a member of Anime Fury, which later became Phoenix Anime and Seichi Fansubs, and I almost NEVER go there anymore unless I'm looking for something hard to find thats older or licensed (yeah yeah I know). Animesuki.com has also played a large part of the revolution as it is pretty much THE central database for all of the trackers. And its really nice to see fans

  • de-sharing files (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:49PM (#8260893)
    "Last May, 29 percent of adult Internet users in the United States reported that they had engaged in file sharing; that figure dropped to 14 percent in a survey conducted in November and December."

    So did 15 percent of people get their file sharing virginity back?

    • Re:de-sharing files (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JLyle ( 267134 )
      "Last May, 29 percent of adult Internet users in the United States reported that they had engaged in file sharing; that figure dropped to 14 percent in a survey conducted in November and December."

      So did 15 percent of people get their file sharing virginity back?

      No, they just stopped blabbing to pollsters about it.

  • Evil genius (Score:5, Interesting)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:49PM (#8260896)
    For his part, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent users are not anonymous and that their numeric Internet addresses are easily viewable by anyone who cares.

    The evil genius of the whole BitTorrent idea is the lack of anonymity. Like the article points out, it's perfect for Linux distros and anime fansubs. But if you think nobody can know what you're sharing or who you are, you're a fool.

    I use the Mac OS X version, so I don't get to see this, but a friend showed me his Windows version and you could not only see who was connected, but what their bandwidth use was too. Apparently some people know how to become super-leeches. They'll appear, and everybody else's download speed suddenly goes to zero while they suck up the whole file. Then they go away. That this is even visible to a regular client should be thought-provoking.

    It took me months to find it (because nobody bothered to document it!), but fortunately I found the bandwidth limiter in the OS X version. (Click on that widget on the right side of the window title bar.) Now I can seed files without completely hosing my DSL connection.

    The thing I think I like most about BitTorrent compared to other "forced sharing" models like Napster is that you get to choose what you want to share. You go to a tracker and see "hey there's no seeds on that one show I like", then share the file at 5K. That way even the leeches have to wait. Animesuki.com even has a "seeds needed" page for anything that's worse than about 10 or 15 to zero.

    • Re:Evil genius (Score:4, Insightful)

      by molafson ( 716807 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:03PM (#8261051)
      I use the Mac OS X version, so I don't get to see this, but a friend showed me his Windows version and you could not only see who was connected, but what their bandwidth use was too.

      If you want a client with more features (as above) check out Azureus [sourceforge.net]. It's written in Java, and it works really well for OS X. The vanilla BitTorrent client is also fine, but lacks important options like setting bandwidth caps, seeding ratios, etc.

  • Torrent files and trackers not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)

    by swilver ( 617741 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @02:53PM (#8260936)
    Bram seems surprised that sites like suprnova [suprnova.org] stay up, while all they are providing is a few tiny files with a load of checksums that nobody owns any rights over.

    Even trackers are not doing anything illegal, as they are just collecting lists of people downloading the same file and provide this list to anyone who is interested (there's no illegal content there either).

    The only illegal content comes from the users themselves, and its chopped in thousands of pieces, making them hard to identify.

  • Torrent pool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greg_barton ( 5551 ) * <greg_barton&yahoo,com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:00PM (#8261013) Homepage Journal
    One big problem with BitTorrent is the opposite of normal client/server file sharing: if a file isn't popular, it downloads slower.

    Why not extend the concept to a set of files? Who says that the file you download also has to be the file you upload? If a site is offering a set of torrents, maybe while a client is downloading the most popular file of the moment they can be serving portions of less popular files. (9 to 1, popular to unpopular maybe, if another client is uploading them, that is...) Sure, that would take some bandwidth from the popular files, but they have enough to spare.

    For example, I just recently downloaded the Mandrake 9.2.1 power pack ISOs for club members. Download time sucked! If that torrent could share bandwith with the public Mandrake 9.2 ISOs, that'd be keen.

  • technology is what it is (Score:3, Insightful)

    by monkeytalks ( 746972 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:00PM (#8261016) Homepage Journal
    Bittorrent kindof sucks for me because I have DSL which has a limited upload capacity and a large download capacity. I'd like it a lot more if I had a different kind of broadband connection. The "how could he have not forseen" argument is ridiculous. Anything powerful can be used for legal or illegal means. Do you not think http and ftp have been used to infringe copyright? If you're going to criticize for that, let's go ahead and talk about what evil inventions the ink pen and printing press were. The interesting thing to me about the illegal uses of Bittorrent are how those prosecutions will be handled. Imagine a world in which every time you bought drugs, you had to sell some of them to someone else. Then the issue becomes: were you buying with intent? When you "download" (for that's what it will be to the layman regardless of technicality) with Bittorrent, are you intentionally redistributing or is the redistribution an unintended consequence of the lesser crime of simply partaking of the copyright protected work? Authority figures and courtrooms both tend to focus their efforts on the "sellers" rather than the "users." What do you do when every user is also a seller? I get the point that this isn't really anonymous, but neither was Kazaa. It's more a matter of civil disobedience. Speeding is illegal but I've been on many a highway in which you couldn't spot a soul driving under the limit. Most of them... most of the time don't get tickets. "Everybody's doing it," may not be a legal or moral defense, but it's much easier to hide in a crowd.

  • My questions for Bram Cohen (Score:5, Funny)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:12PM (#8261155) Journal
    1. What role do you think peer-to-peer encryption will play in the p2p sharing networks of the future?

    2. Did you know that you have the same first name as Bram Stoker, the author of "Dracula"?

    3. To what degree do you think having "identity verification" (that is, verification of the nodes on a p2p network) is valuable in building reliable networks?

    4. Isn't Dracula cool?

    5. Who do you think would win in a fight - Dracula or Wolfman?

  • Fine tune your computer for BT (Score:3, Informative)

    by halo8 ( 445515 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:19PM (#8261232)
    Here is a great link for for BT have all 8 ports open up and your download/upload rate will sky rocket. [dyndns.org]

    This worked for me a month ago

  • Severe BT bottleneck: trackers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:56PM (#8261679)
    At first, when I found BT, I was thrilled (once I figured the damn thing out). But now, I'm noticing that more and more trackers are bogging down, so even with hundreds of "leechers" and several "seeds", speeds can hover anywhere from 1-5KBps. That, and frequent tracker errors point out that trackers are apparently very resource intensive and can get bogged down quickly. Does anybody know if BT trackers are due to be improved any time soon? Many, many, many links on suprnova.org, point to trackers that are already swamped or dead, making BT not much better (or worse) than straight FTP.

  • Great idea (Score:3, Informative)

    by 16K Ram Pack ( 690082 ) <tim DOT almond AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @04:11PM (#8261879) Homepage
    I use it to download Open Office and I'm using it for getting Fedora at the moment.

    I love it, and it works great for the OSS community.

    Personally when I've finished a download, I leave my machine on for a few hours or overnight just to give back plenty o' bandwidth.

    BTW I prefer Azureus over Bram's client.

    PS If you get a BSOD using BT in Windows, it could be your network card. I had to get new drivers. Search for 'Bittorrent blue screen' on google.

  • I Love BitTorrent (Score:4, Informative)

    by ChaosDiscord ( 4913 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @05:11PM (#8262888) Homepage Journal

    I'm a bit fan of computer games. So I download a game demo or so a week. Modern games are big, and so are their demos. Sucking down a 500MB demo from various download mirrors sucks. Because of the huge bandwidth costs to serve the files the various mirrors force me to sign in, view ads, wait in queues, use Windows only spyware filled download programs (I often download in Linux in the background while doing Real World). Software publishers themselves generally don't release the demos themselves (because of the cost), they offload it onto one of these icky download sites. This entire process sucks.

    Then came BitTorrent. If I can find a good source [aixgaming.com] all is well. The software works great under Linux, it's open source, no spyware, and if the file is popular instead of waiting in line the download actually goes faster. BitTorrent is just about the only thing I do that saturates my cable modem bandwidth. Pulling down a huge demo in less than an hour is great. No longer do I fire off a download, then let my computer work on it for the rest of the night.

    Now if software publishers would realize the joy of BitTorrent and release the torrents themselves everything would be better.

    As a way to illegally share content BitTorrent isn't so good. But as a way to acquire legal but big content there is nothing like it.

    It's damn good software. It was worth a donation to Bram [bitconjurer.org].

  • eDonkey 2000 (Score:3, Informative)

    by danila ( 69889 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @06:04PM (#8263727) Homepage
    As usually, the slashdot crowd forgets about existence of a superior alternative. Mozilla vs. Opera, BitTorrent vs. ED2K, people here are so entrenched in their sympathies as to abandon the last shreds of objectivity.

    eDonkey network, together with Overnet are technically every bit as good as BT is. Add to that some things done and thought out significantly better, add to that a thriving open-source development community with several different clients, with many people activily working on the code, and you will see a solution which is hands down better than BT.

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