BitTorrent Gains Corporate Support 437
BitWarrior writes "Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard, the creator of many legendary games such as the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft. BitTorrent is becoming a hit among companies required to distribute large quantities of data to their customers. Valve also jumped on the BitTorrent bandwagon last month(NYTimes, first born required, blah blah), hiring its creator, Bram Cohen. The one downside to Blizzards move is that BitTorrent has been added to many Universities black lists of clients to allow through their networks. Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
Seperated at birth? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seperated at birth? (Score:4, Funny)
Cuz, there can be only one...
Re:Seperated at birth? (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Acceptance of p2p (Score:4, Informative)
Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
someone was describing to me the other day how kaaza and similar networks could be defeated and his plan sounded good. he seemed to think that this would end online file sharing. the problem is that people have been sharing files on FTP and Usenet for a lot longer than the idea of P2P was even born. with the advent of things like bittorent and freenet its obvious that people will always create a way to share information on the net. the genies out of the bottle and you cant put it back in.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm rambling and I don't really have a point so don't bring up my flawed thinking because I'm tired and in Vegas.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Funny)
What, you want him to break the law? [slashdot.org]
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Still early for P2P apps, but BT gets a lot right (Score:5, Insightful)
The various bits are there scattered across different p2p networks. IMNSHO, all p2p networks/clients ought to have:
-Swarming (as defined/used in BitTorrent)
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
-Open-source clients with no ads/spyware
-Decentralized/self-organizing networks (no central point of failure, or at least minimal)
-Browser/web server hooks to autoswarm web content (there ought to be bittorrent:// links)
All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.
Re:Still early for P2P apps, but BT gets a lot rig (Score:5, Interesting)
- swarming a la BitTorrent - open source, check
- anonymity a la Freenet - open source, check
- browser support, Mozilla - open source, check
- server-side support (setting correct content type for bittorrent links), Apache - open source, check
It's all at our fingertips- now we just need to put it all together in an elegant way (do I smell a new sourceforge project!), and we will be in P2P heaven.Re:Still early for P2P apps, but BT gets a lot rig (Score:5, Informative)
Just a clarification - Freenet [freenetproject.org] supports swarming.
Big files (>1 meg) are broken into several blocks (of 1 meg size each), with redundant blocks added to decrease the chance of one missing block making the whole file useless, and these block are treated as independent files by the network, allowing them to be up- and downloaded separately.
This technology is called splitfiles, or FEC splitfiles, where FEC stands for Forward Error Correction (redundancy).
More or less (Score:5, Informative)
Downloaders on Freenet are not the same people as uploaders (which again are different from inserters) - the nodes uploading doesn't care about demand, as long as it is requested enough to remains in cache.
Indirectly, it provides some of the same benfits because popular files will be distributed to more nodes, giving a better statistical chance of hitting a good source.
Rather than a gathered swarm, it acts more like a contagion - given enough popularity (contagiousness) it'll be at nodes "close" to you. The results may seem similar, but there are quite different effects at work.
Kjella
Reinventing Mojo Nation (Score:3, Informative)
But now that some pieces have been done, putting them back together might
the obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Many universities (my own alma mater being an exception) tend not particularly progressive in any area but instruction. IT departments at universities often have very limited staff and budget, and block P2P services as much due to the hassle or threat of lawsuits as to cut down on bandwidth (the nerve of people to actually use the network connection!)
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Re:the obvious answer (Score:3, Interesting)
When you're a college student, your dormroom computer usually has the ability to push out five or six megabits of data per second onto the Internet presuming you can find an off-campus host that's able to keep up with that kind of traffic to be on the other end.
Yes, there is a "How dare you use the bandwidth we gave you access to?" factor to that... if everybody on campus
Re:the obvious answer (Score:5, Interesting)
So usage has increased. The number of users has increased. But the actual speed of the network has increased greatly. I frequently reach download speeds of 800kB/s (yes bytes) if the servers I'm connecting to can handle it. This is at a major US university whose peers are capping and blocking everything in sight. It is very possible to offer students an amazing connection, even in today's environment. Most schools, however, are not willing to make the commitment.
Internet 2 vs. Smaller Internet feeds (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the obvious answer (Score:5, Interesting)
I know there are many programs out there with the explicit purpose of either throttling, or cutting off completely, ip addresses that suck up a given value of data in a given value of time.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the obvious answer (Score:3)
I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not just block outgoing transfers, and encourage people to leave their torrent clients open with their files, so that if people want the newest demo or movie trailer or whatever, they can find it via LAN bandwidth. Let the earliest finders take the brunt of it and then work from there. A system like BT is perfectly suited to this and I am shocked that no one does it.
Re:the obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps a better solution would be to take the approach many broadband providers are using. Set a maximum percentage of the bandwidth any one user can abuse, say 10%. If
Re:the obvious answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Great. (Score:5, Interesting)
If all of those annoying webbased 'portal' like downloads would just start seeding torrents, we'd all get great download speeds and they would have users helping them share the files.
Now if only I could show people why its a stupid idea to zip a large file before torrenting it.. (Hint: if I've got a 300meg movie(for this example, I'll say something off of csflicks.net), and the torrent is for a
Re:Great. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great. (Score:3, Insightful)
BT and asymmetry (Score:3, Interesting)
The other is more fundamental, which is that swarming protocols work because every peer is pumping out traffic, rather than only the central server, so on the average, you can only
NYTimes Login (Score:5, Informative)
Information wants to be free. [bugmenot.com]
Re:NYTimes Login (Score:5, Funny)
No it doesn't; I just changed the password on john; QED.
You can thank me later.
Would be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Would be nice... (Score:4, Informative)
Out of a frying pan, into a fire? (Score:5, Insightful)
But universities still fell a bit awkward about this. See, in the university's opinion, a student's dormroom bandwidth isn't really their property, it's an educational tool. So, even though the copyright concern is waived off on this kind of P2P sharing, they've still got a problem with it.
When it comes down to it, a student's dormroom Internet conection leads to the big fat Internet pipe that is being paid for by the school, and in the case of a state school that's mostly government money. Every school has a rarely enforced clause in their terms of service for their Internet access that says its intended for educational use. There's defintely a clause that says that commercial use is strictly prohibited. Students can't run a a for-profit web hosting service out of their doomroom computers for example.
So, actually, the commerical embrace of Bit Torrent is going to clear up one complaint universities have about P2P, but it's going to drive them straight into another. Now, instead of hurting a company's copyrights, it's going to be used to help a for-profit company avoid costs. That's another thing that gives universities that "maybe we should block this..." feeling.
That's easily handled (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that the most proximate reason for universities to ban p2p is the fact that it clogs their feed to the outside world.
Close that outward feed, and then all is better than it was before!
Is this a reasonable solution? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why doesn't a university block *all* outside P2P altogether, and provide a facility whereby people can request a single download of legally-clear files via e.g. BitTorrent? An admin could download the requested, legally-clear files when they had time available, put them on a ftp server, and then anyone within the campus could just download from that server. The types of legally-clear files I'm thinking of would
Blindingly obvious? (Score:3, Interesting)
The bigger problem is just reality. Having to rely on a third party to initiate your downloads would be a major hassle.
But your suggestion leads directly to a better idea: whenever a BT stream gets start
What the... (Score:3, Funny)
A company a distribution method that is both smart and approved by the target audience?
Doesn't that violate some kind of business "decision making" law?
Re:What the... (Score:5, Informative)
Inherently bad...no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inherently bad...no... (Score:3, Interesting)
I should write a letter
Re:Inherently bad...no... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Good evidence that P2P is not bad, the user is (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, a gun can be used to kill, but it is the user of the gun to blame for the crime. If a gun is allowed to be owned by law (a device designed to kill!), then a mere device to enable efficient publish/subscribe file distribution
Internet costs money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ergo...if we would enable/promote p2p, it would rapidly increase our costs to supply Internet to our public.
Unfortunate, really, but when you have to pay for something, sometimes it changes how you look at it.
Legality Not the Only Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
As many comments have pointed out, it also has the potential to drain huge amounts of bandwidth.
Furthermore, I'm not a BT expert, but I've heard murmers about huge issues regarding Windows users and hard disk fragmentation brought on by extended use of BT. I ran defrag the other day for the first time since installing BT and I did notice the fragmentation percentage was unusally high. Although it's not really any business of post-secondary network administrators, maybe they're just saving themselves from another headache. Can anyone more knowledgable comment on this?
Re:Legality Not the Only Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it this way... since Bit Torrent doesn't get the parts of file in sequence, even on a blank disk where there's nothing to get in the way, the client is still going to write the data to the disk in the order it was recieved, not the order it's supposed to be read back. By definition, you're going to get a fragmented file since it's going to be out of proper sequence. ScanDisk will have some work to do when you're done downloading, always.
I can't see why any college administrators would care much about fragmentation on a user's HD however unless their support desk is getting calls about that kind of non-network issue...
Re:Legality Not the Only Problem (Score:4, Informative)
The official BT client no longer does this. It now only uses as much disk space as has been downloaded rather than allocating the whole file at once.
Re:Legality Not the Only Problem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Legality Not the Only Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be very surprised if BT itself were to blame. That you're using BT to create vey large files regularlly, then proceeding to unpack them and delete them probably is the source. Myself, I use BitTorrent to download demos of games. When I install the demo the game will typically create a few hundred files. Then I play the demo, then delete the
There are two ways.... (Score:3, Informative)
Pros:
Very little fragmentation
Cons:
Takes up all the space at once
Constant need to reposition HDD heads
2. To allocate as needed
Pros:
Takes up no more space than necessary
Can dump data to disk sequentially
Cons:
Fragments disk. Badly.
Either way, people will complain it's not the other way around.
Kjella
Didn't work for Kazaa, why should it for BT? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been six months since this story, [slashdot.org] and since then Kazaa:
might be sued by the US government for facilitating IP infringement [washingtontimes.com],
is being sued in Australia for IP infringement [star-techcentral.com], and
is being sued [miami.com] for possible IP infringement of the Kazaa software itself.
BitTorrent *is* cast in the same light as Kazaa, Morpheus etc. according to the media, and as such it will not (in the near future) be seen as legitimate, no matter how Atari or Blizzard uses p2p. Yes, p2p has legitimate uses, but until the world wakes up and realises that you can do more than download Britney_Spears_L33T-N3w-S0ng!.mp3, it will remain as shady as Napster 1.0.
Re:Didn't work for Kazaa, why should it for BT? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right that educating the public will take time, but it is worth it.
A better protocol for legitimate download swarming (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A better protocol for legitimate download swarm (Score:3)
Unfortunately, PDTP seems a bit far from completion [pdtp.org]
Re:A better protocol for legitimate download swarm (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, let's think about this for a second.
1. All new versions of the MacOS have the python interpreter included
2. Many, if not most, modern Linux distributions install python by default
Who does that leave? Windows users. Sure, that's a whopping 90% ++ share of the market, but think about it: installing python on just a fraction of those machines mitgates, in some small way, the vendor-language lock-in that MS has been hammering in fo
game companies won't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
If instead legal business and/or education software was being distributed through BitTorrent, then you would soon see a reversal of firewall policy.
Re:game companies won't do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah well.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The university I go to disabled bittorrent because they say thats where the MSBLASTER and MYDOOM viruses came from (this was said in a newsletter sent to all students in the dorms)
I'm not sure how they got this idea, but, crazy isn't it?
Misunderstanding perhaps (Score:4, Funny)
"Really, Joe? Must be those new worms."
"Yeah, and it's caused by this BitTorrent thingy!"
*pause*
*in unison*
"Ban it!"
(it's actually that leaked DOOM 3 alpha...)
What does "corporate support" mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is paying Bram to work on something that isn't BitTorrent a form of support?
Evil P2P! (Score:3, Informative)
not all P2P distribution is inherently bad
That depends on what you mean by bad... in my experience, not all BitTorrents are illegal, but most will require you to reset your router a bunch of times... (Yeah, I still think it's worth it for a protocol that makes you give back while you take, but just saying...)
Colleges will still filter or block torrents (Score:3, Interesting)
BT wins Wired Rave award (Score:3, Interesting)
Universities (Score:5, Interesting)
Or what about... (Score:4, Informative)
Because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not a bittorrent proxy? (Score:3, Informative)
Just look for a
Re:Why not a bittorrent proxy? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that's the way to do it, except rather than simply saving it locally, have it rewrite the torrents and point clients at a tracker on the proxy. With a little thought, you could have the tracker dynamically adjust WAN traffic based on the number of local clients asking for the file.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Being Cheap & What Happened to Shareware (Score:4, Insightful)
Now -- not only can they maintain positive control over the distribution (guaranteeing advertising as people come to their sites to get the demos) but also can get the people downloading to help foot the bill for the bandwidth. Again, great if you don't pay for the bandwidth -- but pretty damned sucky if you're a college who has to pay for all the bandwidth your customers use.
"Exclusive" demos and restrictive distribution are the causes of this. If any enthusiast site that wanted to could pick up the binary for a new demo and serve it from their server, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Let the old shareware model return -- like back in the days where every BBS around had Commander Keen and Wolf3d demos available for download.
Don't screw the end user.
Jackholes (Score:4, Insightful)
Avoid these morons and stop giving them money until they drop the suits and make resitution over the projects they tried to destroy.
My University & BitTorrent (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As an attorney... (Score:5, Funny)
The day that Linus Torvalds joins the board of directors at SCO.
Re:As an attorney... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, but I seem to recall some torrents being placed here to lessen the load on some Slashdotted sites, so people could view the videos, docs, etc from those buried sites - without adding to the source's pain.
As an attorney, perhaps you should read up on the benefits before opening your yap. Perhaps this will make sense: There are other uses for it than just piracy, just as there's more use for electricity than executing murderers.
As a network engineer... (Score:5, Informative)
For a company that chooses to distribute files that way, it means that (after an initial period until there are a few seeds) an immense amount of load will be taken off their servers. Furthermore none of this has to do with someone intentionally trying to flood a server with packets. If you choose to download or seed a torrent this is entirely your choice.
As for the copyright issue, even though BitTorrent is quite commonly used to shade DVD rips, many people like yours truly use it in a legal fashion to download Linux ISOs or the like.
Instead of condemning this I would actually encourage the legal use of such a great tool as it is being displayed here.
Re:Lack of Morality (Score:5, Insightful)
While what you're saying is probably true, in many Otaku's defense I'd like to point out that most anime bit torrents out there are for fansub releases for series that are unlicensed in North America. These fansubbing groups obtain original Japanese versions of programs, write English subtitles themselves and release it to the community often with a message requesting that distribution be ceased when the title becomes licensed. This allows many anime fans around the world to appreciate and experience these shows almost as soon as they come out in Japan, as licensing can take quite some time. Furthermore, there are still many series that have never recieved licenses for any English format, and may never, and programs like Bit Torrent are may be the only way for the English speaking anime fan to enjoy a series without spending many years learning Japanese.
While many young people do indeed use Bit Torrent for piracy, I don't think it's fair to generalize that a lack of morality for intellectual property rights is at heart. But many of the arguments have already been presented by people far more eloquent than I am. My point is merely that Peer-To-Peer services like Bit Torrent have plenty of potential for good, and I think it's a great thing that Blizzard is demonstrating how it can be used legally and effectively. Peer to Peer file trading has been incorrectly stigmatized before it has been completely understood, it seems. Let's not forget the birth of the videocassette (and I know this has been mentioned countless times before). People still do use it for piracy, but I think the benefits that we've gotten out of it far outweigh the few bad seeds.
Re:Lack of Morality (Score:3, Informative)
Parent is flamebait (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:answer (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone points out that they can rate limit the upstream bittorrent into a bittrickle(sic) without user intervention and that this combined with the current choking algorithm should push clients towards other internal peers if they exist. So in the long run, it could save them bandwidth costs.
Of course, this does rely upon them also accepting that bittorrent is used for linux ISO's and other "educationally legitimate" purposes.
Q.
Re:answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Forgive my anonymous posting, but I wish to speak my mind. The first hand experience I have with this presently is that those making the decisions have two and only two factors on their mind.
Legal damages/responsibilities/eccetera from users on their networks violating copyright. There's a bit of a catch 22 in terms of policing this, ironically. Basically it's let it all through and say, "Sorry, we aren't a *publisher* and therefore lack editorial whatever." or shut it down completely because one illegal download through a filter puts indemnity (?) on their heads. So, which has fewer headaches.. practically no net, or uncensored net?
Cost of bandwidth. Don't even bother being reasonable here. We have had a throttling system here, preventing the "long distance phonebill of doom". You go over your reasonable amount? No net for the week. Nonetheless, the disabling of network resources (er, the installation of a firewall) was touted as a fantastic way to reduce network traffic (and thus costs, in an increasingly underfunded arena).
Apparently noone has thought to the point of just whiting out all the text in the libriray, because it may save them from lawsuits...
The short of it is that universities are/will become useless as connectivity providers for their students, and one can only hope to be refunded the cost to acquire alternative service from an external provider.
Yes, this is all a bit off topic, but I've just recently been denied my beloved Bittorrent, so hopefully I'll get a little mod slack.
Scalability and Localization (and Piracy) (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it's fairly good for letting universities and other fast-internal limited-external environments limit the amount of material they need to download from outside - and it's even better at letting them distribute software to the outside without burning infinite amounts of bandwidth, and serve files to internal users somewhat less server capacity, so it's a tool that makes sense for them to encourage.
There's still Research to be done in how to maximize clustering and localization of clients, so that most of the uploading and downloading stays within the fast LANs compared to the amount that uses the wide area network. BitTorrent has a certain amount of tuning in this direction that's driven by overall performance characteristics (obviously it makes sense to use fast links when you have them, but to do some balancing so that slow and isolated users get some content also and so rarer file segments get found if they're available), but most of the design work went into maximizing performance for the cloud as a whole and for end-users (more for non-leaching end-users) rather than for intermediate groupings of users.
Napster, while it was alive, did some work on this to avoid (ok, delay :-) getting thrown out of universities. Since it had centralized databases handling the indexing function, it was able to take identified groups of users and let them do most of their downloading within the group instead of outside. This was a Good Thing, particularly because Napster's client software (and therefore users) mainly knew peer performance by interface bandwidth, and sometimes by ping time, so they were more likely to grab a song from somebody on a 100 Mbps LAN, not knowing that there was an overloaded T1 in between until their ping times got ugly.
Re:Scalability and Localization (and Piracy) (Score:4, Interesting)
Barring that, a couple of trace routes sent back to the server could eventually redirect traffic in an orderly manner.
Re:answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Another possibility would be to have some sort of transparent BT proxy for the network, again the same sorts of bennefits could be achieved (as well as allowing for some sort of whitelist/blacklisting of 'inappropriate' torrents).
Re:answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask my lab's sysadmin, who cut off BT's ports when we got a cease 'n desist order from a movie company. No, not the MPAA, a SPECIFIC MOVIE STUDIO. Not even a MAJOR one. Because someone was putting a 100k up pipe on a movie torrent. Because he/she was a SLOW human being.
University networks are tricky to control (what're you gonna do, place controlled profiles in the dorm room users' computers?!) and only seen as one entity. If P2P program X has ONE pirate, the whole app goes down on the network. This isn't like ftp where someone's password account can be traced, this is P2P where getting the IP of the one P2Ping is just a bit trickier, to the point where it's not worth the effort when you can just kill the ports and any enusing lawsuits that'd possibly follow.
Re:answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:answer (Score:4, Interesting)
I installed Valve's steam on another machine last night and I got a popup that said "Preorder new game now! Please note that unless you explicitly disable it, we'll download a locked copy of the game for you anyway."
So they want everyone to be able to pay and instantly play, and they're probably using bittorrent technology to get the locked copies to them. But that's likely the extent of what they can do with it.
In terms of in-game content distribution, though (new maps, custom decals, etc.) the bittorrent model is ideal.
Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. If the company's connection can only handle so much, you'll probably find out it's faster to download over BT than say ftp or http.
Call me impatient, but I call that a benefit.
2. If the company has to pay for a 100 mbit connection (which wouldn't exactly be free) for pure http download, but could suffice with a 10 mbit connection with BT, that would save them money. Maybe they'd even cut in some slack for you as well, who knows?
But as far as BT goes, your main benefit is speed.
We all say "P2P is the future.", "Distributed ditribution is such a good idea" and so on.. Well, now we got it. We got out way, at least with Blizzard.
So now what's this moaning i hear about "my bandwidth"? Did you guys forget to mention that you didn't want to participate when you said P2P was the future?
Like most of you ever need the upstream bandwidth anyway.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:answer (Score:4, Interesting)
As a University network administrator I thought I might answer this...
Universities already know that Bittorrent is not inherently bad. The problem is that there is a no way of distinguishing between a legitimate torrent (of say, a Linux distro) and a torrent of "unauthorised copyright material". If there were a way to easily differentiate between the two then I'm sure that many Universities would be quite willing to lift restrictions on bittorrents. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
I can guarantee, that if we altered our Bittorrent bandwidth restrictions to allow unfettered download/upload, our pipe would be saturated within a day.
Re:answer (Score:5, Interesting)
At Carnegie Mellon, all students get globally routable IP addresses in the dorms. There are no filters on the traffic (except bogon filters that an respectable ISP should have to keep spoofed traffic from leaving a subnet).
We have a probe on our egress router that tracks daily inbound and outbound traffic sums per IP address. We have a policy that if a student exceeds more than 7.5 Gigabytes of traffic in either direction (calculated separately) over a 5 day period (1.5 GBs/day) they will get a warning message that reminds them of the policy. If after 3 days, they exceed 1.5GBs in one day, they get a warning, then 3 days later, if they keep on exceeding, we yank their machine off the network (block their ip on the router and take them out of the dhcp server config).
We used to do the message sending and yanking by hand. It would take about 2 hours per week of my time. Now it is all automated and takes no time.
Our rationale is that trying to do application policing is a losing strategy. It will not be long until the kazaas of the world are port hopping and encrypting their data, or encrypting the data and sending it over port 443. It is a losing game.
Here is a link to the presentation material:
http://www.net.cmu.edu/pres/jt0803/
Re:answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yay! (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies are not out modifying BitTorrent. They have no reason to favor MIT over GPL.
The reason BitTorrent is a big deal is:
* It doesn't necessarily easily expose you to tons of pirated content. With Kazaa, pirated copies of Blizzard's games are only a search away.
* It doesn't have spyware/adware/whatnot.
* It integrates nicely with websites. You click, program works.
* Because the interface is from a website, which is effectively a trusted source of information, one doesn't
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Informative)
No, I disagree strongly.
Companies are not out modifying BitTorrent. They have no reason to favor MIT over GPL.
That would have been a good point, IF you were right about companies not modifying BitTorrent. Check out Blizzard!
Re:BitTorrent (Score:3, Insightful)
Traditional downloads stop when you've got the whole file. Bittorrents will keep sending and sending as long as anyone else is downloading.
If you don't sit there waiting for the end (or have an alternate client), then the usage is unbounded.