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BitTorrent Will Not Go AwayBitTorrent Will Not Go AwayBitTorrent Will Not Go Away 03/17/2005 03:08 AM There was an article I read in Yahoo News from the Washington Post on BitTorrents. It explains that too many legit uses exist for BitTorrent for the service to be shut down. The MPAA is admitting that there are good and bad uses for BitTorrent and that they will only go after people that are helping users to download illegal movies. It's good to see a mianstream media outlet like the Washington Post understand the real concept and design behind BitTorrents. This represents a shift from previous practices, in which the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) and other groups have tried to have entire products -- for example, the first Diamond Rio MP3 player or the networked ReplayTV (news - web sites) video recorder -- taken off the market.One reason for this change of heart may be that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn't amount to a token minority. It's central to this program's existence. Developers of versions of the Linux (news - web sites) operating system were some of the first to jump on BitTorrent as a way to ship out vast amounts of data. A Linux distribution can easily span four CD-ROMs; instead, companies such as Red Hat offer BitTorrent downloads of their work. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)BitTorrent Will Not Go AwayGrok Headline matches for BitTorrent Will Not Go AwayBitTorrent is dead. Long live
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| Brian Dear says Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, will be distributed via BitTorrent: |
| In a stunning move, controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore announced today that his latest film, "Fahrenheit 9/11", will be released by BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network. |
| From Brian's Denounce.com. |
| [Later...] Once again, we need to point out that Denounce is a satire site. Hence the name. Here's the disclaimer, from top right on the index page: |
| Recognized around the world as the best source for completely fictional news and information. |
| When you're not looking for a reliable, accurate site for industry news, there's only one place to go: Denounce. |
| All fake. All the time. |
| Founded in 1980. Eight years before The Onion. Deal with it. |
1. download BIT TORRENT 3.4.2.exe (Link) and installLink
2. download Fahrenheit.911.CAM-POT(1).torrent (Li nk) on your desktop
3. open it with BitTorrent
4. start download
5. download "wrar330d.exe" (Link) open it
6. unpack the file "pot.911a.rar" in the CD1 file (as well as the "pot.911b.rar" in the CD2 file - this is why there are 36 parts on each desk. In order to assemble it, opening the file will automatically identify all the segments and put them together) this will create a "pot.911a" (and a "pot.911b") file
7. download "vlc-0.7.2-win32.exe" (Link) install
8. open "CD1.cue" from the "pot.911a" file
I have used BitTorrent quite a bit and really like it's performance for those big downloads. If you are not up to speed on BitTorrent this Faq is the place to start. [BitTorrent Faq]
Dear Bay Area friends: I am coming to visit you! [Scripting News]
No - this isn't a Dave Winer lovefest - but I DID catch something in the subtext which said:
I was looking through MLDonkey wiki when I ran into this technical yet compact explanation of how BitTorrent protocol works. I already know how BT works but I thought my fellow geeks might find this useful since the diagrams at the official BT site aren't that useful:
It [BitTorrent] divides shared data (a single file or a directory) into pieces, typically of 256 KiB. A SHA-1 checksum is computed for each piece, and used to check the piece has been correctly downloaded. The checksums are stored in a .torrent file, along with filenames. The .torrent file also nominates a tracker, a Web resource that introduces peers to each other. Peers contact each other, learn what pieces they have available, request the rarest (least commonly seen) pieces first, and send requested pieces.
Just in case you are wondering, MLDonkey is a universal client of sort for many P2P networks including FastTrack, eDonkey2000, Gnutella, and Direct Connect. It supports BitTorrent too but then BitTorrent is not really a network. While MLDonkey is open source, it's written in Ocaml which is powerful but non-mainstream.
...there's always a 'but' isn't there?
I had attempted to use BitTorrent a couple of times before, but never spent more than a few minutes with it, not enough to understand what was going on. Yesterday night though, I gave it a little more time and some tips from Russ and Matt I could get it going. I had to adjust some settings, such as the bandwidth allocated for uploads, which defaulted at 12 KB/sec and immediately started to suck up my entire upload capability (I set it at 7 KB/sec). I chose a couple of files (three actually) and let it download overnight. This morning, things were well on their way, two files done, the remaining one halfway through. But then it hit me: my transfers are limited!
I have a 4GB transfer limit (as it's common here in Ireland) on my DSL connection. So now I have downloaded, in one day, over 1.5 GB of data, and still have 1 GB to go. Then, there's the uploaded data, which also counts. EEk! By the time the second transfer is finished I will have spent over 75% of my monthly bandwidth allotment. With 60% of the month still to go!
Damn. I want to go back to my good old days of DSL in the Bay Area, where I had a symmetric 768 KB/sec DSL connection, with no transfer limits, at $40 a month. Okay, that's not realistic. :) But on the other hand, until transfer limits are removed (or at least raised) here, I won't be able to do much with BitTorrent. Too bad.
And, btw, this clearly has to have an impact on broadband usage. Forget about BitTorrent specifically, other types of media transfers are also quite heavy, and having that sword hanging over your neck (the sword being whatever they charge per megabyte after you cross the transfer limit) users will be more likely to treat broadband as a kind of always-on modem, rather than as true broadband. Ireland is great, for technology in particular, but it definitely needs some serious improvements to both infrastructure and access to that infrastructure (see my post on mobile handset costs yesterday) to be truly competitive. There's a qualitative jump (both on the supplier and the consumer side of a market) that happens when connectivity is pervasive, always-on, fast, and relatively inexpensive, and Ireland isn't there yet. Here's hoping we won't have to wait much longer.
wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html
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Wired seems to be a little soft on DRM these days; the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you've bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you're publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: "If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled."
There's a strong tie here for the use-case for BitTorrent. I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.
Which brings me back to Clive's casual note that Microsoft DRM can keep media "out of pirate hands." It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.
Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate." Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.Link (via Waxy)Cohen seems curiously unmoved by the storm raging around him. "With BitTorrent, the cat's out of the bag," he shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about piracy and the future of media, and at first I think he's avoiding the subject because it's so legally sensitive. But after a while, I realize it simply doesn't interest him much.
He'd rather just work on his code. He'd rather buckle down and figure out new ways to make BitTorrent more efficient. He'd rather focus on something that demands crazy, hair-pulling logic.
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