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88 Comments
- Qenton, on 10/12/2007, -3/+65First rule of Usenet ... don't talk about Usenet.
- gldfshnpcklejar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+46The "nobel prize" of computing is called the turing award. Good Game.
- evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+35'Furthermore, every torrent needs a "seed"-- a peer with 100% of the file downloaded-- connected at all times. If there is no seed, no matter how many peers you have, none of the peers will never be able to download the entire file.'
Not true - if there are two peers connected, and each of them has a different half of the file, the entire file can still be downloaded. (Obviously scales to N peers, 1/N parts.) - meshman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+36"As far as I'm concerned, there should be a Nobel prize for computing, and the inventor of BitTorrent should be its first recipient."
*ahem*
"Usenet was the first Internet peer-to-peer technology. Originally developed just to share files between computers, it evolved into a natural net-wide hierarchy of eight major categories plus a catch-call." - gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27everyone loves bittorrent ... except ISP's who throttle it to death, like Rogers :(
- reboare, on 10/12/2007, -1/+26So it was you who stopped my illegal download of Cherry Picking Grannies! DAmn you, DAMN U 2 HELL!!!
- donnydarko319, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25I'm still amazed that a lot of people still use mainly Limewire and related clients to download content.
My revelation came to me when I had downloaded a rather lengthy movie off of Limewire, then saw someone begin to download it fro me about a week later. It had taken me three weeks to download this movie, mainly from lack of peers/slow upload speeds, so I was probably this guys best chance to see this movie before next year.
Yet Limewire was eating up memory, so I closed it, then thought to myself "Why the hell should I leave it open for this guy? I've no incentive." Then I reflected on my three weeks of agonizing downloading, switched to torrents, and never looked back. - Dantetheinferno, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24If he loved it...
Why is he telling us it's faults more than its goods? - archlich, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22Oh yeah, and all the people that invented the TCP/IP protocol don't deserve any credit either /rollseyes
- staffell, on 10/12/2007, -4/+22Hell, I'll admit it:
I love bittorent - tidu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19That's one trippy GIF
- Anrkist, on 10/12/2007, -12/+28Usenet is generaly junk unless you pay for it.. it's also not as easy to get into like bittorrent.
If Usenet was really such a great protocol, more people would be using it. Oh yeah and the spam. No moderation. Crap retention.
And before anyone says it's faster.. I can hit 8Mbps (bits) depending on the community. - Plooo, on 10/12/2007, -17/+31Usenet= elitist jerks who think they're better than everyone else.
- stevets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I see all of these people saying nice things about Usenet getting dugg down. For what? Saying bad things about your mom? They are just saying that there is an alternative to Bit Torrent, which is safer, faster, and more reliable. Usenet.
Ya know, I would bet that the vast majority of users using Bit Torrent have no idea what Usenet even is. Screw having to wait for seeds and maintaining dozens of connections at once. Yeah, premium usenet isn't free, but for 15 bucks a month you can get a whole lot of free software, music, and movies. All while never having to worry about seeds, or fake content, or keeping peer guardian updated. Lets not forget that the speed is pretty constant; my 6Mb connection gets maxed out with eight connections - and it doesn't stop. So you Bit Torrent fanboys can digg me down if it makes you feel better about yourself. Meanwhile, I'll go download something.
Oh yeah, and ISP's don't employ any traffic shaping techniques on Usenet packets, much like they do with p2p. - M2Ys4U, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Number 4 is inaccurate.
There can be 100% of the file spread between peers with no seed availible and everyone can finish the download assuming everyone stays connected. - deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"Usenet is generaly junk unless you pay for it"
And whats' wrong with paying for it? Bandwidth isn't cheap. I'm willing to compensate a good usenet provider for a quality service. - emceepecks, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11I'll take BT over Usenet any day.
- MYarms, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Everybody loves BitTorrent, period.
Digg and its commenters are just an anomaly. - Namco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The trick is to find a good torrent client. I used Azureus (however the hell you spell it) until it started crashing on me. When I switched to uTorrent, I found that I was getting 10 times more seeders and peers than I ever did under AZ or Shareazaa. If a good torrent client gains popularity in the mainstream, then game over for any other type or media distribution.
- inmatarian, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9BitTorrent is bad _because_ it's become popular. It exposes your IP address to everyone else in the cluster. Granted, it's a good idea for distributed distribution, but Usenet is the better solution, placing complete cached copies within a couple of hops from the client to his own server.
Usenet Retention Policies, however, can be a problem. Though, no worse than all of the seeders disappearing. - usbserial, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah, I noticed that too.
Also: This is true of *any* p2p service. There is no way around it... its like saying "the file must be available for it to be able to be downloaded"... DUH. Show me a network where this isn't true; good luck. - Voodooengine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6BT is great i use it for everything. Every time i want an ISO, i look for the torrent link rather than the HTTP link. Sure its slower, but it saves the company some bandwidth, and i like to give back to the community.
Its legal, its fast most of the time, and its efficient. What's not to like? - dmbfan2007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Often times I don't care about the speed I get, I care about selection. There have been items that I've only been able to find if I go through a tracker & torrenting.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Torrents are only good with private trackers where leechers have to seed!! try to dl anything off a public tracker and your dl speed is just pathetic. Usenet+SSL is where its hot.
- johnhummel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I do agree with his point about the "seed" issue - there have been times I've been trying to grab a file (like a translation patch, fansub, or the like) and gotten stuck at 90% because the seeder vanished.
I'd hope that future algorithms for bittorrent would focus on this problem by seeding the least commonly picked up pieces first. For example, suppose you have the pieces A B C D E F G. If there are 8 clients, the initial seeder should not "repeat" a piece until all other pieces are distributed. So if piece A has already been uploaded, the initial seeder should ignore all of those requests until pieces B - G are uploaded to other torrents. Then, even should the seeder vanish, there are enough pieces to construct the original file(s).
All too often, though, it seems that this isn't the case - or perhaps it already works this way, and I'm just unlucky sometimes ;). - onionizer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The subject may have been overdiscussed, but this is an interesting article with many good points.
The first 2 problems highlighted are the most important imo.
1) bittorrent is a long tail client: very true. if you need a not-so-popular file a direct server download would be much easier.
2) bittorrent is still centralized: yes, this is a big limitation.
Unfortunately bittorrent is still the more popular way to share files, while there are more evoluted options available out there. Kademlia (the KAD network, used by emule and many others) is the most advanced system at the actual state of the art, and it dosen't require a centralized server, but it run entirely on peers, tho it isn't yet as popular as bittorrent.. - dtfinch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3plz reseed :-(
- macaddct1984, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4When I read the title, the first thing that came to my mind was
We [heart] BitTorrent, where Katamari rolls around picking up all the free software and movies he could roll on.
And that gif just confirmed it. - Amablue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Before I knew how p2p works, I thought all internet file sharing worked like Bittorrent. I'm surprised it took as long as it did for someone to come up with the idea.
- jhshukla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3by that logic every safety precaution and over engineering is a waste. RAIDs are a waste. a bridge capable of supporting 200000 tonnes supporting only 20000 tones at a time is a waste. i think you have never heard of redundancy or plan-B or similar measures.
- Phusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Bit Torrent? What's this Bit Torrent you speak of? It's great you say?
- krakround, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4BitTorrent is popular because you can get illicit goods with plausible deniability, not because it's a brilliant P2P protocol. If someone invented Perfectly Anonymous FTP then that would get the "Nobel Prize".
- JohnboiWaltune, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6uTorrent is a clever piece of software and the best implementation of the protocol. However, uTorrent is not open source, and has been sold to BitTorrent (the corporation), which has been legally pwned by the media cartels. In case you aren't clever enough to figure it out, they have the potential ability to easily monitor your downloading habits, even if you keep your IP-blocker ***** up to date. So maybe you should do a little more research before deciding on a client.
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/RIAA_buying_out_bit_torrent_clients - nayr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5go transmission!!!
lightweight; 'tis all you need. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Tor really isn't designed for moving files around, it's slow enough for text-only browsing, aside from the fact it's against "Tor-etiquette" to use file-sharing applications over it, it's bloody slow to do so too..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_P2P has a bunch of different "real" anonymous file-sharing applications, the biggest of which is probably : http://freenetproject.org/
- Ben - M2Ys4U, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"distributed distribution" eh
- surgen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3See superseeding, most of the clients I've used have this as an option, not as the default.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_seed#Effects
"A super seed will usually upload fewer bits before downloaders begin to complete than a standard seed by strictly limiting the uploading of duplicate pieces"
Some client software will even pretend that although you have the whole file, you only have the rarest x% compared to what portions of the file other peers have. - etruscan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4BitTorrent can be flakey... but the issue with your ISP is likely the primary one. For that, consider uTorrent and it's ability to perform forced packet encryption, which your ISP won't recognize as BitTorrent traffic (and hence, will be unable to limit its speed).
- deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2NNTP > BT
- posure, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Anyone I've introduced to newsgroups has never gone back to BitTorrent. Its well worth the money. I would agree that its junk though if you're trying to use your ISP's servers.
- jonaphin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Quote: "there should be a Nobel prize for computing"
And one for ignorants as well. For the rest of us, there is the Turing Award.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award - nayr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I do, but just for singles that I don't care to pay for... for the small bands, I buy from iTunes.
- Namco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, I'm pretty sure everyone read the article and dugg you down because you're stupid.
(but I agree, everyone's too goddam PC nowadays) - Durrok, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, those direct download links are always spam on Pirate Bay anyway.
- MilesLombardi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeh well, getting on these private trackers is quite difficult. The only one that I've ever got into is demonoid, and the torrents go ridiculously slow. IE 5 kb/s from demonoid, yet up to 100 on the public stuff. Bittorrent seems to be conspired against everywhere, I only recently found out that pretty much every UK ISP blocks bittorrent traffic, and it was an amazing speed boost to go from the 20kbps to about 60 (on a good day).
Any idea of how I could get into these private sites? lol, I would love to be a member of oink etc, but they seem impossible to get in to. - xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You were beat by about an hour man.
- MilesLombardi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh it's just one of those times you really want Digg to have a personal messaging system :S. Oh well.
It's miles.lombardi at gmail dot com
Thankyou very much. - PabloEscobar666, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Number 1: How does this guy expect to get the file faster if there is not many people sharing it? That not a problem of Bittorrent nor of any protocol. Few people sharing the file = few upload for you = slow download.
Number 4: Totally wrong. If your upload is higher your download gets higher. And it is totally possible to finish your download if there are no seeds (if the file can be completed with the pieces the other peers have).
Horrible article. If you want to write a critic first you have to understand what you are talking about. - Fhionnlaoch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Shaw and Rogers are totally different companies. Nevertheless, with RC4 encryption, you can get up to 200 kb/s on Shaw.
- aadnk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2BitTorrent and other P2P-technologies have indeed liberated the less resourceful of the burden of distribution (and gained some anonymity with it), but the very need of inventing such protocols illustrates the inherent shortcoming of today’s Internet. The Internet wasn’t designed by DARPA for broadcasting of large amount of data, it was merely meant to be a robust, decentralized communications network in the even of a catastrophe – a goal it has fulfilled many times (it proved to be very useful under the tsunamis of 2004).
Now, I don’t mean to claim that the Internet wasn’t in any way revolutionary. Indeed, it revolutionized how we do one-to-one conversations greatly – instead of making physical connections like the telephone (which took an awful long time to do), it created virtual routes for the information, divided into packages with a sender and a receiver, to undertake on the fly. By virtualizing the method of connection on top of that, we eliminated the cost associated with it (though one cost still remains – the physical connection to our ISP). However, there still remain elements to be optimized.
As I previously mentioned, BitTorrent and protocols like it, works by sharing the burden of bandwidth amongst the downloaders. While this solves the problem of one party having to acquire massive amounts of bandwidth, in the end, the data still gets duplicated proportionally to the amount of downloaders. In this sense, the Internet is much like the postal service (albeit admittedly more reliable). The old method of distribution (using dedicated servers) would be like if everyone had to ask a single company to mail them a certain movie (for instance), only, since this is an analogy for the Internet, the company did it for free, and thus having to pay for all the transferring. In contrast, the method of BitTorrent (grossly simplified) is a bit more like if someone sent a scene of a move to some friends, and then got a whole group of people asking for that very scene. But instead of asking the original sender, they asked each other, sharing the load of sending the scene amongst them. By repeatedly doing this process for each and every scene in the movie (not all at once, of course), they would all eventually obtain the complete movie. The least costly way, however, would most likely be to broadcast the movie on TV and having each person tape it on their VCR.
My main point is, however, that in both instances the underlining infrastructure - the postal service – would still under the same strain and pressure, perhaps even more in the latter case, as there would be more overhead associated with it. This is what’s happening on the Internet today. BitTorrent is a solution, but only partially, to the problem of broadcasting static information on an inherently connection based model. I propose that we instead mark “static” information distributed to many peers with special and appropriate meta data (like a hash, date and segment id) that would make caching on a physical level possible. That way, one would minimize the amount of duplication on the network, and optimize the amount of different information that could be distributed. This has, of course, somewhat already been implemented (HTTP proxies and such), but it is very limited in both adoption and usability (it can even cause some problems if the web page updated frequently). By implementing this method on a lower part of the OSI-model, and caching data for nodes physically close to others, I think it would greatly improve the efficiency of the net. Bear in mind that changes such as that usually takes a long time. Just think about IPv6 – a protocol that’s very closely related to IPv4, but which hasn’t after a whole decade gotten a widespread adoption. -
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