Whether by design or chance, it happens to be ideally optimized for today's legal climate: brilliantly separating central searching, central tracking, and p2p distribution into three legally distinct entities -- none of which can easily be proven to be breaking the law.
- Indexing sites know what is being shared, but not who -- not illegal? - Trackers know who is sharing, but not what they share -- not illegal? - Pirates know what they share and with whom -- usually illegal -- but have limited windows of exposure and minimal paper trail. If Bittorrent were truly designed for performance at the expense of piracy protection, it would: - Have persistent central tracking (so you can upload when bandwidth is cheap, in the dead of night, rather than when it's most expensive while you're trying to download.) - Seed directly from websites (so you host the file on a regular website rather than going through a fancy, client-side publishing step) - Have central logging and quality-of-service controls for legitimate content owners to know how much data was distributed and to whom (rather than actively and automatically shredding all historical knowledge at every step). Indeed, Bittorrent DNA is the ultimate admission that the original Bittorrent was either a poorly designed tool for legitimate content owners, or it was a superbly designed tool for pirates. In other words, if it's really so great for legitimate content owners, why build DNA? (And as for DNA being some brilliant BT enhancement, let's not forget it's essentially duplicating the Red Swoosh service -- which was released well before BitTorrent came onto the scene.) I think Bittorrent's technical achievements are far outstripped by a superb threading of the legal needle in a way that has stumped the anti-pirate forces for years. Their one salvo against TPB has been very late in coming, and will in all likelihood end up a Pyrrhic victory (just like every other anti-pirate salvo in the past). Of course, if we're really lucky TPB will lose, and we'll once again enjoy a resurgence of really exciting P2P research. I mean, today's pirate tools are pretty good, but I can't wait to see what comes next! -david Will Morton wrote: > I believe that BT wasn't created as a Piracy Protocol, but rather as a > way to spread the burden of downloading large files from a server, a > task at which it is supremely awesome. :o) > > BT has lots of shortcomings as a tool for piracy, it's just that its > strengths are so strong that people live with them. > > W > > > On 11/03/2008, David Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I agree a well-seeded torrent can be pretty quick. But the >> protocol/clients/users only seed for a very limited time, or not at all. >> The result is most torrents are poorly seeded, and thus slower than >> downloading from a well-provisioned webserver. Said another way, >> Bittorrent generally sacrifices speed in order to protect pirates. >> >> That said, S3 has the potential to have very powerful, fast seeds, and >> to make the torrent always download fast. What I'm curious is if they >> actually do. Or if they use exploit the reduced speed expectations of >> torrent users and instead seed the file slower than had the user just >> downloaded it right from the webserver. >> >> >> -david >> >> >> Bill Mccormick wrote: >> > Hmmm, I was unable to get the new iphone SDK from Apple's servers on >> > the weekend, but it was running very quickly on BitTorrent. >> > >> > Does anyone know if Apple is seeding BitTorrent for the iphone SDK? >> > >> > WoW also uses a BitTorrent derivative for distributing software >> > patches etc. It seems to be very fast if there are a few high speed >> > seeders. >> > >> > Billl >> > >> > On 3/11/08, Victor Grishchenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Yes, P2P as a content distribution method is known to be orders of >> >> magnitude cheaper than any "classic" solution. >> >> See the paper "Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the >> >> U.S. Peering Ecosystem" by P.B. Norton of Equinix >> >> >> http://www.blogg.ch/uploads/Internet-Video-Next-Wave-of-Disruption-v1.2.pdf >> >> >> >> Still, it is an open question whether costs are actually saved or just >> >> shifted to ISPs :) >> >> I think, P2P traffic localization techniques may actually save costs, on >> >> obvious reasons. >> >> >> >>> Saw this on /. a couple days back and noticed that the peer efficiency >> >>> being reported by Bittorrent in this study is upwards of 96%. Not bad! >> >>> Does anyone read Norwegian, and can they determine what the (harmonic) >> >>> average download speed was for S3 versus Bittorrent? >> >>>> "An experiment was conducted recently by Norwegian broadcasting >> >>>> company ... 41,000 NOK ... 1,700 NOK. >> >> -- >> >> >> >> Victor >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> >> p2p-hackers mailing list >> >> [email protected] >> >> http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers >> >> >> > >> > >> >> _______________________________________________ >> p2p-hackers mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers >> > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > > _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
