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 Examining Bittorrent |
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from the systemic-problem dept.
ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.
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35% (Score:5, Interesting)
by mistersooreams (811324) on Saturday December 18, @06:22PM (#11126889) (http://www.sooreams.com/) |
35% of all 'net traffic |
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Re:35% (Score:2, Funny)
by WizardRahl (840191) on Saturday December 18, @06:36PM (#11126959) |
| "Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small." I guess sacrificies have to be made. You going to volunteer? |
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Re:35% (Score:5, Funny)
by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday December 18, @06:38PM (#11126964) (Last Journal: Friday November 19, @05:03AM) |
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I have the complete statistics: 35% = BitTorrent 40% = Spam 15% = Slashdottings 10% = Porn Browsing |
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Re:35% (Score:3, Funny)
by Doctor Crumb (737936) on Saturday December 18, @07:36PM (#11127221) (http://www.jess2.net/) |
| what about porn that is downloaded using bittorrent? |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by cbr2702 (750255) on Saturday December 18, @09:54PM (#11127819) (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cbr) |
| That wouldn't be "Porn Browsing". People browse to decide what to download with BitTorrent. |
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Re: 35% (Score:3, Insightful)
by Alwin Henseler (640539) on Saturday December 18, @07:50PM (#11127284) (http://www.alwinh.dds.nl/tops/) |
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Retry:
35% = BitTorrent
(All numbers about as accurate as the results of a Slashdot poll Slashdottings may be fun to note, but significant amount of all internet traffic? Don't think so. The low number for mail is because there may be lots of spam, but it's not that big a part of the total amount of data. Download a movie, >1 GB. traffic, and you can watch the content in an hour and a half. A single e-mail is maybe just a couple or tens of KB's, but may keep you busy for a while. And like IM, mostly text-based. |
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Re: 35% (Score:1)
by tietokone-olmi (26595) on Sunday December 19, @01:55AM (#11128628) (http://www.iki.fi/ksandstr/) |
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NNTP traffic tends to be, at least in europe where ISPs provide local news servers, local to the ISP's own networks. And therefore just a slight blip on the larger whole of backbone traffic. (Hell, I'd expect SSH to look bigger on the graph.) You probably already knew all that, I'm just educating the masses here... |
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Re: 35% (Score:1)
by jonadab (583620) <jonadab@bright.net> on Sunday December 19, @05:31AM (#11129070) (http://www.bright.net/~jonadab/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 15, @09:03PM) |
| email consumes more bandwidth than you realize, certainly more than ftp. |
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Re: 35% (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Sunday December 19, @08:36AM (#11129549) |
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The low number for mail is because there may be lots of spam, but it's not that big a part of the total amount of data. Download a movie, >1 GB. traffic, and you can watch the content in an hour and a half. A single e-mail is maybe just a couple or tens of KB's, but may keep you busy for a while. And like IM, mostly text-based. With services like Gmail the size of spam mails can finally be significantly improved. I'm excited to find out when I'm getting the first pr0n spam mail with the text replaced with an embedded movie. |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by Jucius Maximus (229128) <54lcrcv02&sneakemail,com> on Monday December 20, @10:25AM (#11136977) (http://www.getfirefox.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 30, @10:38AM) |
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" BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why."
So 66% of all net traffic is P2P. Astonishing. (35%)/(0.53) = 66% How how much is spam and how much is the rest of the net? |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by Doppler00 (534739) on Saturday December 18, @07:06PM (#11127086) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 24, @02:08AM) |
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to BitTorrent's creators. You mean BitTorrent's creator (Bram Cohen)? That makes this even more amazing that one person is responsible for all this traffic. I wonder if he will ever be personally sued for creating this software... |
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Re:35% (Score:1)
by nkh (750837) <purple.meteor @ g m ail.com> on Saturday December 18, @07:25PM (#11127176) |
| Bram Cohen is innocent. This [python.org] guy is responsible for everything: he created the language for such an abomination. Without Python, no BitTorrent! |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by really? (199452) on Saturday December 18, @08:55PM (#11127569) (http://www.ebij.com/) |
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C++'s creators are also in trouble. (See http://www.bitcomet.com/) |
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Bram, but also Supernova etc's creators (Score:2)
by billstewart (78916) on Monday December 20, @08:52AM (#11136369) (http://idiom.com/~wcs | Last Journal: Sunday April 27, @06:17PM) |
| Bram's distinctly not responsible for any copyright violations, any more than the people who created ftp or implementations of ftp servers are. But Bittorrent is heavily used not only because it's a great tool for hauling around movies and other CD-sized data, but also because there are sites that host torrents for that kind of content. And unlike Bram's work, their work is enough closer to abetting copyright infringement that they can be sued (and this weekend's news is that Supernova and a couple of other sites just shut down.) They may or may not be guilty, but they're at least close enough to sue. |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @10:31AM (#11158659) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
| If you DO go to Princeton, you are just as worthless (being rich doesn't change your "worth," only your income). |
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The other 65%... (Score:3, Funny)
by aztektum (170569) on Saturday December 18, @07:22PM (#11127166) |
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pr0n |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by Wesley Felter (138342) <wesley@felter.org> on Saturday December 18, @07:40PM (#11127235) (http://felter.org/wesley/) |
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Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? The **AA don't use sniffers, so it doesn't matter. Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small. If you assume that torrents follow Zipf popularity and the **AA are only going after the top ones, your chance of being caught is pretty high if you have some mainstream tastes. |
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The availability problem can be solved. (Score:5, Informative)
by Guspaz (556486) on Saturday December 18, @10:55PM (#11128035) (http://novasearch.net/) |
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It all comes down to two things: knowing where to host, and how to maximize your availability. 35% of all net traffic belongs to BitTorrent traffic. The corresponding web and traffic tracker required to power that is inconsequential. I used to run NovaSearch.net, which was for a time the official search function of Suprnova.Org. I made up roughly half of all their traffic, something on the order of 300k pageviews per day by the end. Availability was indeed a large problem, and always my primary concern. However, my possible availability was much higher than actual availability. By this I mean that Novasearch had the POTENTIAL to be available much more than it was, due to reliance on Suprnova. When SuprNova went down, NovaSearch (usually, often it could be used as an out-of-date cache when Suprnova was down) went down too, because it didn't get updates. That accounted for most of my downtime, very little of it was actually from issues relating to NovaSearch itself. Despite all this, NovaSearch, during it's primary operational period, relied on only one dedicated server (A second was added for static content later on, but for transfer cap reasons, not actual bandwidth or load). This highlights the primary problem with Suprnova in regards to their reliability, they rely on donated mirrors, and that reliance has caused them to use an insufficient architechture (Last I heard the core of Suprnova was one single dual xeon server). Had they instead chosen to use a clustered solution that they managed themselves, combined with hardware firewalls and DDoS mitigation technology, the availability then and now would be significantly higher. Tracker reliability is a much lesser problem. Torrents can easily survive short to medium tracker downtime just by the shear momentum of the users. Once they have a peer list, they can continue communicating with those peers even with the tracker down. And the widespread adoption of various unofficial additions to the BitTorrent protocol have further improved that. One such improvement that enjoys almost universal support among third-party BitTorrent clients is the multi-tracker protocol, which effectively allows trackers to be clustered so that even if all but one of the trackers for a torrent is down, it can continue normally. Anyhow, this is a long post that sort of went off on a tangent and started rambling, but I thought that I should put a few words in because of the role I played. |
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Re:The availability problem can be solved. (Score:1)
by Tibor the Hun (143056) on Sunday December 19, @09:22AM (#11129757) |
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Thank you sir, NovaSearch rocked. |
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Re:The availability problem can be solved. (Score:3, Informative)
by Guspaz (556486) on Sunday December 19, @02:11AM (#11128673) (http://novasearch.net/) |
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Probably not, I only ran one donation drive back in the day. That led to NovaSearch's first dedicated server. When Suprnova told me they wanted to switch from NovaSearch to their own internal search, I gave them the source to NovaSearch in hopes that Suprnova's search would be as good as NovaSearch. While it seems they mimmicked some of NovaSearch (which is good), they left out some of NovaSearch's more unique features. |
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Re:The availability problem can be solved. (Score:2)
by bairy (755347) on Sunday December 19, @03:49AM (#11128894) (http://www.bairy.co.uk/) |
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Ahh man you're a slashdotter. cool. I've wanted to tell you since they "moved" the search over that novasearch was seriously good. Thier search is horrible, sometimes the page doesn't load properly leading to a just-give-me-5-mins-while-I-find-a-server refresh. On the occasion it does work it's not so fast. And all that is when the main suprnova site is up. The main domain and search domain don't seem to integrate properly meaning you can't directly click through without problems. Whatever mistake you made, they made a huge one by moving it to thier servers. You did a superb job and it was sad to see novasearch go. |
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Re:35% (Score:1)
by Kempt (841654) on Sunday December 19, @03:55AM (#11128904) (http://kempt.org/) |
| If you sit down and think about it, you'd realize that 35% of all internet traffic is bit torrent and bit torrent is 53% of P2P traffic. This being so would mean that nearly 60% of all internet access is P2P!!! ---- Kempt [kempt.org] |
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Re:35% (Score:3, Informative)
by ultranova (717540) on Sunday December 19, @05:23AM (#11129048) |
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100% of all Internet traffic is P2P, for the simple reason that the Internet is a P2P network. There is no separation between client and server machines at the network level, no matter how hard ISPs try to create one with asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking. |
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Re:35% (Score:1)
by sangdrax (132295) on Sunday December 19, @06:47AM (#11129238) (http://vengeance.et.tudelft.nl/lucifer) |
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Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small. Well no, because currently they only have to monitor the trackers themselves. They can then try to arrest any peer the tracker is pointing to. Once they locate the trackers (say, suprnova), there is no need to monitor all the traffic on the Internet. |
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Re:35% (Score:1)
by ChickenAintDone (713461) on Sunday December 19, @07:29PM (#11133620) |
| Tracking the trackers? Bastards... |
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Try a different level (Score:2)
by Have Blue (616) on Sunday December 19, @11:44AM (#11130540) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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I'd guess at least 90% of Internet traffic is created by something derived from the BSD TCP stack |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @06:35PM (#11126951) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
Poster wrote:Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit. You really think that the scheme will remain legal because of these few users?That's all it takes - see the Betamax decision. However, you might also want to take a look at the stats (below) for why people get high-speed internet. BitTorrent and the likes will be shut down in 2005. Mark my words. Since most of the traffic I see (I am an admin) is illegal, I'll shed no tears. It's you who violate copyrights who are to blame for the crackdown and the eventual clampdown on the internet - not RIAA, MPAA or any other corporation.How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws. From the article: A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems.Well, since, according to El Reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/brit_net_ The stats: According to a survey conducted by British ISP Homecall, 23 per cent of Britons are getting broadband for the porn, and it's by far the most important factor in getting wired. 12 per cent cited access to music videos, 8 per cent access to movie trailers, and a gratifying 9 per cent for radio, which is undergoing a renaissance in the UK. Sometimes new media can be the best thing to happen to old media.All the above are LEGAL. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @07:02PM (#11127068) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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That's all it takes - see the Betamax decision. Well, actually it only requires that the technology be capable of substantial non-infringing uses. It doesn't matter if no one actually engages in them, though it's always easier to make the case if you have examples to point to. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws. No, they probably are. If they're in the US, they're pretty likely contributory and/or vicarious infringers, though much depends on the specific facts involved. While you're not mistakenly reading Sony too narrowly, you need to not read it too broadly either. I suggest also reading the Napster decision. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:18PM (#11127149) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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Thanks for the comment. I would put the Most torrent sites make it clear that postings of torrents by users are the property/responsability of the user, not the site (like what you see here on slashdot: " All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSTG" But again, the Betamax decision was, in part, about trying to go after a manufacturer of a device for helping people break copyright. Seems spot-on to me (but I could be wrong - the way the law works nowadays is getting downright S-T-R-A-N-G-E in some areas). What next - try to break down the "common carrier" status of ISPs? Oops, they've tried that, too. Damn! BTW - love your sig. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @07:48PM (#11127268) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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I would put the So? The issue is, for contributory infringement, whether it materially contributes to the infringement of another, with the knowledge of the infringement. As for vicarious infringement, whether the party had the right and ability to control the infringement, and directly profited from it. Both could include pointers. In fact, Napster merely maintained a database of pointers that permitted downloaders that wanted to reproduce works to find uploaders that provided access to copies, thus distributing them. Napster never hosted anything, however. Sony simply says that the capability of the technology for infringement, where it's capable of substantial noninfringing uses, isn't enough by itself to impute knowledge for contributory infringement. If you can show knowledge by some other means, however, Sony is no obstacle to liability. Most torrent sites make it clear that postings of torrents by users are the property/responsability of the user, not the site That's irrelevant. The issue is simply as it is described above. Generally, a mere disclaimer won't absolve one of liability for one's own illegal actions. What next - try to break down the "common carrier" status of ISPs? Oops, they've tried that, too. Damn! ISPs aren't common carriers, IIRC. Their protection from liability largely derives from some important precedents and statutory safe harbors such as 17 USC 512 or 47 USC 230. (which ironically are parts of the DMCA and CDA respectively, showing that those acts weren't all bad -- just mostly bad) BTW - love your sig. Thanks. It's all true, too. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @08:12PM (#11127397) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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The toughie as I see it is contributory infringement. The issue is, for contributory infringement, whether it materially contributes to the infringement of another, with the knowledge of the infringement.No easy argument there (though, with time
Vicarious infringement is not so hard to get around As for vicarious infringement, whether the party had the right and ability to control the infringement, and directly profited from it.The infringement is in the actual copying, to tangible media, and there is no mechanism that I know of to remotely disable someone's burner, so the "ability to control" is not there. The torrent site has no control over, and no knowledge of, whether the downloader makes 1, zero, or many copies. It could be argued that removing the torrent would also stop the copying, but that could be argued as being several steps removed from the actual act of copying. By the same logic, the sale of blank CDs should also be banned (and burners). The "directly profited from it" is easy - there is no direct profit from hosting a torrent file - it actually costs you resources. Same argument as for use of copyright works covered by one of the exemptions provided in copyright law. Whether the school (or site) as a whole makes a profit is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular use qualifies as exempt. In other news: up here several of the major ISPs are common carriers (Rogers and Bell are both phone companies and ISPs), and they were taken to court to provide the names of file traders. Unfortunately for the music industry, Canadian law doesn't allow for the release of their subscriber's names. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @08:36PM (#11127488) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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The infringement is in the actual copying, to tangible media, and there is no mechanism that I know of to remotely disable someone's burner, so the "ability to control" is not there. The infringements are distribution by the people who upload, and reproduction by the people who download. With BT, pretty much everyone is both kinds at once. And tangible media includes RAM (see the MAI v. Peak case, which is widely followed) so as a general rule, following e.g. Napster, you have the right and ability to control if you can kick people or files off of the portion of the network that you're involved with. It could be argued that removing the torrent would also stop the copying, but that could be argued as being several steps removed from the actual act of copying. But it's the actual act of distribution, so there you go. By the same logic, the sale of blank CDs should also be banned (and burners). No, because the issue is right and control as to the infringement. Selling someone a burner or not isn't control over infringement. Only if you could control their use of it, would it be. Controlling people's use of a network is fairly easy, however. Networks of these types aren't standalone things, really. You'll note that the way Grokster et al avoid vicarious liability is to make sure that the network is designed so that they cannot ban users or files no matter how much they want to. The "directly profited from it" is easy - there is no direct profit from hosting a torrent file - it actually costs you resources. Yeah, but direct doesn't mean all that direct. More 'attributable to.' Napster profited by using the infringement there as a draw for users who could then see ads, or who could be charged for other services that were planned, etc. No one would use Napster, as it was, if they were 100% legal. So that's enough. Whether the school (or site) as a whole makes a profit is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular use qualifies as exempt. I would disagree. You can probably be held liable for providing free resources for infringement if you're using that somehow to profit elsewhere. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @08:57PM (#11127578) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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Interesting So, I guess the only solution is
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @09:13PM (#11127658) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Yeah, basically. Grokster has been quite successful in not being sued into oblivion because they designed their software around the Napster and Sony cases. They avoid being in a position where they can get knowledge of an infringement whilst materially contributing to it, and just making the software isn't sufficient to show knowledge. And they deliberately avoid having the right or ability to control their users. This basically is done by being highly decentralized. The people running their supernodes are still liable -- but since Grokster carefully avoids touching them, the company doesn't care. BT as a technology is not in danger from these suits. The people who are neck deep in involvement with its nefarious uses, however, are. No way around that, save for jurisdictional avoidance (which is inconvenient at a minimum). And users are always responsible for their own actions. |
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anonytorrent... (Score:3, Interesting)
by da5idnetlimit.com (410908) on Sunday December 19, @10:37AM (#11130144) (http://www.jadwio.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 30, @05:54PM) |
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Azureus [sourceforge.net], the open source, cross platform, java bittorrent client, supports connection through a socks or http proxy... of course passing all your data through an anonymizer proxy can slow down some of your downloads, but this might be the solution... No direct contact with the tracker/seeder, all identifiable traffic stopping at some proxy, the proxy resending it to you on an know port... easier than recreating a fully encrypted, non tracable p2p network from scratch, and only uses existing tech... Now where can I find a nice, free, fast, anonymous proxy in the EU that can support a 2Mb broadband connection speed ? |
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Re:anonytorrent... (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @11:02AM (#11159022) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> an anonymizer proxy can slow down some of your downloads, but this might be the solution Now, if you can just find a solution on where to GET the torrent files after all the site owners have been wrongfully imprisoned, we'd be happy. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @08:41PM (#11127505) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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It has to be a material contribution. That is, not an insignificant one. There is a difference between saying that 'people sell drugs in Crackton and Bumtown' and saying that 'John Doe sells drugs at 1 Main Street, Crackton, between the hours of 9 and 5, and here's his phone number and a letter of introduction.' The difference is not always a bright line matter -- but it's there, and courts can generally find it since they're used to dealing with these sorts of things. On a related note, I find that people here often have difficulty with some important legal concepts such as intent, reasonability, materiality, etc. Here [sooke.bc.ca] is an essay that I think helps with this. You may find it interesting. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Sunday December 19, @08:47AM (#11129592) |
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Well, actually it only requires that the technology be capable of substantial non-infringing uses. Such as the distribution of the World of Warcraft open beta client, which was available via Blizzard's downloader, which turned out to be a BT client? Then there's that Fedora Core 3 ISO I got via BT - with the |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @08:22PM (#11127438) (http://slashdot.org/) |
I don't really agree with you there. For starters, because I don't see that the Court ever mentioned a test for substantive uses in Sony. Here's what they did say:Unless a commodity "has no use except through practice of the patented method," the patentee has no right to claim that its distribution constitutes contributory infringement. "To form the basis for contributory infringement the item must almost be uniquely suited as a component of the patented invention." "[A] sale of an article which though adapted to an infringing use is also adapted to other and lawful uses, is not enough to make the seller a contributory infringer. Such a rule would block the wheels of commerce."(citations omitted) You are probably thinking of the dissent, which said: I therefore conclude that if a significant portion of the product's use is noninfringing, the manufacturers and sellers cannot be held contributorily liable for the product's infringing uses. If virtually all of the product's use, however, is to infringe, contributory liability may be imposed; if no one would buy the product for noninfringing purposes alone, it is clear that the manufacturer is purposely profiting from the infringement, and that liability is appropriately imposed. Of course, even the dissent admitted that the Court "never addresses the amount of noninfringing use that a manufacturer must show to absolve itself from liability as a contributory infringer." Though this is probably because, as I said, no actual uses need be shown; only possible uses. The dissent recognizes this: "The Court explains that a manufacturer of a product is not liable for contributory infringement as long as the product is "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." Such a definition essentially eviscerates the concept of contributory infringement. Only the most unimaginative manufacturer would be unable to demonstrate that a image-duplicating product is "capable" of substantial noninfringing uses." (citations omitted) So anyway, I tell you what; could you post some quotes, maybe with pinpoint cites, regarding this, if you're sticking to your guns. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Eskarel (565631) on Saturday December 18, @10:55PM (#11128033) |
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I dunno about you, but I've used bittorrent for perfectly legal uses. I've used it to download perfectly legal game demos(this is the demo released by the company). I've used it to download GPL'd software(Gentoo, Redhat, FreeBSD). I've even gotten some of those links of suprnova. I've used it(off of Blizzards website mind you) to video demos of world of warcraft. Bittorrent is probably the best technology currently available for distributing media since the only time you really have issues with download speed is when there are far more leechers than there are seeders. Any company which wants to distribute a file could set up a tracker link and seriously decrease their bandwidth usage. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @09:34PM (#11127741) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Slashdot is hosted in the United States and operated by a United States corporation. I know a few people who would consider "nyeh nyeh, my country is allowed to copy music freely and yours isn't" offtopic on Slashdot. And which record-label-approved site has music videos available for public viewing? Most of the videos I've seen have been on eMule. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by topynate (694371) on Saturday December 18, @09:43PM (#11127778) |
| Well, seeing as we're not discussing Slashdot, I fail to see the connection between its ownership and the non-topicality of non-US talk. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Eskarel (565631) on Saturday December 18, @11:10PM (#11128099) |
| There are tonnes of RIAA approved sites where you can view music videos. After all a music video is an advertizement for an album and a band. These sites use streaming rather than downloadable media. Neither the article nor the parent ever specified that the people wanted to keep the music video. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Vengie (533896) on Sunday December 19, @11:08AM (#11130304) |
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launch.yahoo.com
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Saturday December 18, @11:50PM (#11128245) (http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 25, @10:49AM) |
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That's all it takes - see the Betamax decision. Don't hide behind the Betamax decision, say what you mean: Copyright is wrong and no longer makes sense. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Matt - Duke '05 (321176) on Sunday December 19, @02:32AM (#11128735) |
Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Listen, buddy. I dislike Bush as much as the next guy, but he has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with our current copyright laws. Go lay the blame elsewhere (hrmm.. maybe Sonny Bono?), but t'was not Dubya. Move along. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by SpamapS (70953) on Sunday December 19, @11:42AM (#11130527) (http://spamaps.org/) |
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How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Monday December 20, @11:50AM (#11137767) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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Copyright was originally designed to help promote creative works by providing a limited timeframe in which those works could be exploited, after which they were to pass into the public domain.
Corporate lobbyists have won several extensions to the copyright act, which ultimately inhibits creativity by keeping the "raw materials" from entering the public domain, where they can then be used to further advance the art, literature, etc. Nobody should "own" an idea for their lifetime + N number of years, especially since even the idea of "intellectual property" is an artificial modern construct. See the January 2005 issue of Analog for an interesting take on this whole mess. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by iminplaya (723125) on Monday December 20, @08:05PM (#11142667) |
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Remember, its a copyRIGHT. That doesn't make it a right just because a gov't says so. Copyright expires(eventually). Natural rights don't. The U.S. has a thing called the PATRIOT act. It's a lot of things. Patriotic is not one of them. Just because a law has a warm, fuzzy name, doesn't make it a good law. Calling something like the Jim Crow laws the "Furry Kitten" laws doesn't make them any less despicable. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by tomhudson (43916) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `nosduht'> on Saturday December 18, @06:51PM (#11127022) (http://funstuff.dnsalias.org:8080/ | Last Journal: Friday December 31, @11:48PM) |
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Nice try, shill.
No convictions in the link you pointed to. Unless you, like the **AA, like the concept of "guilty until proven innocent". It's not possible to overturn the Betamax decision - there is no legal ground for doing so. The only thing that can be done is to pass legislation making it illegal - and all that will do is make owning any home computer, and any other device capable of making copies, illegal. It would also make printers and photocopiers controlled devices, as they are also capable of making illegal copies. And, since bittorrent is a distribution system, you would have to make any system that allows for illegal distribution of copyrighted material illegal. So much for email, and your local postal service. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:10PM (#11127110) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
Nice ad hominem...Thank you, but I'm just repeating what others have noticed about you. Posting anonymously. Posting what are clearly lies (cf. the Betamax decision, misquoting the Reg to make it look like people have been convicted when none have, confusing the torrent file with the target file, and otherwise toeing the **AA party line). Sounds like a shill to me. It's kind of telling that you didn't even bother commenting on my question: "how hard is it to pay for your media?"Because it doesn't apply to me. I pay for all my media. Blank media. On which there is a levy that goes to the music industry to compensate them for my use of their music. It's the same solution you guys should use - work with the technology instead of against it. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:39PM (#11127234) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
You've clearly misunderstood the meaning of this said "levy". It's to compensate the industry for the losses incurred by existing piratism. It will in no way entitle you to further infringe on producers' copyright.Wrong. http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html?tag= Or, for those too lazy to click: Canada deems P2P downloading legalTo quote you, Or maybe you just don't like the way how the truth sounds.Yes, it compensates them, but the thing you don't seem to want to understand is that THIS IS THE SYSTEM THE RECORDING INDUSTRY PROPOSED and agreed to. They just never thought blank CDs would go from $35 each to 30 cents each. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @06:59PM (#11127055) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
> see the Betamax decisionThe Betamax decision, along with fair use, gives you the right to use a VCR to time-shift copyrighted materials. And, yes, I DO have a constitutional right to copy music off the net - it just happens that MY country's constitution is not the same as yours. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:26PM (#11127183) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
Congress has a hard enough time with simple issues (it's not like they READ the bills they pass, anyway). Can you imagine the mess they'll make out of any such law? Overly broad - it hurts too many vested interests and gets tossed out. Overly narrow - it gets worked around. The only long-term solution for the **AAs is to get their act together and find ways to make money giving the people what they want, the way they want it. Their "natural monopoly" is dead. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @08:46PM (#11127537) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Congress will have a very hard time abridging this right for the 95% of the world who are not covered by US law. At this point I would like to introduce you to the Hon. Robert B. Zoellick, US Trade Representative. He's the guy that threatens other countries so that they do what we want them to do. We really don't have that hard a time. Sorry. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @09:08PM (#11127634) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
I hope everyone else who's been following the thread realizes that your post is not flamebait.
If it happens again, we're going to let you KEEP Celine Dion! |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @09:19PM (#11127687) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Meh. Anything to get Cellucci out of Massachusetts is worth it IMO; sorry y'all got stuck with him. Perhaps you'd like to take Romney off our hands too? Various entities (several computer software vendors come to mind, and not just the usual suspects, either) have been pushing for changes at WIPO regarding copyright law WIPO is one important organization. But don't forget WTO (which has its TRIPS Agreement), of course that the USTR will frequently engage in bilateral arrangements outside of our multilateral ones, so as to promote short term US interests and damn the diplomatic fallout. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by ShieldW0lf (601553) on Saturday December 18, @11:21PM (#11128132) |
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Having said that, Paul Cellucci did more harm to US/Canada relations from the average Canadian's perspective, than anyone in recent memory. Thats funny... I thought the guys name was George! |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @11:33PM (#11128173) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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Nah, didn't you get the memo - we're being nice to ole Dubya this week |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @08:31PM (#11127473) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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Porn Whitelist was started a week ago in response to someone putting a bunch of people on something called the Profanity Blacklist It's a nasty job, but somebody's got to do it |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @10:43AM (#11158812) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> something called the Profanity Blacklist Yeah, I was put on that. Funny thing is, that kind of "censorship" (I know it isn't, really) is the same as CyberSitter & stuff like that. What I mean is, when I was put on that list I hadn't been swearing. I was talking about politics at the time, closer to the "Right" side. So, evidently, backing a Republican is profane. Hmm, maybe it wasn't an incorrect assessment. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame-Soverign decisions. (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:03PM (#11127072) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
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The trackers themselves are legal. The site you pointed to in the Reg article was hosting the files themselves, not just the trackers - not the same thing.
The trackers themselves contain no copyrighted material, just pointers to the shared file, just as a link to copyrighted material on a web page is not itself an infringement of copyright. You really need to brush up on the technology involved, and learn the difference between a tracker, the shared file, etc., because right now, you come off as being, shall we say, uninformed. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame-Soverign decisions. (Score:2)
by Jeremi (14640) on Sunday December 19, @03:35AM (#11128864) (http://www.lcscanada.com/jaf) |
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The trackers themselves contain no copyrighted material, just pointers to the shared file, just as a link to copyrighted material on a web page is not itself an infringement of copyright.
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Re:It's you who are to blame-Soverign decisions-II (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:21PM (#11127163) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
| Simple solution - post with an account. After all, all ACs DO look alike. |
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Re:So violating GPL or BSD-licence is OK too? (Score:1, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @07:23PM (#11127169) |
| Go for it. You won't be able to keep me from copying the software with the GPL in it anyway. You won't be able to stop me from using that software then. So it doesn't matter. We will just take it back. You're such a drone. Copyright robs the public. It causes stagnation, not innovation. So you know where you can stuff your damn copyright laws. |
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Re:So violating GPL or BSD-licence is OK too? (Score:3, Insightful)
by tomhudson (43916) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `nosduht'> on Saturday December 18, @08:27PM (#11127458) (http://funstuff.dnsalias.org:8080/ | Last Journal: Friday December 31, @11:48PM) |
OK, we'll just steal your GPL softwareYou can't "steal" it. Copyright infringement is NOT theft. It's copyright infringement.
and use it in our binary-only software without giving back the modifications.Unlike most people here, I don't think that's much of a problem. After all, we'll have the basis of any mods you make, and we can then work out a better version, even without your modified source.
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
by Eskarel (565631) on Saturday December 18, @10:30PM (#11127963) |
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Copyright was not always a bad law, when terms of copyright were reasonable and it served to protect small creators instead of the blood sucking parasites who feed of both them and us, it was a good law. Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good. Problem is none of those things are true. We know that most media is overpriced and most actual content creators(artists, programmers, etc) are underpaid(at least comparatively, famous actors/actresses are an exception of course since they don't usually do multi-picture deals and their name has brand power). This means that someone is getting the money and it is neither the content creator nor the public, who are the people these laws were initially designed to support. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by iminplaya (723125) on Sunday December 19, @05:09PM (#11132739) |
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...Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good. Sorry. That's just not so. Copyright law was designed to allow only authorized people to operate a printing press. This may appear to protect authors and whatnot(that's the spin they put on it anyway), but it's real intent has always been to insure that only "approved" people could publish and distribute their own work. The work against all P2P(and all uploading by individuals) is designed to do the same thing to stop self-distribution. We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world. Especially now that it's so easy. Hence the attempted lockdown of the internet. They may succeed as long as we remain tied to somebody's wire. This is why I constantly drone on about the necessity of developing true wireless internet(ad hoc style or P2P, a real distributed net in every sense and truly robust). Any two computers can be a micronet(Heh, remember them?), and anybody can join in on the fun. Only then will the net be truly free of control by those who shouldn't have it(gov't, corp.). It's not hard to see that products under IP protection suffer from complete stagnation until those protections expire. For example, the moment somebody makes a completely patent free computer(or ignores patent law and fixes Intel's umm...er...stuff), you will see speed increases that go way beyond Moore's law. It won't happen because of the potential for profit. It will happen because somebody or a group of "manybodies" will want a faster computer. The barriers created by IP are holding back progress. People motivated only by money to create something will never produce a product as good as one motivated by the need for the poduct. Those motivated by money are always in a rush to "get it out the door"(Do we need to mention names here?), and what comes out that door is usually garbage, and under IP law, nobody is allowed to fix it except that company. So now for the most part we are working with crap computers and crappy software, and most people are buying crappy music because that's all the publishers will let out. Problem is none of those things are true. Ooops! Are you disagreeing with your first paragraph? Or did you mean that none of those things are true today? |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @10:48AM (#11158866) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world One problem with this line is that "their poison" doesn't belong to them. They are spreading ??AA's poison. I'm just happy that I got all the movies & TV shows I really wanted before the torrent sites went down. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good ones left to use when the next TV season starts (other than TVTorrents.something). |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by zors (665805) on Sunday December 19, @01:16AM (#11128521) |
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i'd say music is a useful art. the fact that every known civilization has had it in one form or another supports that. and what arts would you say are useful? music can make me think, it can challenge me, it can inspire me, it can communicate nearly anything. pretty useful, i'd say. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @10:54AM (#11158930) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> the fact that every known civilization has had it in one form or another supports that. Almost every known civilization did not charge for the right to listen to its music, though. That's precedent. > what arts would you say are useful? Art as in the art itself, none. They do, as you point out, have useful attributes though. They can make you think about other things, etc. > music can make me think, it can challenge me, it can inspire me, it can communicate nearly anything. > pretty useful, i'd say. What about the music that DOESN'T make you think? The stuff I have on only for background noise. You could argue that that is "useful," but it could be static as well. Music just sounds better than static. Is that less useful stuff freely copyable then? |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Sunday December 19, @08:28AM (#11129518) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
| Thank you (wish I knew who you were so I'd know who I'm thanking, but that's ok) |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @11:13AM (#11159158) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
| FYI, a "few" people live in Canada too. |
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Bittorrent shut down?! Right. (Score:2)
by Chordonblue (585047) on Saturday December 18, @06:58PM (#11127048) (http://mute-net.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Friday December 31, @04:02AM) |
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So they'll be shutting down ports 25, 80, and 21 also? Only the method used to communicate the data is different, the end result is the same... |
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Re:Of course it can be shut down (Score:1)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Thursday December 23, @01:30PM (#11170032) |
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AC: For instance, in the case of a legit user, a port 80 will never transfer gigabytes of data per day. Odd. Have you see this site, http://slashdot.org? It transfers 10s of gigabytes daily over port 80, and is completely legit. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
by lheal (86013) on Saturday December 18, @07:05PM (#11127085) (http://healconsulting.com/) |
Yup. All it takes is any. The legal principal is this: if the {object, device, chemical, drug} has a purpose for which it is legal, then the thing should be legal. The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule. The pressure to legalize or ban something evinces arguments about its legitimate uses, and it's these arguments that are persuasive. Saying "We'll do it anyway" is unproductive. In this case, since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P, it's inappropriate to ban it even if that software is only a small percentage of the service's traffic. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by B1gP4P4Smurf (790700) on Saturday December 18, @09:07PM (#11127624) |
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The exceptions to this (guns, marijuana, and other things we've allowed to be banned) prove the rule My ass. Guns are not banned. What the fuck country do you live in? |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Jeremi (14640) on Sunday December 19, @03:49AM (#11128896) (http://www.lcscanada.com/jaf) |
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What the fuck country do you live in?
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by xstephx (841516) on Sunday December 19, @04:29AM (#11128954) (http://xstephx.dune2.info/) |
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Maybe you should go out of the us for once... |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Saturday December 18, @11:53PM (#11128263) (http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 25, @10:49AM) |
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This is really really stupid. Here's a retort for you: as all the If you don't like copyright law (and I don't) just stand up and say so, don't hide behind decisions like Betamax. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by lheal (86013) on Sunday December 19, @12:12AM (#11128317) (http://healconsulting.com/) |
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"as all the If that's the case, then they are acting more like Kinko's or a publisher, and are responsible for the content. If they merely provide a glorified copying machine, then they aren't responsible for the content. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday December 19, @01:19AM (#11128530) (http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 25, @10:49AM) |
Go to SuprNova's upload page [69.50.170.101]. Ignore the disclaimer, that's their legal opinion, which is obviously biased. Press 'I Agree'. Now you have three options:
Now read the rest of the page... "How can I add a torrent to SuprNova library? "What? Moderation? Don't you trust me? So even if it were the case that warez were put onto SuprNova solely by these "Unmoderated Submitters" SuprNova is still responsible for their actions because they are responsible for who gets unmoderated submitter status. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by murdochrjj (838014) on Sunday December 19, @07:43AM (#11129378) |
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I agree with parents viewpoint but many see it differently. Cannabis and ecstacy have uses other than as recreational drugs. For example treating post shock syndrome and multiple sclerosis. These are however overlooked by the born again prohibitionists known as the fda. (Which imho is bankrolled by tobacco and alcohol companies but thats a different issue- Whoever granted them a monopoly on human suffering i'm not exactly sure) Chemicals which have a legitimate purpose are controlled if they can beused for bombs, drugs etc. Also in this country, (England&Wales) many objects are prohibited in situations, such as carrying a large kitchen knife in public for example. |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2)
by Snaller (147050) on Tuesday December 21, @04:21AM (#11145445) (Last Journal: Monday December 27, @11:04PM) |
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since downloading Free software is so much more efficient with P2P, Not for me, not if its Bittorrent then its usually something like 1800% slower.... |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:2, Insightful)
by lheal (86013) on Saturday December 18, @07:23PM (#11127168) (http://healconsulting.com/) |
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Banning something from private networks (even publicly own private networks) is different from banning something by law. The University has apparently decided it has better uses for its bandwidth than to let you be a file server. The Internet as a whole is driven by demand, not by fiat. |
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Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:1, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @08:49PM (#11127549) |
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There is no substantial noninfringing use of bittorrent. whoa, wishful thinking! The fact that you have a majority of infringing traffic is irrelevant - more precisely, the wrong angle. By your argument, medical use of marijuana should not be alowed either - since the other illegal uses are by far a majority (in the US at least). significant does not pertain to signal-to-noise ratio - it has to do with the signal vs. lack of signal comparison. If by banning BitTorrent there is significant damage for legal users[*] it should be legal. The rest is about enforcing the law when illegal uses come up, which is police work, not lawmaker work. [*] and aside from bt becoming the preferred distribution method of free ISOs (Linux, *BSD, Gutenberg and so on), if the Blizzard and WoW are any indication, game providers could move towards such distribution channels too. Since there's no comparable tech that would withstand a flashcrowd for the download launch of the next big hit game client, that makes BT a significant tech. |
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Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:2, Interesting)
by lheal (86013) on Saturday December 18, @08:53PM (#11127563) (http://healconsulting.com/) |
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Oops, my bad on the spelling. No, I'm not a lawyer. However, in the Grokster decision [legal500.com], a lot of discussion went into how to apply Sony to that case. They knew that Aimster had put forth a proportionality test, but the Grokster judges finally held that there could be no arbitrary ratio of infringing to noninfringing use. Any use is therefore enough. I generalize that to weapons, drugs, etc., to fit P2P networks into perspective with the culture of freedom. I think you have an axe to grind. Perhaps you are a record industry lawyer, Mr. AC? |
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Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:2)
by Tim C (15259) on Sunday December 19, @04:01AM (#11128916) |
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Any use is therefore enough. No, it was decided by those judges, in that case, that any use is enough. Next time round, it may be decided that some ratio or other is a minimum required, or that almost no amount of non-infringing use is enough, etc. One case does not make a binding precedent. I think you have an axe to grind. Perhaps you are a record industry lawyer, Mr. AC? Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them. |
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Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Sunday December 19, @09:08AM (#11129682) |
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Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them. You are clearly getting paid by Microsoft, SCO, the GNAA, the CCCP, PETA and the tobacco industry or else you wouldn't make up such a ridiculous claim! |
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Re:It's spelled "principle", dufus (Score:1)
by ggy (773554) <eric,aili&gmail,com> on Sunday December 19, @10:23AM (#11130048) |
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Isn't it just possible that the guy happens to have an opinion that differs with yours? Frankly, I'm getting tired of people here resorting to this kind of petty "attack" every time someone disagrees with them. Could you please apply this to your own sig? I don't know if it's your opinion or not, but personally I don't really care, it the little black and white thingies that's the reason for me to read |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
by slavemowgli (585321) on Saturday December 18, @07:46PM (#11127259) (http://www.fur.com/peace) |
Says who? Considering the popularity *and* size of, say, ISO images of Linux distros/*BSD releases/..., I actually would think twice before making statements like this. There is no study yet that examines the ratios of illegal vs. legal or illegit vs. legit BitTorrent traffic, and furthermore, not everything that you might think illegal at first glance actually is - copyright laws are quite varied throughout the world. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:2)
by Proc6 (518858) on Saturday December 18, @08:16PM (#11127415) |
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Im not sure I can follow your ramblings too well, so I dont know if Im agreeing or disagreeing with you... but to be clear,
Atheism [reference.com] is a belief system as much as Christianity. It is an unwavering belief that there is NO God. Agnostic [reference.com] is less of a belief system. It's more like vague avoidance of the topic all together. To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, dont know, dont care. Very strictly speaking they're both "beliefs" (so is anything anytime you use the word "is"), but I think it's safe to say atheism is more of a belief "system" than agnostic. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1, Offtopic)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Sunday December 19, @12:49AM (#11128430) |
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Atheism [reference.com] is a belief system as much as Christianity. It is an unwavering belief that there is NO God. Hey, next time try READING the dictionary link [reference.com] you provided. That way maybe you can correctly repeat the contents of one single sentence. Here it is:
This might require some tough thinking, but notice how it can mean EITHER active denial, OR just disbelief? Disbelief means you don't believe, but it doesn't imply you've ever even considered the idea. 100% of people less than 2 years old are atheists, since they haven't even heard (or comprehended) the concept of "God" yet. To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant. All agnostics are also atheists. They don't believe in God... the fact that they're not quite about it doesn't change the fact that they don't believe in God. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Sunday December 19, @01:02AM (#11128476) |
| Oh, and that sig ("Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism...") is wrong for another reason: atheism is not incompatible with religion. You can have a religion without theism. For example, Zen Buddhists don't believe in God, but are very religious (and sometimes they even erect displays) |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:3, Informative)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Sunday December 19, @05:39AM (#11129090) |
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AC: Religion implies the belief in things which are not perceivable by our senses, and thus incompatible with Atheism. Wrong. Atheism means you don't believe in god(s). What you're talking about can be called naturalism [wikipedia.org] or materialism [wikipedia.org] (or even "asupernaturalism")... disbelief in supernatural forces. Gods are one kind of supernatural force, but not the only kind, so materialists are a subset of atheists. AC: The point of Atheism is not to avoid deism or theology but to avoid the acceptance of ideas that cannot be disproven Once again, you have incorrect definitions for words. What you're talking about is scepticism [wikipedia.org] (or "rationality", or "science"). Many atheists are also sceptics, and vice-versa, but the words are not equivalent (although this explains your confusion) Also, you keep on capitalizing "Atheism", which is technically a spelling error. It is not a proper noun. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:2)
by mOdQuArK! (87332) on Sunday December 19, @02:03AM (#11128652) |
All agnostics are also atheists. They don't believe in God... the fact that they're not quite about it doesn't change the fact that they don't believe in God. Total BS. Agnostics simply say that there's been no definitive proof of whether or not (a) God(s)/Goddess(es)/It(s) exist, and it's really pointless to claim that such (a) being(s) exist (and to try to describe their characteristics) without such proof. Just because a lot of people happen to believe the same unverifiable set of opinions does NOT make that opinion fact. As far as what happens after you die, who knows? You might find out that human beings should have never stopped worshipping a paisley monolith buried somewhere in deep Africa. The only practical approach to find out what happens to you after you die, is to wait until you die & approach the possibility of afterlife with a sense of adventure. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Sunday December 19, @09:00AM (#11129645) |
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Total BS. Agnostics simply say that there's been no definitive proof of whether or not (a) God(s)/Goddess(es)/It(s) exist, and it's really pointless to claim that such (a) being(s) exist (and to try to describe their characteristics) without such proof. Just because a lot of people happen to believe the same unverifiable set of opinions does NOT make that opinion fact. Exactly. Just to make clear why agnostic != atheist: Agnosticism implies that (a) the existence of a [G|g]od has not been proven and that (b) it has't been disproven either, which means that (c) we can't really make a statement. There's also "hard agnosticism" which assumes that it's actually impossible to prove/disprove the existance of a [G|g]od. So, an agnostic definitely is not an atheist, because the assumption that there is no [G|g]od violates (b). |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:2)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Wednesday December 22, @07:01AM (#11157322) |
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So, an agnostic definitely is not an atheist Wrong. Agnostics are atheists, and you just explained why. Agnostics don't believe they can answer "Is there a God?", which obviously means they don't believe the answer is "yes". Both of these statements are true:
"Agnostic != atheist" in the same way that these statements are:
"Honda != automobile" So, all you've really demonstrated is that
Equality is different from set-membership. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Wednesday December 22, @07:51AM (#11157444) |
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Agnostics don't believe that the answer is "no" either. (Over-generalization is fun.) Depending on your definition of atheism that might or might not mean that they are atheists. If you define an atheist as someone who doesn't assume that there is a God then agnostics are atheists. If you define an atheists as someone who assumes that there is no God then agnostics are not atheists. All atheists I have met so far belong into the second category. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:2)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Wednesday December 22, @11:32AM (#11159405) |
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Agnostics don't believe that the answer is "no" either. Correct. And since theists are anyone who believes the answer is "yes", while atheists are everybody else, that means agnostics are atheists. Depending on your definition of atheism that might or might not mean that they are atheists. Since someone earlier in the thread was already kind enough to paste in the definition from the dictionary, that's what I've been using. If you define an atheists as someone who assumes that there is no God And in general, if you define a word to mean something besides what it really means, you can "prove" all kinds of wacky stuff. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Wednesday December 22, @01:55PM (#11161069) |
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atheist noun a person who believes that God does not exist -- compare AGNOSTIC agnostic noun a person who is not sure whether or not God exists or who believes that we cannot know whether God exists or not -- compare ATHEIST -- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, sixth edition (2001) Either the OALD is wrong or I am right - or this is yet another area where the definitions depend on who you ask. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:2)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Thursday December 23, @01:27PM (#11170008) |
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-- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary Since the definition established for this discussion was already explained 6 posts ago [slashdot.org], your introduction of alternative, wrong sources is meaningless. Proc6 gave a reference she trusted [reference.com], and I explained that she was incapable of reading it. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Jesus_666 (702802) on Thursday December 23, @03:37PM (#11171256) |
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Could you please explain to me why exactly my source is wrong any yours is not? All I see is two excerpts from two different dictionaries who differ in one detail. Without further information from a source that knows more about this topic than a dictionary it's pretty tough to call one source right and the other one wrong. Also, the source you cite points to two definitions, one of which says the same as my source. Given that your argument as to why agnostics are athists is based on a certain interpretation of the first definition given by your source, having the second one contradict you might prove bad for your argument. |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by Minna Kirai (624281) on Thursday December 30, @11:18PM (#11225259) |
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Could you please explain to me why exactly my source is wrong any yours is not? For the FORTH and FINAL time: "my" source is right because it's not "my source"- it's Proc6's source [slashdot.org]. And since I was responding to Proc6, her source was the pertinent one! |
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Re:Religious nut (Score:1)
by sqrt(2) (786011) on Sunday December 19, @01:05AM (#11128489) |
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Atheism is the lack of belief in any higher power, not the belief in the lack of any higher power. Your definition of agnosticism is correct however. If you would like to educate yourself further, please take a look at the American Atheists website [atheists.org]. You'll find this page to be especially informative. [atheists.org] |
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Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:1)
by jonadab (583620) <jonadab@bright.net> on Sunday December 19, @05:41AM (#11129098) (http://www.bright.net/~jonadab/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 15, @09:03PM) |
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> Yeah, right. Only an insignificant fraction of torrent traffic is legit. This article is the first I'd heard of widespread illegal use of BitTorrent. I doubt if it's really all that many users; I suspect every thousand downloads or so of this type represents only one person (whereas, every thousand Mandrake ISO downloads represents several hundred people) -- i.e., the amount of traffic involved doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of users. > You really think that the scheme will remain legal because of these few users? No, I think (BitTorrent itself) will remain legal because it isn't really a very good system for copyright infringement. As the article notes if you read it, someone distributing an illegal movie or somesuch exposes himself to easy discovery for hours or even days, because the seed has to remain online until the first recipients have the whole file. > BitTorrent and the likes will be shut down in 2005. No, Suprnova and the likes will be shut down. BitTorrent will continue to be used by distributors of popular content to ease the load on their ftp servers. |
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Re:35% (Score:2)
by Pharmboy (216950) on Sunday December 26, @08:22AM (#11184483) (Last Journal: Wednesday August 20, @09:37PM) |
| I used ABC for a while because of the extra options it has. Then I switched to BitLord the other day. Unreal better client than most, with tons of information and options. ABC is still the next best thing, and yes, it runs on Linux (alpha). |
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Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @06:27PM (#11126921) |
| aside from movie and music piracy there are legal uses for bittorrent p2p too, like when Linux distros are released the demand is much greater than the file servers can handle and thats where bittorrent plays an important role, i prefer to get my Linux ISOs via bittorrent because it helps others get their ISOs too, for example FedoraCore-3 was released and it came on 4 CDs plus a fifth rescue CD making for a HUGE download, and also offered resume so if you have to log off or have a network problem you don't lose all that data and have to start your download over... |
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Re:Legal Torrents (Score:2)
by GeorgeMcBay (106610) on Saturday December 18, @06:36PM (#11126958) (http://www.mischief.com/) |
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Another legal use is World of Warcraft's update system, which is BitTorrent based. I hope Blizzard has a plan B for next year, when all the major ISPs (in the US anyway) are forced to block BitTorrent traffic. |
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Re:Legal Torrents (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @06:42PM (#11126991) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
I hope Blizzard has a plan B for next year, when all the major ISPs (in the US anyway) are forced to block BitTorrent traffic.You can configure bittorrent to listen to non-standard ports, just as you can configure apache to listen to http requests on non-standard ports if your ISP blocks port 80 to try and keep you from running a porn^H^H^H^Hweb server from home. |
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Re:Legal Torrents (Score:1)
by LegionX (691099) on Saturday December 18, @08:34PM (#11127482) (http://www.evilmonks.net/) |
| well.. by using bittorrent for distributing it's extremely easy to add new seeding servers. i don't think the customers do much uploading. |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:2)
by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Saturday December 18, @06:37PM (#11126962) |
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i prefer to get my Linux ISOs via bittorrent
How does a moderator verify that this isn't a fake distro? Or do you go back to the site and verify all the checksums after the d/l? |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:1)
by tuffy (10202) on Saturday December 18, @06:47PM (#11127007) (http://slashdot.org/) |
How does a moderator verify that this isn't a fake distro? Or do you go back to the site and verify all the checksums after the d/l? Distros should ship with a signed MD5SUMs file containing the proper checksums of the ISOs, in case the tracker is serving up a hacked distro. By checking the signature against the distro's public key (downloaded long in advance) the MD5SUMs file can be validated. Then that file can validate the ISOs' integrity. |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:2)
by HeghmoH (13204) on Saturday December 18, @06:52PM (#11127025) (http://www.mikeash.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 11, @12:57AM) |
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BitTorrent's protocol is built around the idea of SHA-1 hashing everything in sight. This is both to avoid corruption and to prevent fake dataa. Assuming SHA-1 is secure, then it will be impossible to fake the distro without also faking the |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:1)
by nkh (750837) <purple.meteor @ g m ail.com> on Saturday December 18, @06:58PM (#11127051) |
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The moderator can check the file being uploaded against his own file with the SHA-1 sums of the torrent file. Of course, with the SHA-0 cracked, how much time do we have left before we see modified binaries having the same checksum? |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:2)
by EnronHaliburton2004 (815366) on Saturday December 18, @08:01PM (#11127334) (http://www.whitehouse.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 18, @03:07PM) |
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Of course, with the SHA-0 cracked, how much time do we have left before we see modified binaries having the same checksum? One of the major advantages of a p2p network is that if the file is good, there will be more people seeding & peering it. If it's a legit distro distributed from a legit source, more people will seed and peer the file. If it's a hacked distro, more people will find out and fewer people will seed and peer the file, and it will be harder to distribute. This isn't always the case however-- before Farenheit 9/11 came out, there were a number of 700MB spoof video files with the title "Farenheit 9/11", and they were being mirrored pretty heavily... |
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Re:Legal Torrents - 1 Major Problem w/this (Score:2)
by Eudial (590661) on Saturday December 18, @07:05PM (#11127082) |
| Through the md5s on the distro's webpage. |
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A recent trend is MMORPG Client software (Score:2)
by WotanKhan (150429) on Saturday December 18, @06:38PM (#11126969) (http://www.offlinetshirts.com/) |
| being offered for download via bittorrent. World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online, both major MMORPGs are are distributing their client software via Bittorrent. |
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Sites that list legal torrents... (Score:5, Informative)
by Ghostgate (800445) on Saturday December 18, @07:10PM (#11127108) |
| There are also sites that list legal torrents, try File Soup [filesoup.com] or Legal Torrents [legaltorrents.com] for example. These are just two that I remember offhand, I'm sure there are many others as well. Remember, BitTorrent, like any other P2P application, has plenty of legitimate uses. Don't get sucked in by the *AA propaganda machine (not directed towards the parent, just saying that in general). |
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Re:Sites that list legal torrents... (Score:1)
by Joel from Sydney (828208) on Sunday December 19, @04:15AM (#11128936) |
| Don't forget Filerush.com [filerush.com], they have things like game trailers, demos and so on. |
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Re:Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)
by koreth (409849) on Saturday December 18, @08:02PM (#11127343) |
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There are other big legal downloads available via BT as well. For example, I set my web server up as a seed for the Project Gutenberg DVD-ROM and CD-ROM images [gutenberg.org], about as legal a set of files as you can get. So far I have served up over half a terabyte of those two images to people. I also seed a couple freeware games and some Creative Commons-licensed video to the tune of a couple hundred gigabytes of traffic, not a single byte of illegal or unauthorized content there.
Hosting the 3.85GB Gutenberg DVD image would be a bit costly for the Gutenberg folks. Without BT or something like it, it would be much less convenient for volunteers like me to help them out by spreading the load around. |
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Re:Legal Torrents (Score:1)
by jimmyp9999 (813454) on Monday December 20, @01:37PM (#11138790) |
| The best use of BT for me is getting recordings of live shows on etree: http://bt.etree.org/ [etree.org] |
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Such an unused potential (Score:5, Interesting)
by vincob (247090) on Saturday December 18, @06:31PM (#11126936) (http://www.oberle.org/) |
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There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms. But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time. My dream about a P2P PVR: http://www.oberle.org/blog/2004/08/02/a-p2p-video |
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Such an unused potential-Stop abusing it. (Score:1, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @06:39PM (#11126978) |
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"There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use it instead of fighting it, their market could explode, while having no distribution costs, their custermers would provide the distribution mechanisms." 1) They wouldn't be fighting it, if a certain group wasn't abusing it. 2) What makes P2P work isn't the technology, but broadband. Something that's confined to 20% of the US population. A demographic that's primarely affluent, white males 20-30 years of age. That means that the geeks "new business model" doesn't work for 80 % of the US. "But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time." What's the rush? |
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Re:Such an unused potential-Stop abusing it. (Score:2)
by dosius (230542) <MollyzKoubou@BettyKate.dosius.com> on Saturday December 18, @07:11PM (#11127116) (http://www.dosius.com/) |
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I'm hardly affluent, I'm on SSI, fixed income small enough I get food stamps, I still can easily afford DSL. It's not expensive. Moll. |
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Re:Such an unused potential-Stop abusing it. (Score:2)
by node 3 (115640) on Saturday December 18, @10:55PM (#11128039) |
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They wouldn't be fighting it, if a certain group wasn't abusing it. Bittorrent users are not "abusing it". They are *using* it exactly in the manner it was intended--to distribute large files to many people efficiently. That's not abuse. What makes P2P work isn't the technology, but broadband. That's foolish. First, broadband *is* technology (and part of what makes up "P2P" in practice), but even taking broadband out of the picture, if a file is 300MB, it will still download faster over dial-up if you use something like bittorrent than it would using a standard ftp/http site under higher loads. "But I'm afraid they are not going to get it in time." What's the rush? The reality that P2P and broadband are here now, waiting to be used to enhance our life, but for a few old greedy dinosaurs wish to proscribe *our* use of it. It's like as if we were coming out of an ice age and the people want to go out and bask in the sun, but are being sued by the coat-makers for cutting into their profits. All they have to do is go from making coats to making shorts and t-shirts. Maybe they won't make as much, or maybe they'll make more, that's not my concern. They aren't entitled to profit, only to *try* to profit. The fact that they wish to do so by making *reality* illegal is revolting to the extreme. |
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Re:Such an unused potential-Stop abusing it. (Score:1)
by Deraj DeZine (726641) on Saturday December 18, @10:30PM (#11127961) (http://derajdezine.vze.com/) |
| Your link states that 45% of people with Internet access have broadband. That's not the same as 40% of the US population. |
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Re:Such an unused potential-Stop abusing it. (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @01:27AM (#11128552) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
| No, you're right, BUT, it's a huge percentage of the demographic that marketers/advertisers and companies are after. Numbers are fun, aren't they? |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:1)
by ToyKeeper (17042) on Saturday December 18, @07:52PM (#11127293) (http://www.xyzz.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 22, @06:30AM) |
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Heh.
The market is just going to have to explode without them. As for the P2P PVR... um, suprnova.org? |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:1)
by iminplaya (723125) on Saturday December 18, @07:55PM (#11127308) |
| The majors are more interested in controlling the market than expanding it. They want to be the gatekeepers. Self distribution is the anti-christ to these people. They will vilify it anyway they can. They don't want to work in any kind of free market. They just want the whole market to themselves. The fact that they can as the government's proxy censor doesn't hurt either. |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:4, Interesting)
by FFFish (7567) on Saturday December 18, @08:11PM (#11127392) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Oh! how I long for the day when they finally realize I want to pay for the entertainment I watch! The fact is that their business model is d.e.a.d.: I have become an extremely selective media user. I refuse to purchase cable television; the cost is an order of magnitude more than the value I would receive. The same applies for movies; I do not derive fifteen dollars worth of enjoyment from all but a few very exceptional films (and the commercials at the beginning are, in fact, a significant reduction in their value). I rely exclusively on torrents and rental DVDs for my television entertainment now. I get the benefit of selecting the time and location (I use a laptop) of viewing. There are no commercials, saving me ten minutes of annoying, aggravating brainwashing, and at "free," the price is sweet. If the producers would simply skip the distributors and make it easy for me to pay them directly, I'd actually be willing to flow some cash their way. My price points are: Family Guy: probably a buck an episode if the quality of humour remained as surreal, unexpected, and edgy. Scrubs: about the same, especially if it helps them avoid becoming maudlin. Regenesis: a couple bucks an episode, but that's going to plummet if they don't start wrapping up some of the damned stories. Too many loose-ends, unless they're going to all come together in one brainfucking twist that scares the living bejesus out of me. The trick, really, is to ask me to pay after I've seen the episode. Sometimes I've been hurting from laughing at, say, Family Guy. Hit me up then and I'd throw a wallet at you: give me more, damn the cost! |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:2)
by gozu (541069) on Sunday December 19, @06:55AM (#11129256) (Last Journal: Sunday December 19, @06:50AM) |
| You sir, are a man with fine taste! You've just listed my 2 favorite series in the animated and non-animated categories (i had never heard of regenesis but i'm going to give it a shot now that you've mentionned it) Pm me on the slashdot messenging thingie or email me : gozulin at gmail dot com) maybe we can make each other discover other shows we'd both like. |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:2)
by FFFish (7567) on Sunday December 19, @12:14PM (#11130728) (http://slashdot.org/) |
| You want to watch any of BBC's Attenborough documentaries. Life of Plants blew me away with the sophistication of some plants' ability to use animals as sex/seed distribution slaves. The first Massive episode was incredible, about the collision of sardines, dolphins, sharks, gulls, and seal lions off the coast of Africa. |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:2)
by gozu (541069) on Sunday December 19, @04:36PM (#11132500) (Last Journal: Sunday December 19, @06:50AM) |
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Thanks for the recommendation but I was looking forward to a more...fruitful dialogue |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:1)
by FFFish (7567) on Sunday December 19, @08:40PM (#11133988) (http://slashdot.org/) |
| Er, no. |
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We have it in Sweden... (Score:1)
by apanap (804545) on Sunday December 19, @03:03AM (#11128803) (Last Journal: Saturday October 02, @03:42PM) |
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In Sweden, the largest movie distributer SF has a site for "renting" movies and TV shows online, that you see directly on your screen called SF Anytime [sf-anytime.com] (might not be accesible from a non-swedish IP). It has it's problems (it requires IE6 and WMP for example..) but overall it's a pretty good service. They have both movies and episodes of some swedish TV shows (though the selection is a little limited...). The prices are quite reasonable, about 1 dollar for a TV show and 4 or 5 for a movie. I've only used it for the free content they have (music videos), but that works great if you have a fast internet connection (the streams are at 400 kbps). And no commercials! It hasn't helped one bit against piracy though, people still think free is better... |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:2)
by Sanity (1431) on Saturday December 18, @08:43PM (#11127514) (http://locut.us/~ian/blog/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07, @07:15AM) |
There is such a powerfull distribution mechanism in P2P network, if only the studios/majors/etc would understand it and use itAs someone who as lived this conversation many times with these people, the RIAA has nothing to gain from P2P, except, if they are lucky, a quick and painless demise. These people thrive on controlling the means through which people acquire entertainment. P2P, and the Internet in general, provide a far superior alternative that they don't control.
RIAA = Dinosaurs They are going to cause lots of people lots of pain as they go down, but down they will go (and it will be good for everyone but them). |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:2)
by ultranova (717540) on Sunday December 19, @11:34AM (#11130482) |
P2P = Meteor ?-)
Don't bet on it. Haven't you ever seen "Godzilla vs. Bambi" ? Being smarter doesn't really help when your opponent is a scryscraper-tall fire-breathing abomination from world's dark past. Brains are no match for blood-dripping talons or saliva-dripping teeth; nor is being right match for lawyers and money. Media companies are simply too big to go down, ever. They will continue to plague our civilization until the day it collapses. In the meantime they will continue attacking everything that threatens them in any way, doing their utmost best to stunt technological development to upkeep the status quo. Sooner or later they will try to make port blocking compulsory on the ISPs part, because "only terrorists and copyright infringers need to be able to accept connections; everyone else is happy that those darn hackers can't get to their machines anymore". If that law gets rejected the first time, they will simply try again, and again, and again, until they succeed. After all, the biggest problem to those media corporations is not copyright infringement - no, it's the efficient distribution channel that Internet offers. It could allow people to search news and entertainment on their own, or to even *gasp* make their own independent of the media companies. This threatens their monopoly, and is therefore something they must destroy in order to survive - and they most likely will, due to the resources at their disposal. After all, it is legal for politicians in the US to take bribes (called "campaign contributions" there), and once they get the US, they can simply bully the rest of the world to the line. Age of Information is about over; next is another Dark Age. |
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Re:Such an unused potential (Score:1)
by GreatBug (841593) on Saturday December 18, @08:58PM (#11127589) |
| http://www.torrentocracy.com/ [torrentocracy.com] Done, and done. (almost) |
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Bartering? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Hatta (162192) on Saturday December 18, @06:32PM (#11126940) (Last Journal: Thursday July 15, @09:56PM) |
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the downloaders of a file barter for chunks of it by uploading and downloading them in a tit-for-tat-like manner to prevent parasitic behavior. Each peer is responsible for maximizing its own download rate by contacting suitable peers, and peers with high upload rates will with high probability also be able to download with high speeds. Does this actually work? I find that when there are limited seeds, those first in line essentially transmit as fast as they recieve, and increasing upload doesn't really affect total speed much. When there are lots of seeders there's plenty of bandwidth to go around so it's always fast. Does anyone notice that restricting upload significantly affects download speed? |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:3, Informative)
by RandomJoe (814420) on Saturday December 18, @06:49PM (#11127013) |
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The only effect I've noticed is when I forget to tell my firewall to let BitTorrent connects through to my computer. Then I see a HUGE decrease in speed. Other than that, adjusting the upload bandwidth seldom seems to make a difference. I have a cable connection, 4Mb/512kb, and even throttled down to 50-100kb outbound I'd still frequently see the incoming connection at 2.5-3Mb. On the occasions when torrents were slow, cranking it all the way up (minus a bit for overhead) didn't help speed it up any. In fact, then I would often see my outbound be 2-3 times my incoming speeds. Note for the militant: I don't throttle down like that as a rule. When I was first playing with BT I did for each stream when I would have 3-4 running at a time. Now I just do one at a time, and play with the settings because I get bored and want to see what happens. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:1, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19, @04:55AM (#11128994) |
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> The only effect I've noticed is when I forget to tell my firewall to let BitTorrent connects through to my computer. Then I see a HUGE decrease in speed. Because no one can contact you, and you have to be the one that initiate the contact. The net result is that you *cannot* be in contact with somewhat that is also firewalled, hence the nubmer of peers avalaible to you is much smaller than the amount in the smarm. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Rakshasa Taisab (244699) on Saturday December 18, @06:51PM (#11127020) (http://www.uio.no/~jaris) |
| Usually you do not get the best download speeds from seeders, but other peers that are interested in what you got. With good upload speeds you are more likely to be unchoked by fast peers who are downloading from you. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by jpc (33615) on Sunday December 19, @07:17AM (#11129308) |
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Seeders arent interested in what you have so they cant base their upload to you on what you are giving them, so working out a good strategy for how they serve up stuff is much harder. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:3, Insightful)
by Jameth (664111) on Saturday December 18, @08:04PM (#11127354) |
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Very many people are effectively required to cap their upload. I'm on a cable connection where, if I don't cap my upload at 10kbps, it drops my download to staying near 6kbps when it hits 16kbps down (I stop it at ten so everything doesn't die while I use the other portions of the internet, such as the web). And, no, it doesn't do anything to your download speed. Yeah, I usually only average 30kbps down, but I also commonly get around 150kbps down, which leaves me with better-than-realtime download of compressed video. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:1)
by Timmmm (636430) on Saturday December 18, @09:19PM (#11127689) |
| I makes a difference for me. Fastest I ever got was 0.5 MB/s down with no upload limit. With 20 kB/s upload limit fastest is about 50. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by dave1g (680091) on Saturday December 18, @09:22PM (#11127702) (http://www.bodasivrak.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 15, @01:14AM) |
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The theory I go buy is to cap my upload just under my max of 40 KBps to about 25 - 30. To make the torrent download faster I will sometimes increase the number of uplinks allowed for that torrent in Azureus. My theory being that the more people I trade with even if the trades are succesivly smaller, I am more likly to get their data than if I had never sent them anything. I dont know if it works, but it is my strategy. If that is gaming the system I dont care cus I ALWAYS share back to a 1:1 ratio and for the stuff I really like or the stuff offered by non profits such as linux sites, I will tell Azureus to keep uploading (I have it set to auto stop at 1:1 ratio) |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by imsabbel (611519) on Saturday December 18, @10:11PM (#11127879) |
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IT does work. I dont know in what extend the "did i get data from peer" factor influences propability to get an upload slot, but i have seen several time (meaning more than statistically insignificant), that after loosing upload limit the download increased significantly (factor 2 or more) |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by System.out.println() (755533) on Saturday December 18, @10:30PM (#11127962) (Last Journal: Thursday August 26, @08:46PM) |
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As I understand it, it depends on the tracker, which is probably why you're getting responses from all corners of the field for this. On my favorite tracker, I've never noticed a difference (although I've never actually experimented with it). On, say, tvtorrents, I've noticed a huge difference. So the answer, as usual, is a resounding "Maybe!" |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by Empiric (675968) on Saturday December 18, @11:04PM (#11128072) (http://www.neorune.com/) |
| Yeah... anecdotally, capping my upload at 20KB/s (I'm on an unbalanced up/down cable broadband connection), made an -enormous- difference. I went from seeming to max out at around 25KB/s down to frequently seeing 100-200KB/s. Pure conjecture: perhaps unlimited up is actually interfering with communication between the client and tracker... unlimited up also makes my web browsing very slow, not because I don't have the free down to pull page images quick, but, I'm guessing, the maxed-out up is actually slowing the http requests I'm sending to the web server. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:5, Insightful)
by AnyoneEB (574727) on Sunday December 19, @12:04AM (#11128295) (http://anyoneebgames.tk/) |
| Unlimited upload on BT (or any p2p for that matter) is bad because it uses TCP so the upload interferes with the packets sent to tell the computer you are downloading that you are actually reciving packets from it. Since those packets do not get sent, the computer you are downloading from sends slower. It would also be interfering with your HTTP requests and acknowledgements to the web server. (There is a correct terminology for what I am saying, I am just to tired to think of it.) On the other hand, I have found that capping my upload too low does lead to lower download speeds. (If there are not a ton of seeds, my download tends to hover around three times my upload.) |
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Fix: Traffic shaping (Score:1)
by AnotherScratchMonkey (592037) on Sunday December 19, @12:44PM (#11130898) (http://matureasskickers.net/) |
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When excessive uploads interfere with other traffic, you need a traffic shaper. Linux users are in luck: It's built into the Linux kernel. You just have to enable it. Download the Wondershaper [lartc.org] script, set a couple of variables at the top describing your connection, and run it to install the settings in the kernel. Once you have it set the way you like, run it from your boot script to automatically configure your kernel on restart.
Those using a consumer router based on Linux, such as the Linksys WRT54G, may find a way to run the Wondershaper on it. For instance, you can get replacement firmware for the WRT54G from Sveasoft [sveasoft.com] that incorporates the Wondershaper. (Just turn on the QoS feature.) I use the Sveasoft firmware and add a couple of iptables commands to put my UDP game traffic in the high-priority queue, so P2P uploads don't disturb my gaming. See the Sveasoft forums (registration and $20 required) for details. You'll also want to do this if you use UDP-based VOIP. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:1)
by ranmachan (320399) on Sunday December 19, @06:43PM (#11133343) |
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Traffic shaping really helps with this. For starters, have a look at wondershaper: http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ [lartc.org] |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:1)
by oddfox (685475) on Sunday December 19, @12:44AM (#11128413) (http://www.oddfox.net/) |
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I regularly limit my upload speed in Bittorrent to 10KB/sec to maybe 13KB/sec. That goes for all my other P2P as well, but with Bittorrent I'm able to get anywhere from 100-300KB/sec usually with the upload limit I use. I also prefer Bittornado. Steer clear of the unlimited upload speed in -any- program, by the way, because they almost always strangle your connection to death. |
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Re:Bartering? (Score:2)
by Deliveranc3 (629997) on Sunday December 19, @01:29AM (#11128560) |
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I find when you break past the standard DSL upload speed of 15kbps you get a massive increase in download speed, around 18k or so you can pull as much as you get at 45k. If something is really cooking that's the best speed to pull those really sweet 350k oooppsss bittorrent messed up speeds. |
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BT is great, but: (Score:5, Interesting)
by ATAMAH (578546) on Saturday December 18, @06:32PM (#11126941) |
| There are a few things that i would count as it's downsides. For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it. So unless you grabbed it while it was "hot" - you will have to deal with much lower speeds. Also i often find that i upload almost as much as i download, not being greedy or anything, but here in New Zealand broadband is still capped either on speed or on traffic. And quotas are pretty stingy, counting both uploads and downloads... but that is more isp/country specific i guess:) |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:2, Interesting)
by ToyKeeper (17042) on Saturday December 18, @07:43PM (#11127243) (http://www.xyzz.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 22, @06:30AM) |
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The things you're complaining about are not BitTorrent's fault. They are simply the nature of peer to peer traffic. The total amount uploaded, by necessity, equals the total amount downloaded. And the people doing the up/downloading are just regular people like you. If your ratio is less than 1.0, that means someone else is donating their bandwidth to make up for what you didn't share.
If you don't want to share, don't use P2P systems. Get your files some other way. As for getting things while they're hot, almost all forms of media have that problem. Published content has a limited lifetime, varying from seconds to years depending on the media. If you missed last week's Simpsons, it probably won't be on TV again for a long time. The media companies decide how long the episode will be available. At least with bittorrent, the users can decide how long to keep stuff around. Newer systems are working on lengthening the lifetime of shared files, by making it convenient to "seed" a large number of files at once. Perhaps you'll like PDTP better than BitTorrent. |
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Yep (Score:3, Funny)
by Wesley Felter (138342) <wesley@felter.org> on Saturday December 18, @07:44PM (#11127247) (http://felter.org/wesley/) |
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For instance, once the object that is being distributed been downloaded by the masses - you won't get a decent speed downloading it. You're right; HTTP is so much better, because when something is being downloaded by the masses from a single Web server you get about 0 bytes/s. |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:2)
by burns210 (572621) on Saturday December 18, @07:57PM (#11127316) (http://www.mirwin.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 09, @12:00AM) |
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"So unless you grabbed it while it was "hot" - you will have to deal with much lower speeds." Well, ya. When there are fewer people uploading the file, you are going to have a lower download. Worst case it should be 1:1 with ftp or http. Best, case, it is exponentially faster than that. A smarter algo for capping upload/download for when the 'rush' has passed might be in order. But if you missed the rush initially, ofcourse your speed is going to be slower, fewer people are uploading the file for you. Personally, I am more looking forward to the streamswarming, to take advantage of TV over IP-type, that prioritizes the file's peices such that you can view as you download, rather than a bittorrent where you have to dowload the entire file first. |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:1)
by SlashdotMeNow (799901) on Saturday December 18, @08:04PM (#11127353) |
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If you don't upload at LEAST as much as you download, then we don't want you on Bittorrent. Please go download somewhere else. You're probably one of those people that caused the downfall of other P2P systems by downloading and not sharing. If you upload less than what you're downloading, then you're part of the problem, not the solution. |
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Geographic monopoly (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @09:54PM (#11127816) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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If people who live in countries where all ISPs severely cap uploads aren't wanted on BitTorrent, then where are they wanted? |
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That just comes from people running shitty seeds (Score:2)
by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Saturday December 18, @08:26PM (#11127453) |
| There is no rule saying a seeder has to be slow, it can be just as fast as a normal web server. However some people like to run seeds on things like a modem. Try someone like 3dgamers.com, they use BT to distribute files. Their seeders are nice n' fast so if no one is downloading, you get a fast transfer. However, unlike notmal HTTP, if lots of people are downloading something, you still get it fast since you all help each other out. |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:2)
by timeOday (582209) on Saturday December 18, @11:48PM (#11128240) |
There are a few things that i would count as it's downsidesIf it makes you feel any better, your participation is exactly why bittorrent works at all... the one thing that set Bittorret apart from the other p2p protocols was addressing the problem of leeching. On the other hand, yes, it's uneconomical. In an efficient system, files would be served from nodes on data centers right near the backbone. P2P sends data up to the backbone and back down again, thus doubling the required bandwidth. (Transfer over the backbone itself is almost free; you can buy web hosting [findmyhosting.com] at $5/mo for 45 GB of data transfers, try getting that deal to your desktop!) |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:1)
by permaculture (567540) on Sunday December 19, @03:48AM (#11128893) (http://www.brunel.ac...gi_photos/index.html | Last Journal: Monday February 02, @09:41AM) |
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"i often find that i upload almost as much as i download" For Bittorrent to work people *must* upload as much as they download. That's how Bittorrent works! |
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Re:BT is great, but: (Score:2)
by isorox (205688) on Sunday December 19, @09:49AM (#11129868) (http://www.slashdot.org/~isorox | Last Journal: Tuesday November 30, @04:36PM) |
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Also i often find that i upload almost as much as i download, not being greedy or anything, but here in New Zealand broadband is still capped either on speed or on traffic. And quotas are pretty stingy, counting both uploads and downloads... but that is more isp/country specific i guess:) Fancy that. A peer to peer system where everyone plays their part? I tend to leave a torrent open for 1 - 1.5 times the upload as the download, to help negate the affect of those that downlaod but dont give anything back. For every byte you download, someone else on ADSL, like me, has to upload it. In a more efficient system, multicasting would be used, but BT is way better then the client/server approach |
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They missing the most important quality (Score:5, Funny)
by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Saturday December 18, @06:33PM (#11126943) |
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...ability to withstand flash crowds
How about the ability to withstand lawsuits? Isn't that more important than flash crowds? |
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Re:They missing the most important quality (Score:1)
by camooT (820852) on Saturday December 18, @08:19PM (#11127424) |
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+5 funny, +1 troll for the sig w/ no distinguishable wit. oh and, +1 foe, if you will. |
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Re:They missing the most important quality (Score:2, Insightful)
by sqrt(2) (786011) on Saturday December 18, @08:22PM (#11127435) |
| Bittorrent itself is safe. Sites like suprnova.org may not be. |
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I'd like another name (Score:5, Funny)
by Jugalator (259273) on Saturday December 18, @06:33PM (#11126945) (Last Journal: Friday November 19, @05:03AM) |
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A few performance problems are revealed Yeah, performance problems should be fixed, but fix the name too. Name the next generation P2P client something like FuckTheRIAADickheadCunts. It would be interesting to see it get mentioned in the news each time RIAA sues something related to that P2P network. Call the "servers" instead "ejaculators" or something worse, and go on like that to introduce terms that violate various taboos. Soon enough, it can't get mentioned in the news anymore and (...now I get to my point, and now you will understand I'm not crazy, now you will see how this idea will triumph and free information once and for all...) RIAA's plans to scare customers by getting sue news in the newspapers won't work anymore! HA HA HA! Are you listening RIAA!? We have you now!!! THE NERDS HAVE YOU! |
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No, no no. (Score:5, Funny)
by drxray (839725) on Saturday December 18, @06:55PM (#11127038) |
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You're on the right lines, but we should call it something really positive, something they couldn't possibly want to ban.
They're pretty hard hearted, they're already happy being know as people who want to ban sharing. But lets see them try to ban JesusKittenShare (the premier opensource implementation of the RespectYourElders protocol) and www.cutebabies.org, the popular |
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Re:No, no no. (Score:5, Insightful)
by goon america (536413) on Saturday December 18, @07:52PM (#11127296) (http://dailysedative.com/ | Last Journal: Friday December 13, @01:31AM) |
| I think this is the basic idea behind the PATRIOT Act, the Clear Skies initiative, the Healthy Forests Proposal, No Child Left Behind act, CAN-SPAM act, etc. The forces of evil are way ahead of you on this. |
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Re:No, no no. (Score:2)
by ScrewMaster (602015) on Saturday December 18, @11:29PM (#11128157) |
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Still |
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Re:No, no no. (Score:2)
by Snaller (147050) on Tuesday December 21, @04:31AM (#11145467) (Last Journal: Monday December 27, @11:04PM) |
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What a pity it is that your message isn't funny |
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If you can't beat 'em, use their names. (Score:3, Funny)
by mikey573 (137933) * on Saturday December 18, @10:16PM (#11127900) (http://www.vgmusic.com/~mike/) |
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Make a music sharing program called RIAA, and a video sharing program MPAA. Then follow-up and make an overall sharing program called CopyRight. |
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Re:No, no no. (Score:1)
by hobo2k (626482) on Sunday December 19, @01:01AM (#11128474) (Last Journal: Thursday July 22, @02:37PM) |
| Or you could play on stereotypes. Lets see what happens when hollywood tries to ban TheBible or PrayerInSchools. |
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Re:I'd like another name (Score:1)
by subz503 (839012) on Saturday December 18, @08:14PM (#11127405) (http://www.subz.org/) |
| While that idea is kind of juvenile, it would be funny to hear it mentioned on the news. |
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Re:I'd like another name (Score:2)
by k_187 (61692) on Saturday December 18, @08:34PM (#11127483) (http://k187.blogspot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 01, @11:00PM) |
| yes, and then when somebody gets dicked over by them, we can't talk about it because of what it got named. Effectively ending the abilty of us to fight back. |
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irony (Score:5, Funny)
by bitspotter (455598) on Saturday December 18, @06:51PM (#11127021) |
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The irony is that a web site dedicated toward serving a p2p protocol expressly designed to rememdy the slashdot effect gets slashdotted. So why don't they just use Bittorrent to distribute their mirrors? |
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Re:irony (Score:2)
by burns210 (572621) on Saturday December 18, @08:16PM (#11127414) (http://www.mirwin.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 09, @12:00AM) |
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because bittorrent isn't efficient enough to handle things like www traffic and html pages. Nor does it combine well with mysql+php or database-driven sites. I think the next big step (generation?) is going to be a protocol that can handle www-style traffic, and can somehow work with databases. Doing this through natural-load balancing and identity hiding(anonymity), etc. Bittorrent can do the load balancing, but it is too chatty for doing things like www that require a lot of updating, etc. Not like big files. Some type of web-cache sharing system, that md5/hashes each (static Things like databases, and scripts get things tricky though. Pages need to be self-contained(anchor links, gmail style dynamic showing/hiding of content, and what not), though. |
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Re:irony (Score:1)
by kjamez (10960) on Sunday December 19, @07:11AM (#11129299) (http://higginsforpresident.net/) |
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i always thought coralcache should release a binary client / server (one that's not hard to setup i think coral is great, but it only cache's after someone implicitly visits it through the cache link. if there are a lot of potential security problems with allowing data from unknown hosts right into your browser, potential cahce-modifications locally, or virus injections, etc. but with enough foresight, and skilled enough developers, coral cache as a firefox plugin might not be such a bad idea. big sites like the clients under a server report their cache's, and the server determines where to load-balance out the incoming connections. i'd dedicate 20k up for cache servering or whatever. i like the idea. it wouldn't limit the actual USE of web-based bandwidth, but it would certianinly keep a good portion of it off the backbones. i lived a a mile from where osdn has their office in beaverton, or |
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Re:irony (Score:2)
by Hatta (162192) on Saturday December 18, @08:07PM (#11127372) (Last Journal: Thursday July 15, @09:56PM) |
Um... irony [reference.com] Pronunciation Key (r-n, r-) |
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I don't infringe copyrights (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @06:51PM (#11127023) |
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As a solid, upstanding citizen of the United States (a country which has the best government that money can buy), I firmly believe in strongly adhering to all the laws of this fine country. That's why I always go to thepiratesbay.org. They are located in Finland, of course, where US Copyright Law doesn't apply. So it's legal for them to offer files for downloading. And, of course, in the US it's legal to download files. What is illegal is to offer more than $1000 worth of them for uploading. So, please, let us all keep our Bittorrent downloads legal, folks. Thank you. |
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Re:I don't infringe copyrights (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @07:15PM (#11127132) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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They are located in Finland, of course, where US Copyright Law doesn't apply. So it's legal for them to offer files for downloading. No, it's probably illegal for them to do so under Finnish law. Your statement is rather dumb. It's akin to saying that because laws in the US prohibiting murder are not in effect in Finland, that you can murder people freely over there. That's not how it works. And, of course, in the US it's legal to download files. Downloading is a form of reproduction, and reproduction is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder per 17 USC 106. Cases discussing this include Napster (downloaders were direct infringers), Intellectual Reserve (viewing a website involved downloading it, a reproduction, and was unauthorized, ergo infringing), and both build on MAI (putting data into RAM or other computer memory is a reproduction that may be infringing). What is illegal is to offer more than $1000 worth of them for uploading. You're probably thinking of the threshold for CRIMINAL copyright infringement. I assure you, aside from getting that wrong too, you're still breaking the law even if you only do so to a lesser degree. |
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Re:Your post is pure FUD (Score:2)
by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Saturday December 18, @08:27PM (#11127457) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Soyes, it is quite legal to share files in Sweden, thank you. I'll take your word for it, though Finland isn't Sweden, last I heard. please show me one attempt at prosecution for less than $1000 of downloads Remember: only criminal actions are prosecuted, or require that threshold. Civil actions are brought by plaintiffs, not the state, and have no threshold. Infringements as to a work with no commercial value whatsoever still permit statutory damages that could go as far up as $150,000 per work. I agree though, that there's comparatively little criminal enforcement of copyright law. IMO there shouldn't be any, and it should be decriminalized. For their $3,000 settlement offer, that works out to be about 50 cents for all the DVD's and CD's I've gotten. I would imagine that part of the deal is that you destroy or hand over the unlawfully made copies. |
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Re:Your post is pure FUD (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @11:27AM (#11159344) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> Why can't Americans ever seem to see the difference? Because most of the people make insults to cover ALL Americans. When someone says "You stupid yanks," I don't assume they mean "The stupid yanks in charge of the US," I assume they mean what they say. Many of them actually hate Americans because they can't disassociate Americans with the government that controls them. |
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Re:I don't infringe copyrights (Score:1)
by spyfrog (552673) on Saturday December 18, @07:15PM (#11127133) (http://slashdot.org/) |
| Isn't it Sweden? |
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Re:I don't infringe copyrights (Score:2)
by gspr (602968) on Saturday December 18, @07:16PM (#11127141) |
| Correct. |
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On Finland-Sweden, and funny legal threats (Score:5, Informative)
by ultrabot (200914) on Saturday December 18, @07:20PM (#11127153) |
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Isn't it Sweden? Yes. Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers here [thepiratebay.org]. It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude |
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Re:On Finland-Sweden, and funny legal threats (Score:2)
by Snaller (147050) on Tuesday December 21, @04:33AM (#11145473) (Last Journal: Monday December 27, @11:04PM) |
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It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude Which will get them closed down all the sooner |
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Re:I don't infringe copyrights (Score:1)
by iocc (238550) on Sunday December 19, @05:53AM (#11129124) (http://www.flashdance.cx/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 15, @05:19PM) |
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No, they are located in Sweden. See this: http://static.thepiratebay.org/dreamworks_respons |
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The tracker in Finland got busted.. (Score:1)
by Soulfarmer (607565) * on Monday December 20, @01:26PM (#11138684) (http://www.mitavittua.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday January 03, @06:38AM) |
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So, even IF piratebay tracker would have been in Finland, it wouldn't be there anymore. But luckily it was and still is in Sweden. (All Finnish trackers I know of, are closed, not by authorities tho) And, About US copyright laws... unfortunately Microsoft asked local police to investigate and so on... prolly old news already... |
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had to be said ... (Score:4, Funny)
by for_usenet (550217) on Saturday December 18, @07:04PM (#11127077) |
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Anyone have a |
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Attack of the sucking parasites (Score:3, Interesting)
by AndroidCat (229562) on Saturday December 18, @07:26PM (#11127178) (http://home.primus.ca/~ronsharp/ | Last Journal: Friday May 02, @01:57PM) |
Only 9,219 out of 53,883 peers (17 %) have an uptime longer than one hour after they finished downloading. For 10 hours this number has decreased to only 1,649 peers (3.1 per cent), and for 100 hours to a mere 183 peers (0.34 per cent).Which explains why I frequently get DHCP IP addresses that are polluted with constant BitTorrent checks on various ports for days afterwards. The previous IP owner downloaded, dined and dashed. (And probably came back right after changing IPs and started his next download feast.) |
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Re:Attack of the sucking parasites (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @02:06AM (#11128665) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
| then you guys at work just don't know what you're doing. I download 3 GB files all the fucking time, and you know what? I'm n a shitty verizon dsl that only gets 16kB up and maxes at 90kB down... and guess what Mr. It-Doesn't Work, if I use a news reader, i get the same stats, EXCEPT if I'm upping something, in which case my downloads at the same time will just crawl... But with Azareus, and my 2.50 ratio, i can get (now get this) more upload kBs, around 18-24), AND, on a nicely seeded 'down', at the same time... 100kBs down, with bursts of 120... Eh? Doesn't work? It's all about ports, and having those inky-dinky packets and file pieces. The ISPs all throttle rates, over time, more or less, but when a new packet hits, to commence a stream, the initial rate is higher, then decreases, which is a bummer with most protocols, but with BT, for some reason, just when the throttle 'kicks in', the packets 'done', and a new packet comes scraming in before the throttle clamps down... Bottom line, distributed computing at its fucking (current) finest. |
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**AA going the way of the dinosaur (Score:1)
by idolcrash (836925) <idolcrash@gm a i l . com> on Saturday December 18, @07:34PM (#11127211) (http://slashdot.org/~idolcrash/journal | Last Journal: Saturday January 01, @06:16PM) |
| I really wish the death throes of the **AAs could be more entertaining. If you refuse to adapt to the climate, you die, simple as that. BT (or P2P in general) can be harnessed for good, and, as iTunes, etc. has shown, it works. |
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Don't forget the psychology! (Score:5, Interesting)
by Hoplite3 (671379) on Saturday December 18, @07:35PM (#11127214) |
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Bittorrent did more than get the swapping strategy correct, it fixed the social psychology of p2p. Before, you traded files with other faceless users. This meant you had little investment in the uploads of others. People would join the network and not share files, cap their upload speeds, etc. Generally, this made downloading a slow and painful process. (Not to mention that it was difficult to tell if two similarly named files are the same But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Users can no longer leach. There's social stigma attached to it. Also, you have some investment in making sure others have a copy of the file. If you liked it enough to d/l it, you probably want to share. Better yet, the action of the users of the site are focused on the same files, so resources are allocated fairly. Generally, it works better all around. This leaves out the boost in nerd status of those who have large share ratios and upload lots of torrents. That helps with file availability too. |
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Re:Don't forget the psychology! (Score:2)
by Lord_Dweomer (648696) on Saturday December 18, @08:09PM (#11127381) |
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While I think there's some of what you mentioned in regards to the uploading, I think the real reason it has been as successful as it has is because for the average user, there is no way out of capping upload without hurting download. I know you're trying to look on the positive side of things, but I think this is a slightly more realistic reason.
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Re:Don't forget the psychology! (Score:2)
by FFFish (7567) on Saturday December 18, @08:36PM (#11127489) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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MAKE MONEY FAST: INVENT HARDWARE-BASED BITTORRENT The only reason I stop BitTorrent: because I need the drive space. (Were I a gamer, I'd stop it during multiplayer games.) Invent a harddrive/router/torrent/video client. Use a bog-standard router with all the usual lan/wan/wlan/firewall/etc stuff. Add code to set port for torrenting (Azureus style). Add hardware interface and code to support torrent client and single-line LCD interface. Hardware is bog-standard. Code will allow deletion of only those shows that have achieved a 1.1 share ratio; and only those shows that have an inadequate seed/peer ratio. Code displays filename to LCD, which has a scroll wheel and delete button associated with list viewing; and standard play/pause/fwd/back buttons for video viewing. Add code to serve a web interface to the torrent client, wrt bandwidth, ports, security, and especially RSS feeds and selection filters. The code uses a custom, open-source OS and video player. This OS need not be Linux; it doesn't need anything like that amount of complexity, I think. Needs to be Open so that more codecs can be developed for it. Bingo. P2P that works. Make it cheap, make it easy, make it plentiful. The real trick is in figuring out a fair payment system so that media producers get the money they need to make their shows. They're not going to be able to rely on advertising any more: they will need to just make it really easy for people to pay after they've watched it, and encourange a culture that is charitable to busking. |
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What if the share ratio stops at 0.2 (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @10:04PM (#11127854) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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Hardware is bog-standard. Code will allow deletion of only those shows that have achieved a 1.1 share ratio; and only those shows that have an inadequate seed/peer ratio. I hope that by "and" you mean "or". I've had a lot of files get up to 0.2 share ratio or so and then stop despite days of leaving Azureus running, largely because I was "late to the party" so to speak, and demand for the file just fell off. Needs to be Open so that more codecs can be developed for it. Codecs? Why? Did you originally envision having TV-out on the box but then decide against it and forget to delete this justification for making it updatable? |
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Re:What if the share ratio stops at 0.2 (Score:2)
by FFFish (7567) on Sunday December 19, @12:16PM (#11130738) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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No, I meant "and." It may need a "or five days of no requests" clause to deal with latecomers. There should be TV out on the box. Hence bit re: video client, fwd/back buttons, etc. |
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Re:Don't forget the psychology! (Score:2)
by FFFish (7567) on Saturday December 18, @08:45PM (#11127526) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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I think maybe it's important to expand on an idea in my previous post: THE NEW ENTERTAINMENT MODEL IS BUSKING I am not at all likely to pay sight-unseen for a new-to-me television show. I'll have to be convinced that it's going to be worth my valuable dollar. Even the shows that have proven themselves to me are would find it challenging to get me to pay a full shot upfront. Might get me to pay half up-front, half on satisfaction, but only if I've learned to trust their product. There is only one answer. Entertainers are going to go back to their roots: busking. You entertain me well, and pass the hat after. You'll get what you deserve: if the show was a delight, you have a great career, with a generous income. Good buskers make a damn fine wage, and that's on the generosity of only a few thousand people a day. Imagine if their audience was as big as all television. Provide me entertainment, and I'll reward justly. It's only fair. |
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Re:Don't forget the psychology! (Score:2)
by drix (4602) on Saturday December 18, @10:49PM (#11128018) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Anyone who knows anything about social psychology is apt to have a very low opinion of it |
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Re:Don't forget the psychology! (Score:2)
by Snaller (147050) on Tuesday December 21, @04:38AM (#11145484) (Last Journal: Monday December 27, @11:04PM) |
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But Bittorrents have organized around websites. These sites typically require registration and monitor the share ratio of users. Which of course makes it much easier for the Police to catch the guilty parties. |
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for those who didn't read the article... (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @07:45PM (#11127254) |
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from right below figure 4:
In order to test the integrity of meta-data, we donated to Suprnova an account for hosting a mirror. By installing spyware in the HTML code, we have registered each |
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Frell! They are already tracking! (Score:2, Funny)
by akaisaru (744547) on Saturday December 18, @08:01PM (#11127337) (http://iamtheman.yeah/baby!/yeah.html) |
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It would really suck if BT were banned - that would prevent everyone from making any downloads. Think of how much free bandwidth there would be - over 1/3rd of all internet activity vanishing because of a BT ban! Wow! A month ago, a few days after I innocently downloaded a file, I received a letter from my ISP telling me to delete the file because they received a compliant on a copyright violation. It stated that future complaints of infringement would result in my (or rather my landlord's) information being handed over to the complaining party for legal action. I offer my sincerest scowl and finger salute to the frelling promiscuous complaining party. |
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Re:Frell! They are already tracking! (Score:1)
by King_of_Crunk (763543) on Sunday December 19, @01:34AM (#11128574) (http://www.linuxdot.net/) |
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LOL bittorrent banned! I dont think that could ever happen. May improved and evolvolved into something better but never banned. Unlike napster and such apps development has been decentralized by making it open source. OK jump on it folks either say hurry for open source sticking it to the man or this is why open source is bad |
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Single point of failure (Score:5, Insightful)
by danila (69889) on Saturday December 18, @08:24PM (#11127441) |
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The study shows how vulnerable BitTorrent is to failures of Suprnova mirrors and trackers. Kill a large First, you don't need servers to distribute ed2k links. A short ASCII string effectively replaces a large Second, the servers play only a secondary role, even if many servers would go down, that would have a small impact on the network because of source exchange. And using Kad it's even possible to operate entirely without servers. I do not hate BitTorrent, really. Even though I am a long time eMule user and even though I am very annoyed by the apparent popularity of BitTorrent here on |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:5, Insightful)
by Soul-Burn666 (574119) on Saturday December 18, @09:16PM (#11127669) (Last Journal: Friday April 26, @04:06AM) |
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Ah! But that is EXACTLY what was in mind when BT was written. BT was originally meant for speeding up LEGAL downloads when flash crowds appear. Therefore not needing anonymity on the tracker and can exploit the advantage of a central server to maximize traffic. In mind was that if an illegal file is tracked on BT, the website could be easily sued and the tracker taken down. Moreover, all those people that say: "please seed after you finish! Don't be a leecher!" are thinking in standard P2P terms, but this is NOT what BT was written for. It was written to aid standard http downloads, as numerous sites already do. |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:2)
by danila (69889) on Sunday December 19, @04:52AM (#11128989) |
| That doesn't change the fact that BitTorrent is a shitty network for filesharing, as opposed to network to "aid standard http downloads". I understand perfectly well the logic of Bram Cohen, I read several FAQs and interviews about him, but this only means that filesharers, who are interested in unauthorised downloads of copyrighted materials made a risky choice. |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @10:10PM (#11127876) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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You can send an ed2k link by e-mail, IM or post it on Slashdot. True, but if you open a public web interface for searching for ed2k links, you may get exposed to legal problems (e.g. ShareReactor and ShareConnector). Furthermore, ed2k has excellent search capabilities - both via servers (very fast and very efficient) and via distributed Kad[emlia] system (fast and efficient). Then there's the problem of peer discovery. How do you find the Kad network if the lawyers take down the public lists of popular ed2k servers? |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:2)
by danila (69889) on Sunday December 19, @04:49AM (#11128984) |
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True, but if you open a public web interface for searching for ed2k links, you may get exposed to legal problems (e.g. ShareReactor and ShareConnector). Correct, but there are still many more ways to distribute the links than Then there's the problem of peer discovery. How do you find the Kad network if the lawyers take down the public lists of popular ed2k servers? Via other nodes. Until the lawyers take down half a significant chunk of network at the same time, you will be able to connect to someone who is online, get your leg in the door, so to speak. After that you instantly learn about more nodes. Kademlia was designed specifically with redundancy and resiliency in mind, so (even though I don't have the math handy) I believe it can withstand the lawyers. |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Sunday December 19, @12:07PM (#11130691) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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you will be able to connect to someone who is online, get your leg in the door, so to speak. So how would you find the IP address of somebody who is online without an ed2k server? |
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Re:Single point of failure (Score:2)
by danila (69889) on Sunday December 19, @01:48PM (#11131396) |
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You have a large list of known clients. You try to connect to them and when you connect to one who is online, he gives you enough up-to-date IP-addresses of other online users. It's very unlikely that all your IP-addresses become invalid (only if **AA manages to sue most P2P users into submission and scare away the rest). And even then, it would only require one IP address of a currently connected user (that you can get on a forum, on an IRC channel, etc.) to get back on Kad (where you would connect with more users and again collect more working IPs for the future). I am not sure whether the eMule client comes with a built-in list of IPs, but you can try it - download eMule [emule-project.net], install it, disable ed2k network protocol, enable Kad and see if it works without servers at all. |
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Sue users and scare away the rest (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Sunday December 19, @02:09PM (#11131519) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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The copyright industry trade groups would attack the web sites, forums, IRC channels, etc. that disclose the IP addresses of any peer that has at least one infringing file shared. They would attempt to have judges interpret disclosing an infringing peer's IP address as contributory copyright infringement and, if that doesn't work, would lobby national legislatures to make it so. Suing more P2P users just might work to drive P2P so far underground that the casual computer user can't connect. Even Gnutella and Freenet have this problem if governments start attacking GWebCaches and seednodes.ref respectively. |
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Re:Sue users and scare away the rest (Score:2)
by danila (69889) on Sunday December 19, @04:37PM (#11132503) |
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Well, I can be a peer on the ed2k network, but not share any copyrighted files. No, the Kad architecture of ed2k is quite safe. There are still issues - namely lack of 100% anonymity and privacy, as well as poorer ed2k performance for new releases (as opposed to BitTorrent and its flashcrowds), but the network itself is quite safe now. |
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Interesting stats (Score:5, Informative)
by Fizzl (209397) <fizzl@@@fizzl...net> on Saturday December 18, @08:26PM (#11127452) (http://www.fizzl.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 24, @07:26AM) |
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Here's a link for the central internet exchange for Finnish ISP's to link together. Coralized FICIX stats [nyud.net]. Compare the stats from week ago, and today. Guess what changed? Most telling is the last graph indicating traffic for the whole year. The largest Finnish torrent site, Finreactor got busted by [p2pnet.net]Keskusrikospoliisi [poliisi.fi] (roughly the same as FBI of USA). I guess they weren't sharing just Linux images |
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Re:Interesting stats (Score:2)
by Snaller (147050) on Tuesday December 21, @04:50AM (#11145507) (Last Journal: Monday December 27, @11:04PM) |
| I don't get it - traffic from all Finish ISP's only amount to 6 Gigabytes a day?? Sounds very little. |
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Re:Interesting stats (Score:1)
by Hogbert (16729) on Tuesday December 21, @09:14AM (#11146532) (http://127.0.0.1:7) |
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picked from ficix.fi page: "Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange (FICIX) is the exchange point of the Finnish Internet. FICIX was founded in 1993 by Eunet Finland Oy, HTC (Helsinki Telephone Company) and PTT (Posts and Telecommunications), which made an agreement on interconnecting Finnish IP networks. In 2001, FICIX was re-organised as an association named as Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange, FICIX." FICIX is finnish ISP interconnection point. Operators take care of international traffic by other means. Traffic within one ISP is not visible there neither, naturally. |
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Two questions - read programmers (Score:2, Interesting)
by camooT (820852) on Saturday December 18, @08:30PM (#11127471) |
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1. Is it possible, perhaps, for a P2P oriented website? Of course, this would call for a new protocol, years of trial and error before widespread acceptance (if ever), but imagine what this could do for the internet as a whole - bandwidth itself wouldn't be a big problem any longer.
2. the average download speed of 240 kbps O_O. I've been working with 30-50kbps on average, and I have my ports opened too. Could it be my smutty upload speed? |
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Re:Two questions - read programmers (Score:1)
by Ravadill (589248) on Sunday December 19, @05:04AM (#11129008) |
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Possibly, or it could be your ISP shaping the bittorrent ports, as a few have been caught doing already. I typically max my dl speed (160k/s) but im always upping close to max as well. Try using an alternate client (azureus.sf.net) or similar that lets you change ports from default if you arn't already. |
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Traffic estimate is suspect (Score:5, Insightful)
by burris (122191) on Saturday December 18, @08:37PM (#11127491) |
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This paper and all of the recent news articles that provide an estimate for BitTorrent protocol traffic use the same source. A single slide in a presentation by someone from Cache Logic shows BT using 1/2 of all P2P traffic at a "tier 1 ISP." Other sources cite P2P traffic at 66% of all 'net traffic. Therefore, BT is 33%. I think any estimate made without measurements at many major routers would be suspect. While there is no doubt that BT is quite popular, the evidence presented thus far for the amount of traffic using BT protocol is extremely flimsy. I would take it with a grain of salt. burris |
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Slashdot effect salve (Score:5, Interesting)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday December 18, @08:37PM (#11127493) (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Monday November 15, @05:23PM) |
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The real breakthru for distributed P2P tech will come when someone publishes a BitTorrent content distributor that can be plugged transparently in front of an HTTPD. So I hit http://www.whatever.com , and get my HTTP response, with cache and timing headers intact. But behind the scenes, the "www" host is really the entry point to a distributed server network, a pool of interconnected "torrent" servers that transparently balance the traffic throughout the capacitance of the protocol network. Those servers actually tap the "real" HTTPD behind that network only to check for updated content, which is distributed to the network on demand, to be passed through to requesting clients. The clients speak only HTTP, and can't tell the difference between the real HTTPD and the distributed network proxies. As long as I'm asking Santa, I'll be more specific. That "www" host has its DNS resolved by the nameserver at whatever.com , which hands out IP#s of the other "torrent" servers distributed around the "Web". torrent servers get the IP# of the real host at whatever.com, so they get content. There are problems: HTTPS requires each serialized object requested/replied to be encrypted with/for the actual private key of the requesting client, unknown until the request is made. And "CGI" or other dynamic content creates a huge space of permuted object states. But, Santa, Google figured out how to deal with all this in a centralized datacenter, and they're damn fast. Get the elves on this, and children around the world will sleep with visions of sugarplums streaming to their download directories. |
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Coral (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @10:14PM (#11127892) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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What you want is Coral [nyu.edu]. |
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Re:Coral (Score:2)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday December 18, @11:28PM (#11128156) (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Monday November 15, @05:23PM) |
| Maybe Coral++ [slashdot.org]. |
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Re:Slashdot effect salve (Score:2)
by kryptkpr (180196) on Sunday December 19, @11:14AM (#11130356) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Disclaimer: When i'm not studying EE, IAABCD (I _am_ a BitTorrent Client Developer). Why does this keep coming up? no, No and NO! 3 reasons why BT is not suited to be a web cache protocol: - BT is designed and optimized for LARGE amounts (on the order of hunderds of MB) of data. Web sites are comparatively tiny. - BT will only work with STATIC content.. files are hashes at - BT relies on the fact that some people will keep their transfers going to upload to others.. and users never stay on a particular website for long. |
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Re:Slashdot effect salve (Score:2)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Sunday December 19, @11:25AM (#11130434) (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Monday November 15, @05:23PM) |
| Maybe you *should* study "EE", or rather software engineering. Of course BT isn't designed to be a Web cache protocol. My entire post is about a redesign to get it to be, or rather, to get something similar to BT to be that protocol. Just because BT "wasn't designed for it" doesn't mean we shouldn't redesign the sacred cow. Or abandon it, and use another protocol, like Coral, as others have suggested. Successful development, like any large-scale human enterprise, starts with what people want, and finds a way to give it to them. Even when that means revising what you're starting with in a completely new way, or throwing out everything but the approach, or just starting over. Maybe you don't even need EE training - just (dare I say it) some marketing experience. |
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Re:Slashdot effect salve (Score:2)
by kryptkpr (180196) on Sunday December 19, @12:08PM (#11130696) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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Maybe you *should* study "EE", or rather software engineering This is an Ad Hominem [wikipedia.org] argument, a logical fallacy. And for the record, the 1.8 million downloads [sourceforge.net] of my top100 project at sourceforge say that I'm doing just fine as a software engineer. Moving on, you claim that: My entire post is about a redesign to get it to be, or rather, to get something similar to BT to be that protocol. However, the introductory sentence to the original post reads: The real breakthru for distributed P2P tech will come when someone publishes a BitTorrent content distributor that can be plugged transparently in front of an HTTPD And I've simply explained why it's a bad idea to use BitTorrent. I didn't say it was a bad idea to use a custom system, it's just that isn't what I got from reading your original post. Free advice: miscommunications happen, and you really should try not to take things so personally, you sorta come off as a raving loon. Maybe you don't even need EE training - just (dare I say it) some marketing experience. I've been first to market on a number of new technologies (mp3, p2p, etc..) and millions of people have used and continue to use my products. My marketing is working out just for me... PS: Bram Cohen is the software engineer, as far as I'm concerned he's the world's leading authority on p2p right now. I try to follow along, understand how it all works, and release some useful tools for the public. |
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Re:Slashdot effect salve (Score:1, Offtopic)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Sunday December 19, @01:31PM (#11131284) (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Monday November 15, @05:23PM) |
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"Disclaimer: When i'm not studying EE, IAABCD (I _am_ a BitTorrent Client Developer)." That is an appeal to authority [wikipedia.org], a logical fallacy, cloaked in a "disclaimer" that makes claims. My reply, directly to your disclaimer, pointed out something that I have learned in my own engineering studies - almost all of which have been on the job, in a career so successful that I retired last decade. Then your actual comment starts off with "Why does this keep coming up? no, No and NO!" and you get your own "pro hominem" (if not quite strictly "ad hominem"; maybe "contra hominem") attack into the mix: "It's stupid to even think about trying to distribute any kind of dynamic content over BT." I agree that miscommunications happen - clearly it's happened here, and we've both got something to learn about using Slashdot posts to critically analyze P2P protocols, at least. BTW, sometimes I am a raving loon, so I don't take things too personally To the matter at hand, you do point out some essential BT features/requirements that make it inappropriate as the Web cache I proposed. I, too, pointed out reasons why BT won't work for this, and even phrased my proposal in the wishful thinking terms of "asking Santa". Other posters in the thread mentioned Coral [slashdot.org], also limited in its current design, to which I responded with an approach [slashdot.org] to make it work. I appreciate the work you're doing. Those actual app releases, rather than just armchair architecture in Slashdot posts, have brought P2P/swarm tech to actually do amazingly useful things. That's why I'm so excited about using some kind of swarm tech, rather than some other approach that either won't work, or is vaporware, to solve one of the World Wide Wait's main problems: centralized server bottlenecks (Slashdot effect). Hopefully we can constructively design and develop these bigger aftershocks of the Web quake together, as a community. Better communication is what it's all about - I don't want just to post to Slashdot forums in a Web form forever, pissing off fellow developers |
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Re:Slashdot effect salve (Score:2)
by Doc Ruby (173196) on Saturday December 18, @10:17PM (#11127905) (http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Monday November 15, @05:23PM) |
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Like them. But Coral requires the clients to point at a Coral server, passing the target server's URL. I'd like to see the results of tests of whatever.com (from my example) serving its own "www." FQDN converted to a Coral server's IP#. The Coral server could be modified to parse the CGI "SCRIPT_URI" to get the requested servername and path which the Coral server is to pull from its distributed DB. Some other tweaks for caching and "Expires:" headers would need to be tested. Swarmcast has similar necessary tweaks, as its servers don't talk HTTP, but rather its own P2P protocol, in which "clients" are other Swarmcast nodes. But we're obviously very close. The current P2P infrastructures are extremely powerful and flexible. They can sit atop HTTP like HTTP once sat atop other legacy servers, through the miracle of CGI and embedded DB client middleware pools. Those innovations of the Web changed the world, but not before they arrived, of course. P2P might just turn out to save RSS from overload, along with every other scalable protocol. Let a million servers bloom! |
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sharing only with trusted people (Score:2)
by jamienk (62492) on Saturday December 18, @08:45PM (#11127524) |
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How can we share only with people we trust? * HTTP authentication on the trackers: many BT clients allow you to authenticate through them -- this would block access to the list of sharers and to the files shared, BUT * How would you know who to trust? * A single infiltrator could bust up a whole sharing network * If the web of trust doesn't scale, it's not as good a network as if could be * The * Torrent files could point to a site like TinyURL, but with authentication needed to access the tracker URL. These sites could spring up ad-hoc * Then, each member of a group could self-tracker ther own torrents. This could further reduce the liability for a group * If a rat is found, passwords can be changed * But, an ad-hock web-of-trust for each torrent seriously limits the potential for a massive number of peers, which is currently one of the best aspects of popular torrents. But for groups who want to sahre files that aren't that popular but specialized and protected from distribution by copyright statutes -- like say a group of people who want to trade videos of old presidential debates, or of video footage of the 9/11 attacks, or of unreleased Bob Dylan songs, or of comiled translations of Nietzsche (no source of Eng translations of his complete works exist) -- this ad-hoc indirection may work: * Each member of the group has a Tiny URL website. Torrent files point to this site, but do not redirect unless you enter a password (might require a change in the torrent protocol) -- torrents can be distributed on a single website or anywhere else * Each torrent has a tracker hosted by a different member of the group * Each tracker has HTTP authentication * Passwords are handed out via key parties Good idea? |
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My response to the author: (Score:5, Insightful)
by TheSHAD0W (258774) on Saturday December 18, @08:51PM (#11127553) (http://www.shambala.net) |
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I have a few comments on your analysis of the BitTorrent protocol... My main criticism is that you are analyzing BitTorrent in combination with pirate web pages as a P2P file sharing system, when BitTorrent's real purpose is to be a file DISTRIBUTION system. BitTorrent is designed to replace and enhance the performance of a standard http or ftp download server. Where even ten simultaneous downloads can slow the performance of most inexpensive server setups to a crawl, BitTorrent can easily handle ten thousand or more, and in this it is an enormous success. One necessary element of a true BitTorrent distribution is a dedicated seed server. This server ought to be always working, and should have a significant amount of bandwidth behind it; I'd recommend 30KB/s minimum, but more is better. You complain that seeders are "punished" and this is why torrents die, but while long-term seeders are nice, they aren't necessary. It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to. Having torrents die off when interest fades is an artifact of misuse of this specification. You worry about pollution on Suprnova.org, and so do I; there's no reason why it wouldn't exist. But as BitTorrent was normally intended this isn't a problem at all. People visiting Blizzard's website to download content via BitTorrent (actually Blizzard uses a modified downloader, but the concept would be the same if users received a standard You're also concerned about tracker availability. I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the As a sharing method BitTorrent indeed has some deficiencies, but it simply wasn't designed for that. That BitTorrent is being misused for that purpose only testifies to its effectiveness. Perhaps a sharing system with elements taken from BitTorrent will someday arise; I know Suprnova.org is attempting to create one with "Exeem". But please don't badmouth BitTorrent. |
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Re:My response to the author: (Score:2)
by Soul-Burn666 (574119) on Saturday December 18, @09:19PM (#11127685) (Last Journal: Friday April 26, @04:06AM) |
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First time I'm saying something like this: MOD PARENT UP for truth. |
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Not on Angelfire (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @10:22PM (#11127926) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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It is better for me as a content distributor to allow people to close their torrent and play with their new download as soon as they'd like to. People can already play with their download while seeding it, as the major BT clients reopen the file in read-only mode once the download completes. Of course, this excludes operating system distributions, which require a reboot (or expensive VMware) for use.
I recommend content distributors run their own trackers, which is an easy task given the numerous types of trackers available, including script-based trackers. There's no reason for a tracker to go down unless the web server goes down, in which case no one would probably be able to get a copy of the
There are a lot of web hosts that allow distributing |
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Re:Not on Angelfire (Score:2)
by TheSHAD0W (258774) on Saturday December 18, @10:45PM (#11128005) (http://www.shambala.net) |
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People can already play with their download while seeding it, as the major BT clients reopen the file in read-only mode once the download completes. Of course, this excludes operating system distributions, which require a reboot (or expensive VMware) for use. Or software that requires a significant amount of bandwidth or CPU, which BitTorrent could disrupt. There are a lot of web hosts that allow distributing True, but you can get a PHP/SQL-capable webhost account for $5 per month or so. |
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Re:My response to the author: (Score:2)
by MS_is_the_best (126922) on Sunday December 19, @10:30AM (#11130098) |
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The author examined the most popular use of bittorent (via suprnova). What the original goal of bittorrent was, is of less interest. It is used as a method for distributing copyrighted content illegally and the behaviour of this system is analyzed. In my opinion this is the more interesting topic in a research paper. Compare with a scientific study of jeans-material. You can say, hey, the jeans-material come from tents originally (Levis and stuff), but that doesn't mean you can't write a paper about jeans, as they are used today (as pants). |
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Re:My response to the author: (Score:2)
by kryptkpr (180196) on Sunday December 19, @11:08AM (#11130303) (http://slashdot.org/) |
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When one researches using tent material for pants, one does not label the study as one about tents.. and this is what's happened here. This is research into ONE particular website's implementation of a tracker and load distribution system (there are many other sites that do it differently), but yet they have labelled it as a "BitTorrent" study. The main problem here is that some of the conclusions the author comes to about "BitTorrent" have nothing to do with BitTorrent the protocol.. and most of the problems are due to having to find webhosts to host high-demand semi-illegal material (there was a figure of something like ~250 torrent hosts over the period of research..) A much more informative study (such as the one going on over at MIT, sorry can't find a link atm) would examine BitTorrent's effectiveness as applied to the field it was designed to be used in.. reducing server load when distributing large files. |
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Re:My response to the author: (Score:2)
by TheSHAD0W (258774) on Saturday December 18, @10:41PM (#11127995) (http://www.shambala.net) |
| Because it'd be better to create a whole new system, give it a different name, and steal parts of BitTorrent and perhaps other systems, than to try and adapt this specifically-designed system to cover a different use. |
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Re:My response to the author: (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @01:32PM (#11160825) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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> I'm a student at a fast paced school > WE PIRATE BECAUSE WE HAVE TO!! You might want to start looking at GOOD schools instead of fast-paced ones. That way, they'll have a CS lab with the software you need so you don't have to download it. That said, I don't care if you do download software, I do it all the time. But making excuses (I don't know if you are, doesn't matter to the point) doesn't help. |
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Another paper... (Score:2)
by Xugumad (39311) on Saturday December 18, @10:02PM (#11127839) |
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http://distsyst.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/btpaper.pdf Covers a few of the same things, but is a server-side analysis across a large number of torrents, for a long period of time. |
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Prodigem: legal bit torrent Use (Score:1)
by lerhaupt (231905) on Saturday December 18, @10:35PM (#11127974) (http://www.lerhaupt.com/) |
| My new content hosting webservice for Creative Commons licensed content. Upload content, click a button and it not only makes a torrent, but my server starts seeding it. torrentocracy.com/prodigem [torrentocracy.com] |
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Bittorrent as a form of trade war (Score:2)
by t482 (193197) on Saturday December 18, @10:55PM (#11128034) (http://xminc.com/linux/) |
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If your country does not like the way it is getting shafted by the US trade restrictions(eg softwood lumber in Canada - or a million other examples), it could allow full protection of torrents until the US changes its trade laws. Thus torrents could move from a copyright annoyance to a tool for trade negotiations. |
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90% of all statistics are worthless. (Score:3, Funny)
by Darth Muffin (781947) on Saturday December 18, @11:03PM (#11128070) (http://www.pebkac.us/) |
| Okay, so 35% of net traffic is Bittorrent. 53% of P2P traffic is Bittorrent, that means 66% of all net traffic is P2P, right? Last I heard, 66% of all net traffic was spam. Therefore, 132% of all net traffic is P2P and spam and nobody is using the net for anything else (which means you're not really reading this). |
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Re:90% of all statistics are worthless. (Score:1)
by Fëanáro (130986) on Sunday December 19, @02:06PM (#11131497) |
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this just means that 50% of p2p traffic is spam, making 33% of overall trafic both spam AND p2p. slashdot uses the remaining 1%. sounds about right. |
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Long article, so here is two paragraphs (Score:1)
by 823723423 (826403) on Sunday December 19, @12:16AM (#11128335) |
| Together, bittorrent and suprnova form a unique infrastructure that uses mirroring of the web servers with its directory structure, meta-data distribution for load balancing, a bartering technique for fair resource sharing, and a p2p moderation system to filter fake files The hunt script selects a file to follow and initiates a measurement of all the peers downloading this particular file, the getpeer script contacts the tracker for a given file and gathers the ip addresses of peers downloading the file, and the peerping script contacts numerous peers in parallel and (ab)uses the bittorrent protocol to measure their download progress and uptime |
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Peer uptime (Score:2)
by Andy Dodd (701) <atd7@@@cornell...edu> on Sunday December 19, @12:52AM (#11128444) (http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/atd7/) |
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Best fix for this is ratio enforcement. tvtorrents.com (NOT related to tvtorrents.net, the site for the EFNet #tvtorrents channel) uses ratio enforcement, blocking users whose ratio gets too bad. 1 credit used per KB downloaded, 1 credit gained per KB uploaded, 1.5 if you're seeding a complete file. The end result is that until a set of DDoS attacks took the site down for over a month, torrents that tvtorrents.com carried were FAR faster than ones obtained from whatever #tvtorrents' site was. Unfortunately, many of the old tvt.com users have left and now the site is kind of dead. Even Enterprise takes a few days to get seeded, and Enterprise episodes used to be tvt.com's most popular downloads. Unfortunately due to leechers who repeatedly signed up for new accounts to get around being blocked for leeching, it became hard for tvt.com to attract new users, which is probably why it never recovered. Some other method needs to be given to give people incentive to rack up a good ratio but without making things difficult for new users who have yet to rack up a good ratio. |
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Re:Peer uptime (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @02:29AM (#11128724) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
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One method: A 'waiting period". New users at my favorite tracker are confronted with 72 hour waits (from the time a torrent is queued-up on their client, until it actually starts d-loading), the wait drops to 60, then 45 hours, as the material available is 'older', i.e. most recently upped material=longer waits, older material=less wait, etc, until you have two-week old material=no wait. BUT, to avoid the 'wait' there is an AND built in: Upload 4.5 GB of 'unique' material AND get to a 1:1 ratio up/down. One can simply download 2.25 GBs and seed them back to a 2:1 ratio,and there's both sides of the "AND" covered. Or, d-load 4.5GB and seed back 1:1, either way, but the 'no-wait' status is only maintained when the ratio [1:1, or better] is also maintained. Very simple, very effective. |
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Re:Peer uptime (Score:1)
by blahplusplus (757119) on Sunday December 19, @04:55AM (#11128995) |
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Not all seeders want to be leechers. ISP's get in the way of good ratio's if you go over a certain amount of gigabytes of upload in a month expect a letter form any SANE ISP. This is exactly why I had to become a "leecher" for fear of disconnection of my internet connection even though I wanted to seed. |
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Re:Peer uptime (Score:2)
by Andy Dodd (701) <atd7@@@cornell...edu> on Monday December 20, @05:29PM (#11141295) (http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/atd7/) |
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I usually make up for low upload bandwidth with extra upload time. I make a point of keeping my ratio (when I can) 1:1 or above. To avoid pissing off my ISP, I do this by capping my UL bandwidth at 6 kilobytes/sec (a fraction of my upstream) and just leave it running much longer. What pisses off ISPs the most is people who saturate their upstream with lengthy bursts at peak bandwidth. |
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Re:Peer uptime (Score:1)
by blahplusplus (757119) on Tuesday December 21, @07:11AM (#11145871) |
| Yeah well I was one of those people, I have 80Kilobytes upload, and I was uploading 4-10 GIGS straight for 12/24 hours at a time. Downloading episodes and movies and such. |
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Hashed IP Address... (Score:1)
by algf2004 (748651) on Sunday December 19, @04:03AM (#11128918) |
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Is it not possible to somehow conceal an IP address? I'm surprised someone hasn't figured out how to create such a protocol yet. We have anonymous proxy servers for http traffic, but none for P2P traffic...
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Re:Hashed IP Address... (Score:2)
by MS_is_the_best (126922) on Sunday December 19, @10:34AM (#11130123) |
| That is not so easy... The traffic has to go to the right address (indicated by the ip-address). But http://freenet.sf.net is an attempt (in thus that it works, but that gives a whole new set of problems (searching etc.)). |
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Deniability (Score:1)
by blacksky (740975) on Sunday December 19, @07:03AM (#11129282) |
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I'm not intimate with the BT protocol. But this strikes me as a way to stop the *AA people getting lists of downloaders, and at the same time improve BTs performance and robustness (not that they seem to be a big problem ATM): When you connect to a tracker, as well as downloading the file you want, the tracker could give you a list of other torrents to download. The client would then carry on as normal downloading the file you want, and at the same time download chunks of the other files, up to - say for example - half the size of the file you want. The very nature of BT means you don't need the whole file to redistribute it. That way, you have plausable deniability - you might be just downloading a Linux ISO, but at the same time you've downloaded chunks from a dozen other, maybe illegal, files, and re-distributed them to others. The *AA people then can't get a list of downloaders because even though you're downloading a chunk of the latest hollywood blockbuster, its not intentional, and you're not downloading the whole thing. You're just caching it for others to download from you. The tracker could implement some strategy to decide which other torrents a client downloads, based on the least available or the most popular or whatever other criteria make sense. The downside of course is that you download more than you actually need, but thats offset by the privacy you gain. |
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Hi people, the author here (Score:2)
by pouwelse (118316) on Sunday December 19, @07:33AM (#11129344) (http://mp3.nl) |
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Very nice to see so many people read and comment on the paper. To the comment of Shadow, that Bittorrent is designed for offloading traffic from web servers. You are quite right, that was the original story, but currently we see both wide-spread illegal copying and significant non-infinging uses. A lot of People seem to want to download movies/games/TV shows/music digitally. SuprNova is the clear market leader on the black side of things. Bittorrent is a neutral technology which can be used illegally. Please read my position statement on that at P2PNet.net [p2pnet.net] A good quote in this context is "The Street finds its own uses for technology", William Gibson. Another example is Freenet which would give freedom of expression back to the Internet. Greetings, Johan. |
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35% Then it must be banned (Score:2)
by nurb432 (527695) on Sunday December 19, @08:44AM (#11129578) (http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27, @03:24PM) |
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If its wasting that much bandwidth, then the entire protocol must be removed from the face of the earth, for national security reasons of course.. |
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Suprnova.org now Closed (Score:1)
by s33t (103055) on Sunday December 19, @11:39AM (#11130513) |
| There had been some talk before, but it looks like now it's happened: suprnova.org [suprnova.org] as mentioned in the analysis has now announced they're shutting down for good (qualified by an "as we know it"). |
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What about investigations on violent criminals? (Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @06:26PM (#11126916) |
| Are those being phased out as unimportant? |
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Re:What about investigations on violent criminals? (Score:1)
by natd (723818) on Saturday December 18, @11:02PM (#11128069) |
| I doubt it, but I can't see the connection between torrent use and violent crime. What is your point? |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:2, Offtopic)
by kayen_telva (676872) on Saturday December 18, @06:33PM (#11126947) |
| amazing, moderated interesting for not RTFA. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:1)
by mowler2 (301294) on Saturday December 18, @06:33PM (#11126949) |
| There are several tens of millions of bittorrent users. I cannot see that they all are going to get sued. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:2)
by Baki (72515) on Saturday December 18, @06:57PM (#11127046) |
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Hmm, locking that many away would be a great way to create an instant revolution, destroying all greedy and corrupt multinationals and lobby groups (who are corrupting democracy by buing laws and politicians). Let them try it, it will return at them like a boomerang. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:1)
by PasteEater (590893) on Saturday December 18, @07:12PM (#11127120) |
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You're right, but they don't have to sue everyone. They can just sue a few people to try to scare the rest of us. The RIAA and MPAA have been doing it for years. You can see that their tactics are working because no one is using P2P, right? |
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Re:I WROTE THE PARENT MESSAGE, and this is to you. (Score:3, Insightful)
by calidoscope (312571) on Saturday December 18, @06:35PM (#11126952) |
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Take a chill pill... Now would be a good time to put as much legitimate traffic (e.g. Linux distro's) as possible to make the case that Bit Torrent has legitimate use. |
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Re:I WROTE THE PARENT MESSAGE, and this is to you. (Score:2)
by tomhudson (43916) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `nosduht'> on Saturday December 18, @06:45PM (#11127002) (http://funstuff.dnsalias.org:8080/ | Last Journal: Friday December 31, @11:48PM) |
| ... not to me, that's for sure. The courts have ruled that downloading music is legal in my country. We pay a levee on blank CDs, cassettes, etc., that gets handed to the music industry to compensate them. |
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Re:I WROTE THE PARENT MESSAGE, and this is to you. (Score:1)
by marcansoft (727665) <marcansoft AT marcansoft DOT com> on Saturday December 18, @08:58PM (#11127586) (http://marcansoft.com/) |
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Here in spain we have the same thing. Except that a private organization called the SGAE who supposedly distibutes the money among the authors (by popularity, which annoys many people) keeps of it, and insists that downloading is illegal. Plus if an artist says he supports piracy or anything that sounds like it to them, they take his music off the stores. So now we've got all artists 110% against piracy, plus nobody knows what's legal and what isn't. Damn the music industry. As people have pointed out, music should be free. It's shows/concerts where artists get money. |
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Re:Skewing the truth. (Score:2)
by a whoabot (706122) <peter.hurst@mail.mcgill.ca> on Saturday December 18, @08:14PM (#11127404) |
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People don't look at what's presented to them anymore. They can only see common arguments and then when things are said related to those common arguments they try to reduce what is happening around them to those commonalities. So the common argument is "file-trading is legal in Canada because we pay levies" with the response, "no, only downloading is legal, not uploading." So the one poster says "downloading is legal in Canada" and the brain dead must reduce it to the common argument. So instead of seeing "downloading" he can only see "file-trading." And so gives the canned response. So that is "WTF." It does make sense in a sad, sad way. Just the argument doesn't. |
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Re:I WROTE THE PARENT MESSAGE, and this is to you. (Score:2)
by calidoscope (312571) on Saturday December 18, @09:11PM (#11127648) |
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You know very well that I wasn't talking about the legitimate traffic. No, I didn't. The point I was trying to make was to maximize the embarrassment for the *AA's by cracking down on legal content - and show them for hypocrites they are wrt freedom of speech. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @06:39PM (#11126974) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
Considering the nature of Bittorrent and how decentralized it is, how would you even measure such a thing accurately?Simple - monitor the amount of data going to the ports bittorrent uses - ports 6881 and up (the original stopped at 6890, limiting you to 10 instances, but now it just keeps climbing |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, @06:42PM (#11126990) |
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BT isn't limited to those ports in any way, shape or form, and many users use different ports. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @06:53PM (#11127030) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
BT isn't limited to those ports in any way, shape or form, and many users use different ports.Of course not, as I pointed out in another post. However, the VAST majority of torrent traffic is on the standard ports. You've got to measure *something*. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by Porn Whitelist (838671) <tomhudson411.yahoo@com> on Saturday December 18, @07:44PM (#11127248) (Last Journal: Saturday December 18, @11:28PM) |
And yet that's NOT how they measured it at all!Why not read the question I was responding to: Considering the nature of Bittorrent and how decentralized it is, how would you even measure such a thing accurately?Never said that was how it was measured in the article. If the person who posted the question wanted to measure and quantify traffic in, for example, their own network, this would be the way to do it. Stupid ACs. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by triso (67491) on Sunday December 19, @05:21PM (#11132820) (http://snicks.bravehost.com/) |
I mean, in a centralized system like Sharman (KaZaA) it would be fairly trivial -- KaZaA even tells you when you start it up how many gigs are currently being traded.KaZaA is decentralized; there is no main server and the files are all stored on the client computers. Also, the version of K.lite that I use shows only: number of nodes on-line, number of files available and number of GB needed for those files. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by ToyKeeper (17042) on Saturday December 18, @06:39PM (#11126981) (http://www.xyzz.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 22, @06:30AM) |
| Oi. RTFA. The links explain exactly how they measured it. The 35% figure, though, is about 6 months old, and represented only one study. The actual number may be significantly higher or lower. (higher, I'd guess, as BT is still growing) |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Zebbers (134389) on Saturday December 18, @06:56PM (#11127041) |
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You work for....a company who is going to drag people into court and force them to settle under its mighty legal fund? Wow. Not really impressive. So-called "piracy" and more importantly, the RIAA's and MPAA's tactics are getting more and more press. To date, I know of few cases of people being busted. Sued civilly by greedy and useless corporations, sure. But not busted. I cannot wait until I am done with law school and can contribute, knowledgeably, to the defense of such bullshit and hopefully the creation of more realistic and fair and beneficial laws. This artificial IP shit is harming the American consumer more than ever. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:2)
by Thing 1 (178996) on Saturday December 18, @07:18PM (#11127148) (Last Journal: Thursday September 30, @01:40AM) |
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My cable modem was turned off a few days ago due to "Copyright Infringement."
They turned it back on after I called in. I was unable to see the evidence against me, and I was punished without being able to defend myself (no trial, just punished (Internet access disabled) on accusation alone). This reminds me of the Salem witch trials. I hereby announce that I will do everything in my power to destroy the copyright cartels. I will not download anything more; I do not need their shows and movies. However, I will devote my spare time towards improving the open source projects like BitTorrent, FreeNet, etc., which will allow users to share any bits they care to with no possibility of censorship or control. I can code, and I have a decent job so I have some disposable income. As much of it as I can spare will go towards these projects (like, donations, or purchasing equipment for them, bandwidth, etc.). |
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Witch Trials (Score:3, Insightful)
by cbr2702 (750255) on Saturday December 18, @09:01PM (#11127602) (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cbr) |
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I was unable to see the evidence against me, and I was punished without being able to defend myself
The problem here lies not in the "Copyright Cartels" but in your Terms Of Service with your ISP. The problem is that the contract you signed with them for acess lets them disable said acess arbitrarily. |
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Re:Witch Trials (Score:1)
by IrvineHosting (628102) on Sunday December 19, @01:27PM (#11131251) (http://www.irvinehosting.net/) |
| Why is that the cable companies still charge you the same for the days they have disabled your account as the days they do not? You are paying for a service that they are refusing to provide to you. |
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Terms of Service (Score:2)
by cbr2702 (750255) on Sunday December 19, @05:25PM (#11132841) (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cbr) |
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Why is that the cable companies still charge you the same for the days they have disabled your account as the days they do not?
Again, because you signed an unfavorable contract which says they can. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:1)
by gwiner (685297) on Sunday December 19, @09:10AM (#11129691) |
| Maybe there's some way to turn this back on the RIAA - Can we file some claims about "Copyright Infringement" with their ISP, and get them shut off too? Sure it wouldn't be permanent, but it would sure be inconvenient. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:3, Interesting)
by gcaseye6677 (694805) on Saturday December 18, @07:57PM (#11127311) |
| The publicity is mainly what they are looking for. Like people say "you can't buy this kind of publicity". It's an effective way to demonize music downloading of all kinds, which is their main goal. They want non-computer literate types to think it is always illegal to download music, therefore they will go to the mall and spend $19.99 on the newest pop crap. But people are slowly starting to wake up to what's going on. Does the music cartel have a backup plan for the inevitable loss of the old way of doing business? |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:2)
by Silvers (196372) on Saturday December 18, @06:57PM (#11127042) |
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Maybe you should RTFA and find out how they did it. You know, it may have just answered that question. |
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Mod parent -1, misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
by Ghostgate (800445) on Saturday December 18, @07:02PM (#11127069) |
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Whether or not there are any investigations against BitTorrent USERS for trading illegal files (of which there is no evidence at all yet... there is only evidence of them going after tracker sites, which makes much more sense anyway), that does not mean you avoid BitTorrent completely. That's the whole point of P2P. It has uses that are legit, and uses that aren't. By all means, keep using BitTorrent for legit uses anytime you want. To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful. |
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Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
by glassesmonkey (684291) on Saturday December 18, @07:13PM (#11127124) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday June 24, @04:25PM) |
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*HUGE* anonymous investigations!!
I always listen to warnings like that! Y2K, update to SP2, don't download anything from the internet. BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one Could they monitor EVERY tracker and EVERY torrent on those trackers and log EVERY IP address, maybe.. But don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that |
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Re:Sure... (Score:1)
by subz503 (839012) on Saturday December 18, @08:22PM (#11127437) (http://www.subz.org/) |
| That is an interesting concept I was thinking about. If you are connected in the torrent that means you are sending out the file, but only bits and pieces of it. Would it be illegal to send the equivilant of 30 seconds of an audio file? I guess the point could be argued that you were offering the whole file, and so that counts as a copyright infringement. At least, that's how our buddies at the RIAA/MPAA will argue it. |
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"safety" of filesharing (Score:3, Informative)
by cbr2702 (750255) on Saturday December 18, @09:27PM (#11127722) (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cbr) |
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BitTorrent is inherently "safer" than any P2P (like KaZaa). Can you be busted for sharing illegal files? Sure. But.. You are at most only in trouble for the ONE copyright violation from one Except the copyright holder only needs one file to hit you with statutory damages of $30,000 to $150,000. And on KaZaa/Gnutella/eDonkey most people have file-listing disabled, so the copyright holder only knows about the one file they found through searching. And even if they did know about all the files, they can only sue you for the ones they hold copyright to. So BitTorrent seems just as dangerous as "standard" means.
Don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that That's not very difficult. They only need to get your IP once. plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own? Sharing just a part of a file is still illegal. It's not sufficient for "fair use" and "being useless on its own" is no defence, as copyright law says nothing about usefulness of the works protected (except the constitution does say copyright is to promote "Invention and the useful arts"...)
If you want safer use FreeNet. If you want legal check out Gnomoradio [gnomoradio.org].
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Re:"safety" of filesharing (Score:2)
by Binkleyz (175773) <binkleyz@yah o o .com> on Monday December 20, @12:20PM (#11138032) |
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Just curious.. IANAL, but I'm wondering if an affirmative defense to a charge of illegal filesharing is to operate an open wireless AP on my connection.. Unless I'm highly mistaken, I have no legal obligation to monitor, restrict or police my connection for what *OTHERS* might be using it for.. and since the IP that a ISP/Content owner might have as a result of an investigation only proves that *SOMEONE* behind the wireless AP/Router was doing something hinky, isn't the burden on the "infringee" to prove that it was *ME* doing the illegal D/Ling? Please forgive if this has been asked/answered elsewhere, but this has always seemed to be a slam-dunk defense. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:2)
by bluGill (862) on Saturday December 18, @07:17PM (#11127144) (http://www.black-hole.com/users/henrymiller/) |
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Here a hint: don't bother to investigate me. All my use for BitTorrent is legal. (or at least I can convince a judge I was defrauded, someone posting FreeBSD_5.3.ISO when it is really some music CD for instance) You will find a significant number of slashdot readers who likewise only use BitTorrent for legal content, of which there is plenty. |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:2)
by cbr2702 (750255) on Saturday December 18, @09:49PM (#11127797) (http://sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cbr) |
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(or at least I can convince a judge I was defrauded, someone posting FreeBSD_5.3.ISO when it is really some music CD for instance)
And when the procecution cites this post in response to your defence you'll do what? |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:1)
by deimtee (762122) on Sunday December 19, @06:20AM (#11129181) (Last Journal: Friday April 30, @05:37AM) |
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(or at least I can convince a judge I was defrauded, someone posting FreeBSD_5.3.ISO when it is really some music CD for instance) And when the procecution cites this post in response to your defence you'll do what? He will likely say exactly what he said in that post. He was trying to download FreeBSD and someone posted a music CD under that title. |
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No threat to MPAA (Score:2, Insightful)
by pr0t0 (216378) on Saturday December 18, @07:24PM (#11127171) |
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I just tried BitTorrent downloading for the first time this past week. I like watching the show "Lost" and missed an episode, so I downloaded it via BitTorrent. It only took about an hour or so, and I was able to watch. That was cool. Then I decided to see what this baby could really do, so I tried downloading a movie, for "scientific research" of course. It took seven hours and was in spanish despite being marked english. So I tried again. The second time the movie didn't match the title. The third time was a charm. But I doubt I'll ever do it again. First, it's stealing and I recognize that. I don't mind paying for a good movie. I suppose some do, but you'd have to have way more time the money. It costs roughly $3.00 to rent a movie at Blockbuster. NetFlix users probably average less. You get better quality with a DVD, and it's more convenient. I will say it seems like a great resource for Porn though. Hehe. |
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Re:No threat to MPAA (Score:2)
by xenocide2 (231786) <jld5445@NOsPam.ksu.edu> on Saturday December 18, @08:13PM (#11127402) (http://dugger.notsoevil.net/) |
| There's a philosophy among the movie pirates, that I don't quite understand, but is detailed herein [bash.org]. Essentially, look for the biggest tracker of a particular file you're looking for-- its most likely the correct one. Or you might try finding somewhere besides suprnova, geared more toward your particular vices. I don't go for movies that often(netflix is worth it), but I do follow anime some. I rarely have a problem with fake torrents in the dedicated sites and metatrackers. |
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Re:No threat to MPAA (Score:1)
by tepples (727027) <tepplesatslashdot@pineight.com> on Saturday December 18, @10:56PM (#11128043) (http://www.pineight.com/gba/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 06, @08:29PM) |
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It costs roughly $3.00 to rent a movie at Blockbuster. So where do I go when Blockbuster doesn't have a particular title? |
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Re:No threat to MPAA (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @01:54AM (#11128624) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
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No, it isn't. It's copyright violation
Heheh, sorry, it ain't a 'violation', either, it's infringement. . |
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Re:Not that great (Score:2)
by HolyCoitus (658601) <ddevildownn@yahoo.com> on Saturday December 18, @07:26PM (#11127181) (http://mywebpages.comcast.net/HolyCoitus/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 30, @01:36AM) |
| Not familiar with firewalls? I have to cap bittorrent off at 350KB/s otherwise it saturates my downstream. Something is definitely wrong on your end with the speed problem. |
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Re:Not that great (Score:1)
by Vizzue (830695) on Saturday December 18, @09:02PM (#11127606) |
| Yeah. Guess you're right. I'll have to do some tweaking... |
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Re:No - the problem is the protocol (Score:2)
by HolyCoitus (658601) <ddevildownn@yahoo.com> on Sunday December 19, @10:54AM (#11130235) (http://mywebpages.comcast.net/HolyCoitus/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 30, @01:36AM) |
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All of what you're saying is true or almost true. However, the transfer rate cited was anemic compared to the numbers that should be obtained. Bittorrent is not perfect at the current moment, but it definitely isn't horrible or worthless.
I've seen it work great for me consistently, and see the problems you are citing. However, it's not to the degree you are citing. It will saturate my bandwidth with control packets and other overhead making it go slower. I've never seen the slowdown you're talking about, and I've downloaded 158 torrents that I still have the I want to make sure it's said, I really do understand the problems with it. I'm a college student who is starting to study networking more extensively. I couldn't dress it down or anything with my knowledge, but I know it's not perfect. It's also the best there is right now for its purpose. So, until something is better, let's make the best of it? |
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Re:I work for.. (Score:5, Insightful)
by harlows_monkeys (106428) on Saturday December 18, @07:30PM (#11127199) (http://www.tzs.net/) |
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Two words - avoid BitTorrent. HUGE investigations are going on to bust bittorrent users
Wrong. There are no investigations going on to bust bittorrent users. There are investigations going on to bust people doing illegal file sharing, and some of them happen to be using bittorrent. |
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You work for ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
by canuck57 (662392) on Saturday December 18, @07:49PM (#11127277) |
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Two words - avoid BitTorrent. Why would I do that? If I use BitTorrent for legitimate uses - does that make me guilty of something? What if I download a legitimate Linux distro... or other open source? Can’t get my Debian otherwise. Microsoft might like that but I don’t. Do we jail people who make kitchen knives, guns, baseball bats, axes, tanks, planes or cars? All can be used to kill people. No we don’t. But we do condemn behavior. To the behavior part. What you are really seeing is the same thing that happened with prohibition and other imposed legislation against public will. The entertainment industry is in collusion. Take your local cable company. Do you have a competitive alternative to wired cable as you might with the telephone? If you are like many of the people the RIAA is chasing, you have had it with monopolistic and anti-competitive entertainment options. I deal with it by renting DVDs as it costs $4 and not $25 for the original. But in reality I should be able to just download it to my computer from Sony for $2. I choose to resist using BitTorrent to rip movies but I can't say I haven't considered doing otherwise. In fact, this Internet is something the entertainment industry fears. You or I could start our own Internet television station and they don’t get their cut. Sites like http://mediahopper.com/ will prevail in time. Note the absence of Canadian and US stations when compared to smaller markets. Sooner or later the RIAA and cable monoplies are going to evolve or loose. But the cable companies realize this and that is why they are proving much of the Internet access. |
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Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @01:24AM (#11128545) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
| Exactly. I'm on a few invitation-only trackers, and none of the clients can get away with upping faked up/down ratios for any effective amount of time. |
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Re:great timing! (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @01:44AM (#11128603) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
| On the Bright Side, maybe there'll be fewer of those whacko Dutch "Top 100" floods in the sounds.mp3 groups. My european trackers are all humming along quite nicely, regardless of the dutch troubles. |
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Re:Not that great (Score:1)
by Lord Flipper (627481) * on Sunday December 19, @01:48AM (#11128614) (Last Journal: Thursday July 17, @07:42PM) |
| yo!! Buggeroff, not everybody's got the same dsl/cable speeds, just be glad your mom and dad let you spend your life and their bucks in the rec room down there, and lay off the generalizing.... eh, like a good boy? thanks |
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Re:great timing! (Score:1)
by Catnapster (531547) on Sunday December 19, @02:44AM (#11128761) (http://dead-general.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 30, @03:59AM) |
A number of the major sites, which I shall not name, have all gone away this weekend due to the actions in the NetherlandsWhy not name them? It's not like we can Slashdot them. |
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Re:Not that great (Score:2)
by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Sunday December 19, @03:27PM (#11132037) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 27, @11:49AM) |
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Here is what you need to know to get bt to work well. First, most users with firewalls seem to have them misconfigured so you cannot open a connection to them. So, they must connect to you, which they cannot do if your firewall config is b0rked. Making sure your firewall is properly configured makes all the differrence. Second, the client you use can have a significant effect. I played around with a bunch of wonky clients before deciding I wanted to do downloads on my server in screen windows and my rates have never been higher. hooray for btdownloadcurses.py. Third, sometimes they're just slow. I just let bt run, sometimes I download three or four torrents at once.
my highest average speed yet on a sizable torrent has been around 200kB/sec but I've seen speeds over 300kB/sec. The trick is finding well-populated trackers. |
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Re:slashdot torrents (Score:2)
by hesiod (111176) on Wednesday December 22, @12:39PM (#11160218) (http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=1467244342 | Last Journal: Tuesday November 02, @12:56PM) |
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Most torrents linked to on |
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