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BitTorrent for Content Providers

Posted by timothy on Wed Aug 10, 2005 05:50 PM
from the but-it's-per-se-bad-don't-you-realize dept.
Media The Internet
snuvlorgin writes "ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site. Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later."
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  • Great idea. It legitimizes BitTorrent as a protocol and it makes find some great content easy. Torrents On!
      • Because that would require more centralization, which is a Bad Idea(tm) when you're trying to mitigate the load. You have to have a port open to accept incoming connections directly.

      • Why can't these people design a protocol more like HTTP? Both the data and control packets can go out over a single TCP port and it's very easy to proxy.

        You did read the protocol [bittorrent.com]? Since this is exactly how peers communicate!
        The problem your transfers are slow is because you can't connect to enough peers (which can be fixed by either party by being connectable by either unblocking or forwarding a port).

  • Let's see. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Poromenos1 (830658) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @05:53PM (#13290155) Homepage
    Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin). And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc.
    • In addition it is good with load balancing, so you don't have the problem of lots of people using one server and another not being used.

    • The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin).

      You know what I'd like to see? A protocol that, in cases of low load, performs similar to modern FTP/HTTP implementations (pause/resume, multi-sourcing, etc.) but switches seamlessly a swarming model when a certain threshold is met.

      Maybe BitTorrent already does this, but it doesn't feel that way. When just starting a rare file (or even trying a popular fil

      • Re:Let's see. (Score:5, Funny)

        by aywwts4 (610966) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @07:27PM (#13290736)
        Shut your face, as someone who is actually still stuck on dialup I find your comments offensive and insensitive; you know full well on your dialup days the downloads you attempt would have taken weeks. And even try to liken it to our suffering when you see speeds in the lower half of a hundred K that might take a couple of hours. For Shame Good sir, For Shame.

        (Yeah, I'm planning on suing the government and AT&T for retributions for the hardships and suffering our modem bound people have had to endure.)


        Seriously though, the answer to the rare file dilemma is that the website that is hosting the torrents needs to have a server running Bittorent and all the files with intelligent prioritizing of the worst seeded files. So when there are other people to take the load the website can outsource it, when its rare the website will have to share the burden like it would have had to via http anyways.

    • Federal government bans bittorrent (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Danathar (267989) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @07:20PM (#13290706) Journal
      Where I work bittorrent is classified as a Peer to Peer software in the same grouping as Kazza, Morpheus, ect....so the offical policy is that you are not allowed to use bittorrent FOR ANYTHING unless you have permission from the CIO.

      On an upside those that have broken the rules are people who were downloading LINUX distros and no action was taken.

      My point being I REALLY hope that bittorrent becomes an offical specified file transfer protocol. It might seperate it from the rest of the peer to peer crap that's tarnishing bittorrents legitimate use.
    • Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client

      As opposed to http and ftp, which somehow magically work without a client ;)

      Seriously though, something like BT plugin in Firefox would probably help a lot.

    • I cheat. I use a Java (Jython actually) applet that acts as a client as long as my users are connected anywhere on my website. I was pouring out 150GB+ a day in bandwidth from my server so switching to distributed downloads was sort of essential for my budget.

      • Download time increased!? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by grahamsz (150076) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @06:55PM (#13290561) Homepage Journal
        My personal experiences suggest that a well seeded torrent downloads much faster than an equivilent http download.

        For whatever reason i struggle to max out my 3MB pipe from anywhere but the fastest servers, yet with bittorrent i can get damn close on most transfers.

        The biggest hinderence (that i see) to bittorrent is that you need to have a listner port open for good performance.

  • More widespread support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2005, @05:55PM (#13290170)
    Excellent, now maybe stupid Radford University will stop blocking ports 6800-6900. Seriously, BitTorrent needs all the legitimate support it can get if it is not to be grouped together with "illegitimate P2P traffic"
    --
    Fairfax Underground: Public message board for residents of Fairfax County, VA [fairfaxunderground.com]
  • The subject says it all really.

    A great repository of mirrors of just about everything that has ever been written and released, not to mention massive, MASSIVE, bandwidth. They are just friggin' cool - cooler than sharks with lasers on their heads!!!!1

    Thanks guys! You guys rock!
    • Ibiblio also hosts the streaming audio for a number of NC public and student radio stations. It is a great service, and if bittorrent can reduce a bit of its server load so it can do even more, great!

      Ibiblio is the former sunsite, and has been a major contributor to the Internet for years.
    • Thanks for your support! I can tell you it feels just as great working there.
  • Just kidding. This is a good thing. I just hope they can combine efforts with The Linux Mirror Project [tlm-project.org]. It'd be a shame for either to go to the wayside, especially when keeping as many seeders as possible is vital to any BT site.

  • /.ed? (Score:4, Funny)

    by anthony_dipierro (543308) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @06:10PM (#13290268) Journal
    Finally, a Slashdotting that's a good thing.
    • Why not italics? Are you not a superfan of them? I personally abhor boldface. But to each his schone, you know? I've degraded into a mere parody of sky, I know.
  • I am sick to death of waiting for fileplanet/etc downloads. Or the dreaded "Sorry there are already 500 users logged into this ftp server. Im like, dude... wheres the torrent???
    • Yeah, fileplanet is a sickness.
      I searched an utility last week. A small programm, about 300k zipped (to be exact, an extractor for some games packfiles).
      The only source i could find was fileplanet. So i bit the bullet and made an account (not the paying kind, but still very "dont like").
      Only to find out that there were x00 people before me in the row and i could expect my download to start in 68 minutes...
      Well, i tried out a blind emule search (now that i could see the exact filesize in fileplanet) and got

    • I am sick to death of waiting for fileplanet/etc downloads. Or the dreaded "Sorry there are already 500 users logged into this ftp server. Im like, dude... wheres the torrent???

      FilePlanet and others like them won't switch to torrents. If they make you wait in a queue they not only get to put ads on your screen for the entire time you wait, but they hope to get you to pay for instant member access. If the torrents could just be distributed without their strict control their business model would fail.

        • and we know there is a great demand for game related content (Videos, Mods, Patches, Etc) Since that market is being overloaded by a not so nice company or two; Why doesn't someone make a Torrent site for all of it?

          A great idea. You could even call it FileRush.com [filerush.com], for example.

          However, note that placing some game demos on torrents is a technical violation of copyright laws. Although the idea of game demos is that they are widely distributed to everyone, often the lawyers slap the same licenses on them as

  • Science Content and Torrent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kkamrani (882365) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @06:31PM (#13290401) Homepage
    I would like to see the scientific journals, especially The Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ [plos.org] start distributing their montly publications over Bit Torrent. There have been occasions of downloading their 150mb journals where there servers and bandwidth were clearly overwhelmed. It would, in my opnion, be a great front to publicize excellent and FREE scientific articles as well as popularize and legitmize bit torrent as a cost effective and fast way to distribute content.
  • Much as I like BitTorrent and want to see it take over all downloads (seriously), it pains me to see new BT sites when the BT protocol is banned from my prospective university network. Any helpful suggestions?
    • Find some things like:
      Clifford Lynch: Speech on Scholarly Communications

      And write a friendly note to your IT staff explaining that you seem to be having trouble getting it, apparently because the ports are blocked. Explain that it is relavent academic material that you need to consult. (Try to find something specific to your major, and with an academic title.) Whenever you run across something like this that has legitimate scholarly merit that is relevant to your courseload, write another friendl

      • Whenever you run across something like this that has legitimate scholarly merit that is relevant to your courseload, write another friendly note explaining how you need access to it.

        Given such a request, an IT staff member would probably investigate the request, wait for approval from the university's CTO, fire up Azureus himself*, download the file, and mirror it on the internal network. It would be like a manual BT proxy with all access controlled through the CTO.

        Just make polite, courteous explana

  • I have a server at a hosting company that gives me up to a terabyte a month of traffic on a reasonably fast net link. Since my site normally doesn't come anywhere near that, I've taken to seeding a bunch of legal torrents (Debian and Ubuntu distros, Project Gutenberg DVD, etc. -- lots of the same stuff ibiblio is hosting.) I think of it as giving a little something back to the net at large.

    Seeding lots of torrents on a server is somewhat annoying to do in that, as far as I can tell, there's no good non-GU

  • ADVision [advfilms.com] recently made a MADLAX trailer available on BitTorrent.

    • Re:Peachy (Score:5, Informative)

      by tacarat (696339) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @06:20PM (#13290336) Journal
      Just in case Peachy's discouraged anyone from trying to submit their homebrew distrobution to Ibiblio.

      From Ibiblio.org
      ---------------
      Contributing to ibiblio.org
      If you are interested in becoming an ibiblio.org contributor:

            1. Read the Collection Criteria [ibiblio.org] to see if your interest will be served by working with us
            2. Check out the services we offer contributors to see if we have what you need.
            3. Hint: very few, if any, proprietary services will be provided, but many open source solutions are, can or will be offered on request.
            4. Drop a note to help@ibiblio.org telling us:

              * What your project will be
              * What services you might wish to use
              * How to contact you by phone (so we can work out any details and passwords)
              * Anything else you think might be helpful
      ---------------

      One of the main things to be considered is keeping things up to date and making some sort of contribution to the public. It (should) be a given that the bigger distros will be properly maintained, as a good homebrew distro should, but a homebrew which is only a minor modification to an existing distro may not make the cut. If you've got a great modification, maybe you should see if it's more practical to distribute the modified packages instead of an entire distro.
    • ... while homebrew distributions will fail to qualify.
      http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ [ibiblio.org]
      ..'nough said ...
      • Your last comment got modded down for good reason. Nothing is stopping you from putting out your own distribution/torrent/. What's the matter with you? Tons of independent content producers use bittorrent to distribute their content.
          • You're not making any sense. Anyone can seed a torrent. It effectively lowers the cost to distribute gigs worth of data effectively. It benefits the independent distro by allowing them the ability to compete on the same scale as the bohemoth corporation.

            No longer does the upstart need to be constrained by cost of things like bandwidth, which can get extremely expensive. Your anger is pointed in the wrong direction; torrents aren't the problem. If you hate corporations so, start a website that markets every

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