BitTorrent Comes to Cell Phones

An anonymous reader writes "Finally, a BitTorrent interface for the mobile phone. Dubbed uTorrent mUI, the web user interface allows the end user to control torrent downloads remotely. The interface still lacks the ability to add torrents, however bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward."

Awesome!

Awesome. I've always wanted to download stuff on the go. Porn on the go, here I come.

Re:Awesome!

> Porn on the go, here I come.

I don't want to be a spelling Nazi, but it's spelled C-U-M, not C-O-M-E.

Pretty Misleading

This technology allows the individual to log into their home machine from a remote location and, among many other things, add torrents, pause a download, or discontinue a download.

The title of this article is pretty misleading. It looks like they've basically made a webpage for their BitTorrent and then made a special css for a cell phone viewing it.

Not extremely innovative, I've seen web interfaces for torrent clients [sourceforge.net].

Neat? Yes. A good project? Maybe. "Huge step forward?" Not really, in my opinion.

I question the motives for bringing torrents to cellphones unless you can use other cell phones as download points (hence the name Peer to Peer). That's where the speedup comes from. I think cell phones are pinched at their access point, P2P apps on the phone aren't going to change that, they will even make it worse if both phones are fighting two separate choke points. Not sure if this is well thought out.

Re:Pretty Misleading

As the parent poster pointed out, Azureus has had a remote web interface plugin for a long time. Making it able to be controlled remotely from anything with a browser and net access. How is this news? Wake me when the hacked iPhone has P2P song sharing via WiFi with autodiscovery of peers via ad hoc network magic.

Useless until it can add.

The phone doesn't need to understand trackers, many popular sites have links directly to the .torrent file - you'd just need to copy and paste a link to a .torrent file and be done with it. I'm sure if the phone can throttle the bandwidth on a torrent it can handle that...

Useless

This may be the most uselss application I have ever seen promoted on /. It might be useful if your torrent program was extremely limited, but uTorrent already allows you to schedule torrents, change speed automatically when they finish, and to impose speed and total download caps if you need them. These features make the ability to remotely monitor your torrents relatively useless, unless you are interested in obsessing over exactly when one of them finishes. But the rest of us have the ability to leave our computers and let uTorrent intelligently manage things without us, with no remote monitoring capability required.

Re:Useless

Maybe you're right legally, whatever...TV seems like a gray area. There's probably some rule about rebroadcasting. Morally, you can take your high and mighty attitude and shove it. I've paid my $40+ monthly to the cable monopoly. Setting my DVR or getting it off a torrent, I couldn't care less. Whatever points you want to make about it are legal technicalities that yes, could get potentially be troubling. What's more troubling, though, is your attitude, as illustrated by your use of the word "steal". It must be nice to be naive like you and assume everything in the law is about fair and just and therefore anything "most likely illegal" is morally wrong. I guess some people are OK with enabling the MAFIAA companies to buy legislation to screw over the consumers. I don't know where you get off preaching to people here.

Wow...

Isn't something like 50% of the net's total traffic (by volume) torrent?

Seems this would really tax wireless capacity.

Re:Wow...

This is a "remote control" for bittorrent related things running on other computers, not a bittorrent client.

step forward towards...what?

"...however bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward."

a giant step forward towards...what? I mean, seriously...just umm...how much space ya got on your phone there that you need to torrent files to it?

Is it April 1, 2008, already?

Freed from the Desktop!

Awesome! Between hosting webservers and downloading torrents, I'll never have to use my desktop again. Does anyone use a cell phone to make a freaking phone call anymore?

Misleading and over-hyped

This would be like setting up a very simple web page to control a nuclear missile silo and proclaiming, "NUCLEAR MISSILES NOW LAUNCHED FROM CELL PHONES!"

All this is is a remote interface, just like the http interface uTorrent already has. Useful? Now for most, but maybe so for some. The fact that you can't add torrents to it is a major limitation, but if you are out with friends and say "So yeah, I hear it's a great film. We can go back to my place and watch it if it's done. Let's see..." then it's a handy little add-on.

Not worth a breathless Slashdot story, though.

"Giant step forward"?

Now, don't get me wrong - it's a very neat proyect, but is it that far from a BT client with web server capabilities and Opera mini in your cell? I know of atleast one person who used to have his computer bookmarked in his cell for stuff like this.

phone 2 phone download?

oops, it is not.

No it's not

> bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.

No it's not. It's not really that impressive at all. They made a web remote control UI for the existing PC-based program, and then went to the website from their Palm. This has nothing to do with bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone.

This is lame

good cellphones (pda-like) could always do that....

there are even bittorrent CLIENTS for cellphones....

check out...
http://www.adisasta.com/wmTorrent.html [adisasta.com]

Great...

...now the **AA can subpoena my cell phone company.

azureus has that for a long time

and it works just fine on my cell phone

infection vector

-This should supply the missing vector needed for cellphone virii disguised as ringtones and wallpapers and pr0n dialers which access premium rate overseas #s

now our phones can be as fsck'd as our PCs -esp the ones running Windows Mobile....

I'm just sayin'

Dupe wannabe article

This was news years ago.

A way to control torrents on my PC from my cell? I've never been able to do that with any torrent client that had a web interface. Or just the torrent client through a shell. Or any of a number of remote desktop apps that exists for the cell..

For God's sake, we've even been able to download torrents on the actual phone for quite a while now, even that is old news.

Besides, who uses torrents anyways? Usenet FTW!

Big deal

eMule had this before bittorrent even existed

My NAS has a bittorrent client.

Somehow that strikes me as being more useful, what with it having 1.4TB of storage and all.

Buh

Because you know, open source eMule mods having a web interface that could be accessed from a phone or, well, anywhere, is completely different. And they've only had that for years.

I really believe BitTorrent is just a tad overrated. Or maybe I'm just bitter because it's not truly P2P, it's peer to lousy-tracker-with-no-seeds-that-shuts-down-after- a-week-because-mom-cut-the-network-cable-down-to-t he-basement to peer (P2L2P). Or maybe I've just had bad experiences with about 90% of the trackers I ever connected to.

Thank you for using BitTorrent!

Text MONEY to 77733 to donate to Bram Cohen! (He doesn't do this for free you know)

Old news

I'm sure this is news in iPhone Land but here in Europe we've been doing this for some time now.

Awesome

Now I can kill my battery even quicker!

Screw this crap.

Hey eggheads, we're all tired of the carrot before the horse crap. Put all your giant brains together and build me a battery. The most amazing, spectacular battery in the world, nay, universe. I want it to power my Treo (which dies after eight hours just sitting there, and yes I have my auto-sync set to 5 minutes and 15 minutes...all the more reason for an awesome battery) for at least five days using 100% of every damn thing its advertised for. I didn't talk my work into spending $650 for nothing.

And while you're at it, no I don't need Bittorrent on my phone. Why the fuck would I? I have other tools that let me remote control my stuff at home. I don't need another program eating memory that does the same thing.

At this rate, Star Trek and every other sci-fi communicator will never happen because people are to busy trying to "DOODZ, you can get porn and movies on your phone!!!!". I'm the one with expendable income, I want a tool, not a toy. I have a laptop for the latter and I don't have to squint while watching things on it.

from the article ... from the summary ...

From the article:

Torrent mUI has all the basic features you could want in order to remotely control your Torrent application.

From the summary:

bringing BitTorrent capabilities to the cell phone is a giant step forward.

Yeah, I know I'm selectively quoting from the summary (i.e. another line says "allows the end user to control torrent downloads remotely".I also understand that I'm splitting some hairs here, but there is nothing new on the cell phone. So do we consider it to be bringing capabilities to a phone every time a new web application is built or an old host app has a new web front end built for it? Nothing has changed on the phone. That's the *point* of building web-based apps - dodge the client.

And (also from the summary a "giant leap forward"? I don't think so. The utorrent web interface allows me to remote control my torrent downloads from any browser which can render the page, and has done so in public availability since sometime last year. I haven't tried to use it from my phone, but there's got to be a phone-based browser out there capable of doing so. Anyone?

I think it is neat that someone is doing this. Can we just take some of the hyperbole out of summaries? (I can hear the 'you must be new here' comments already).

From Sept 2006 the announcement on utorrent's web interface and remote control:
http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=14565 [utorrent.com]

And a BitTorrent client for mobile devices, article dated mar 13th 2007:
http://torrentfreak.com/symtorrent-bittorrent-on-y our-mobile/ [torrentfreak.com]

Nothing to see here ... nothing new, anyway.

Next step: An actual client

This made me think of bit torrent over a massive LAN mesh network. I bet the RIAA/MPAA will be angry when that starts, actually so will anyone else in the business of selling software/media.

The easiest, lightweight way of managing torrents

You can do this incredibly easily and in a much more lightweight fashion from any computer/phone/toaster with Internet access.

1. On your machine you use to download torrents, run rtorrent [rakshasa.no] within screen [gnu.org].

screen rtorrent

2. SSH [openssh.com] into your box: from Windows try Putty [greenend.org.uk], from your phone try PocketPutty [svpocketpc.com]; from Linux:

ssh youraddress

3. Reconnect to the screen

screen -r -x

Simple. No fancy-schmancy GUIs required.

Older than old

I used to have a Treo 270 and run Onager [niemueller.de] over GPRS to control mldonkey [sourceforge.net] which is a general P2P-tool that also handles bittorrent. That was like five years ago.. Though it didn't last too long; mldonkey evolved faster than onager. Every phone since then has included a webbrowser that you can use to control, for example, mldonkey over a web interface.

Is it just me...

...or is this a massive security risk?

From what I can tell, you are esentially giving him your uTorrent login info.

Probably cheaper to go buy it

Since I assume that the data-rate costs are pretty astronomical in most countries. Or a people starting to want to pay to pirate now? :)

High phone bill

Have you any idea how high my phone bill will be if I use this???

Imagine seeding for 24 hours with this thing... ai ai ai

Y

Symtorrent

Symtorrent http://symtorrent.aut.bme.hu/ [aut.bme.hu] is a Bit Torrent client designed specifically for S60 phones. N70, N95 etc.

Make sure you have a generous data plan, though!

Seen it (or Fun With Linux and TorrentFlux)

Linux personal Web & file server + DDNS + TorrentFlux + Cellphone with data (read: internet) access = BitTorrent WITH file downloads on a cell phone.

Tiny phone and tiny functionality

This is such a tiny amount of functionality, it's hard to believe it got ahead of a story about helicopters on space.com. If they had bittorrent downloads to the cell phone through http proxies, that would be worth something, but how often do you start, stop, and pause bittorrent downloads? And when they finally get downloads to the cell phone, they're not going to support http proxies.