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The Internet Networking Software

Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released 521

wintermute1974 writes "After sitting at a stable release of 3.4.2 since last spring, Bram Cohen's official BitTorrent client has been upgraded to version 4. In addition to its existing, rock-steady functionality, BitTorrent now sports a new queue-based UI. The revision details are on the BitTorrent site. Packets are now marked as bulk data too, which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data."
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Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released

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  • Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by patniemeyer ( 444913 ) * <pat@pat.net> on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:06AM (#11885409) Homepage
    It's Java based and seems to have every useful feature you can imagine:

    http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

    I haven't checked out the new official client yet, but Azureus has always been way ahead of the pack and I assume it still is. (Things like fast restart, nice visualizations of clients and file pieces, etc.)

    Pat
  • by ProdigySim ( 817093 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:06AM (#11885416)
    It looks to me like this new client is adding alot of the features other clients added in themselves. The main part being the configurations from a GUI. Perhaps he's trying to get everyone using HIS client, so there's more control over the populus of BT users?
  • ABC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:08AM (#11885422)
    has had [sourceforge.net] a far better interface and featureset for years.
  • Bulk data? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IntellectualCritic ( 858955 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:09AM (#11885431)
    Packets are now marked as bulk data too

    Can somebody explain what that means?

    I'm assuming that's not like bulk mail over the internet. I'd hate to accidently download viagra when I just when a torrent file.

  • by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:11AM (#11885448)
    Dear Lazyweb:

    This version of bittorrent is licensed under the BitTorrent Open Source License [bittorrent.com]. Could you please compare and contrast this with other open source licenses for me?

    Thank you, Lazyweb.
  • by Indy Media Watch ( 823624 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:13AM (#11885469) Homepage
    With the recent tragic death of everyone's favourite torrent site, what are people using these days for sourcing movies?

  • by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:14AM (#11885477) Homepage
    The OS X frontend is separate and uses Cocoa AFAIK.
  • Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) * on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:19AM (#11885504) Homepage
    BitTornado [bittornado.com] is another nice client, with the added benefit that it's not written in Java. Not that I've got much against Java personally, of course, but it's quite a resource hog that I'd rather avoid when possible.
  • by PxM ( 855264 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:20AM (#11885514)
    My main gripe with the default BT client is the lack of per file settings. BitTornado [bittornado.com] (site's down at the moment) allows the user to download specific files in the torrent. This is useful since people can post aggregated torrents and the user can just select the files that he wants.

    --
    Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini [freeminimacs.com]
    Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox [freegamingsystems.com]
    Wired article as proof [wired.com]
  • Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nzkbuk ( 773506 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:20AM (#11885517)
    While it's a very nice client I've always found it to be slower (in terms of network throughput) than other clients.
  • by CedgeS ( 159076 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:23AM (#11885529) Homepage Journal
    Don't know if this is new or not, but a streaming peer-to-peer protocol like bittorrent would be pretty cool. It could be used to inexpensively broadcast audio or video almost live, potentially making news reporting available to a wider selection of journalists. Checksums on data would obviously be a problem here and malicious nodes in the network would have an easier time of disrupting communications. This mechanism needs to be independent of media type, and rely on being used in combination with file formats that can be picked up and played from any small chunk. The client could decide which portions of the stream it would rather get, sacrificing liveness to get as much as possible, trying to pick up the nearest blocks in the future first to stay as smooth as possible, or minimizing buffer size and going after the most recent blocks to stay as live as possible.
  • Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:27AM (#11885559)
    What ever happened to that new and decentralized torrent program?
  • by Rexz ( 724700 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:36AM (#11885614)
    Installer doesn't give any indication it's installing until you get a "Finished!" box. No choosing paths, no status indicator, nuffin.

    Two donation nag screens.

    Steals .torrent file associations.

    No scraping the server for total seeder/peer numbers.

    No moving completed downloads. No advanced seeding rules. No selecting of individual within a torrent. No download speed capping.

    25mb memory usage running just one torrent.

    Nothing excites me about this client. I look forward to its apparent efficiency increases being incorporated into Azureus et al, though.
  • by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:40AM (#11885641) Homepage Journal
    I'm sure a Mac GUI is coming, my point was that if you want the new functionality now it is still entirely usable. The curses interface is actually quite nice, and was all I used for quite some time.

    Jedidiah.
  • Bittornado == no SQL (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @01:41AM (#11885644)
    I don't know where you got the idea of bittornado requiring mysql. It most certainly does not.
  • by parcifal ( 812729 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @02:10AM (#11885777) Journal
    This is already happening, wired even had an article [wired.com] on it, and the advance comes from the porn industry which has a number of contributions to the internet to its credit.
  • No kidding... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mindaktiviti ( 630001 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @02:14AM (#11885796)
    Yeah no kidding, my two biggest memory hogging applications are:

    - javaw.exe @ 43,616K at the moment
    - firefox.exe @ 40,564K at the moment.

    I like Azureus enough that I'll let this slide since I don't use it all the time (newsgroups are fun), and I dislike IE enough that 50mb doesn't seem so bad, plus I have enough ram anyway.
  • by EventHorizon ( 41772 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @02:29AM (#11885860)
    1. There is actually no RFC or other detailed documentation for the BT protocol. The unofficial clients were all written based on the source code from the official client (and more recently, based on the source code of other unofficial clients). IMO Bram should create a formal RFC, but that is pretty unlikely (he's not interested and the IETF is probably too conservative to do p2p).

    2. Sadly the python clients are the only ones usable on 64MB virtual private servers. Most of the unofficial clients are platform-specific (Win32, GTK+), or require a bloated JVM that has no chance of working in less than 128MB.

    I find it tragic that noone has released a high quality POSIX C client. Maybe the OpenBSD guys will eventually get around to OpenBT?
  • by Walker2323 ( 670050 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @02:40AM (#11885907)
    Yes, because without the Slashodotters talking about their favorite sites, the RIAA would never had found them. They're soooooo stupid!
  • by mike_lynn ( 463952 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @02:48AM (#11885943)
    What, no one is going to talk about the new BitTorrent Open Source License [bittorrent.com] that has been slapped on this 4.0 version?

    Thoughts about this would be much appreciated. I'm reading through it right now.
  • Re:GI JOE PSAs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mixmasterjake ( 745969 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @03:06AM (#11886002)
    here's the dude in chicago that makes 'em

    http://www.fenslerfilm.com/

  • by Chainsaw ( 2302 ) <jens...backman@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @03:33AM (#11886089) Homepage
    I have used OpenOffice and StarOffice on OS/2, Windows and Linux (in that order). Wanted to try the Mac version too, and since X11 is already installed - no problem.

    One second after it launched, I knew exactly why Mac users hate it. Amongst my Mac applications, there is one ugly as Stephen's mom application breaking almost every user interface rule there is. Even the simplest one (there's a perfectly fine menubar at the top of my screen, you bastards) was ignored.

    THAT'S the main reason it's not used on the Mac.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @04:21AM (#11886308)
    maybe he's just trying to raise the bar in terms of the default feature set
  • Unix Gurus (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mark_MF-WN ( 678030 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @06:21AM (#11886769)
    A lot of the old Unix research gurus in university positions switched to OSX. I can't count the number of professors I've had who would set their Mac laptop down on the front desk, ssh straight into their home or office computer, and run their slides and code demos remotely.

    The idea of OSX as just a pretty GUI is a gross disservice. I wouldn't touch OSX (or any other proprietary OS) with a ten foot pole myself, but credit where credit is due.

  • by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @08:51AM (#11887358) Homepage Journal
    I wonder if the new version has multithreaded the client so that receive and transmit are in separate threads?

    This is important if you are using traffic shaping on your upstream connection, as I am. I'm on ADSL, and so my upstream bandwidth is less than my downstream. To prevent BT from consuming all my upstream bandwidth I am using the tc module in the kernel to restrict the BT packets (the rate limiting in BT is next to useless, as each instance of the client will use the programmed bandwidth - there is no "global" sharing of the bandwidth, so if you have 4 clients running it will take 4 times the bandwidth of 1 client).

    The problem is that if the client is blocked sending an outbound torrent packet (because the traffic shaper queue is full), the client will not process any available incoming data packets, and this will hammer the download speed - I have expermimentally verified this.

    Now, if there were separate threads for downloading and for uploading, the uploading threads would block as the TC queue filled, but the download threads would not be blocked, and could handle the download at full speed.
  • by swv3752 ( 187722 ) <swv3752&hotmail,com> on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @11:25AM (#11888684) Homepage Journal
    It is basically the same as the GPL, so I don't see why Bram didn't just use the the GPL. Invariably the BT licence is incompatible with the GPL.* So now if you want to incorporate BT into something like say Konqueror, you can't.

    *I may be wrong about the compatibility, but it still does not seem to justify creating yet another licence that does nothing new.
  • Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by honestmonkey ( 819408 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @11:53AM (#11889024) Journal
    Yes, to please be read the site and noticing that English is their second language. Not justifying anything, but they may look at these things differently. Also, BitComet is not open source, which makes me feel uncomfortable as well. All in all, I don't think I'd trust it, personally.
  • Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DisKurzion ( 662299 ) on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @03:43PM (#11892167)
    BitComet is also not Open Source. I may be confused, but doesn't that mean that they're violating the licence?

    I use it, and it's a nice client, but it isn't open source, and that worries me.
  • by HiThere ( 15173 ) * <charleshixsn@@@earthlink...net> on Wednesday March 09, 2005 @05:11PM (#11893372)
    That bit about "if you file a patent claim against this software, you lose all license rights under it" is, indeed, incompatible with the GPL. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

    Perhaps it should be considered for addition to the next version of the GPL? (Which might have the side effect of making the bittorrent license compatible.)

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