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."
Good to see progress... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Informative)
Better yet, now that BT 4.0.0 uses GTK instead of wxWidgets (as per the release notes), will this hamper the OS X frontend?
The only other OS X native BT frontend I know is Tomato Torrent [sarwat.net] ... but that's just a tweaked 3.4.2 build. CLI / X Windows here I come...
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:2)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Insightful)
The OSX client never used wxWidgets in the first place. It's a Cocoa/Python application. Besides, I always use the curses client anyway (very handy to run under screen so that I can check my progress remotely via ssh)
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's in python so you should be able to just grab the source and use btdownloadcurses.py in Terminal.app (or whatever it is). Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?
Jedidiah.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness, it's a Mac. The userbase is not going to accept an application that doesn't have a "pretty GUI" because the GUI is much of what the platform is about. Just see OpenOffice for an example of software that's underutilized for its lack of an effective Mac GUI.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jedidiah.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are alot of new users that see what OSX is, a kick ass unix box with a great multi user desktop.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unix Gurus (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good to see progress... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 th
Re:yep (Score:5, Funny)
You misspelled "Camino".
Re:yep (Score:3, Insightful)
1/3rd of all traffic? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:1/3rd of all traffic? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:1/3rd of all traffic? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:GI JOE PSAs (Score:3, Informative)
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=gijoe-
and more can be found at
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/gijoe.html
It's one of those were either you laugh your ass off or become disturbed at the amount of free time people have. Personally I laugh my ass off.
Re:GI JOE PSAs (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.fenslerfilm.com/
But... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:2)
The 'bulk data' tag (Score:5, Informative)
I'm interested to see where this'll go-- will ISPs absolutely choke 'bulk data' packets and drive folks into using older or fringe BT clients to get faster downloads? Will this help solve VoIP realtime bandwidth issues? Will the 'good net citizen' vibe surrounding writing the 'bulk data' flag into ones code overshadow potentially making ones users into second-class net citizens?
Or will this not be a big deal at all?
Probably some of everything, I suppose.
Re:The 'bulk data' tag (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they'll choke "bulk data", because many other protocols mark their data bulk as well (ftp being one of them, if you have a modern client).
It is very helpful to ISPs to have the bulk classification, so that their more time-sensitive data (ie, VOIP) doesn't get clobbered when someone starts using bittorrent.
It's not like it's difficult to choke bittorrent traffic anyway, just look for communication on ports 6881 to 6888.
If they do, it'll just make everyone remove the bulk flag, and then there will be no easy quality of service queing.
Re:The 'bulk data' tag (Score:3, Informative)
The reason being, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided not to play "good net citizen" and the Windows IP stack sets outgoing packets as 0x10 (or other similar "high priority" category) no matter what.
Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
The actual link is to the download is here [bittorrent.com].
The changelog:
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:2)
I hate people who invent their own licenses. And this one [bittorrent.com] is completely unintelligible, even the preamble is written in lawyerspeak.
This pretty much guarantees I won't ever touch the code: I don't have a clue what I'm allowed, not allowed, and required to do. The GPL and BSD-like licenses are at least understandable for a non-lawyer.
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
(Note: This may not be 100% accurate, IANAL, I am not responsible, etc, etc.)
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:3, Interesting)
*I may be wrong about the compatibility, but it still does not seem to justify creating yet another licence that does nothing new.
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see how people can't understand the GPL; it's fairly long and "lawyery" looking. But the BSD license? It's about six sentences long! It pretty much comes down to "do anything you want with it, modify it or don't, distribute as source or binary, we don't care, as long as you give credit where it's due, don't use our names to endorse your product, and don't blame us if something goes wrong."
Re:Link and Changelog (Score:5, Informative)
HTH,
petard
License and copyright (Score:3, Informative)
The *only* thing that allows you to redistribute the code is the license. So it is in your own interest to defend the license.
Of course, if you don't redistribute the code, you don't have to accept the license. The GPL is very specific about this, but it is true for all licenses. Or used to be, apparently there is a trend in some juristictions to consider the transfer of the program from harddisk to r
Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:5, Informative)
This makes sense though, because it simply works incredibly, and they're probably working on some bigger things now for a new version. It's stabilized quite nicely, better than any closed-source software out there lately!
Re:Azureus rocks... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:...ever feature except speed (Score:3, Informative)
Azureus works fine-- no big performance problems at all. I can download and my wife can still use iTunes and MS Word at the same time. Azureus maxes out our DSL connection, but that's the network, and all computers are affected.
Trying to get more users? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Trying to get more users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sites like IsoHunt have some features that are supported in some clients and not in others like multiple trackers with backups so if the main tracker goes down it will switch over.
He's not trying to implement any sort of eXeem crapfest at least.
I'm a bit confused about the bulk packets thing.
Yea there are people who will want to use over their neighbors wifi and will need some stronger restrictions (when it spikes to 300 down neighbors in
Re:Trying to get more users? (Score:2)
Control? (Score:5, Informative)
He probably just wants to offer a product he can be proud of, maybe so people will appreciate his work and choose to support him.
The new BitTorrent license isn't simple or brief. (Score:3, Informative)
There is considerably more in the new BitTorrent license than in either of those licenses. Among other things, the new BitTorrent license specifies which licenses can be used as sublicenses and how much one can charge for distributing the source code of sublicensed derivatives.
Pride in one's work doesn't come from a license and people aren't going to giv
Irony. (Score:5, Funny)
Is it just me... but does anyone else find it ironic that there isn't a torrent available for downloading Bittorrent?
Re:Irony. (Score:2)
Plus, the download is so small (the RPM's 256k), and the number of people downloading using BitTorrent's probably relatively few, so the gains from using BT might not be that great.
Re:Irony. (Score:2)
Re:Irony. (Score:2)
Not irony, but avoiding user confusion...
Re:Irony. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Irony. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Irony. (Score:2)
Not really. Either A) You don't have a copy, in which case the link is useless, or B) You're upgrading, in which case it's probably a wise idea to get a fresh copy, just in case there's a slight "bug" in the last version (it's a contrived example, but I'm using it).
Re:Irony. (Score:2)
If you don't have bittorrent, how will you download it?
Great! I Love BitTorrent. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! I Love BitTorrent. (Score:2)
bulk data (Score:5, Funny)
ABC (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ABC (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed... (Score:2, Funny)
Too bad it's all broken copies of LG3D.
Different License (Score:5, Informative)
It's complient with the Open Source Definition. Not huge shaking news it seems like.
Bulk data? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:2, Informative)
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini [freeminimacs.com]
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox [freegamingsystems.com]
Wired articl [wired.com]
Re:Bulk data? (Score:3, Informative)
Set an upload cap on your BT client if you don't want it killing your connection, or replace your router with a Linux box that has more intelligent packet filtering. (Specifically, if you know your upstream cap, you can set up the Linux box to be the actual upstream bottleneck and not the cable modem, and when the router is the upstream bottleneck
Re:Bulk data? (Score:5, Informative)
Now, taking these one at a time. VoIP has certain needs: it needs a certain amount of bandwidth, and its data must be transferred within a short period of time, or it becomes unusable. A VoIP connection is generally held for of the order of minutes, so quick setup of a connection is not a high priority. HTTP needs quick setup/teardown, because you have one connection for each file (typically kilobytes in size; yes, I know that later versions of HTTP can transfer multiple files within one connection), but latency is not a huge concern; bandwidth might be, depending on the data. FTP is an interesting beast: low latency and low bandwidth for commands, but high bandwidth and don't-care latency for data. Setup/teardown times not a major issue. NNTP needs high bandwidth, but latency is not a concern at all. SMTP usually needs low bandwidth, and latency isn't a major issue, as long as the message gets through. SSH needs low latency, but bandwidth needs are generally low.
You have a relatively small pipe to the rest of the Internet. There are high demands on this pipe. How do you decide what gets pushed through, and what gets dropped, or delayed until later?
BitTorrent marking its packets as bulk means that quality of service systems can say "These packets aren't of major importance; they can be deferred until later". So the short-term throughput of BT is reduced, for the benefit of others who need the pipe for applications like VoIP (for example). When those other applications reduce their demands, BT is able to transfer its data.
The understanding is simple: the urgency in the transfer of data via bittorrent is low, so if bandwidth is at a premium, the routers can drop, or throttle, the bittorrent data to make room for high priority data. It's the same principle as FedEx uses: if you have stuff that needs to be moved FAST, you pay a price premium, and it gets moved on the next plane, bumping off some low-urgency, low-price cargo to the plane afterwards. If there's a lot of high priority and low priority traffic, such that the low priority traffic is building up faster than it can be moved, it's time for FedEx to buy more planes, or start not accepting low priority traffic -- or, in the ISP business, to buy a fatter pipe.
Hope this helps.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:5, Informative)
No. In order for users to voluntarily mark their packets as "bulk data", there has to be a benefit for them. That benefit is supposed to be higher overall transfer rate. The tradeoff is higher latency. So a router that receives a BitTorrent packet and a VOIP packet at the same time would send the VOIP packet first to reduce latency, and queue the BitTorrent packet for afterwards. But if the queue is full it would *not* preferentially drop the BitTorrent packet because that would reduce throughput. In fact, if the queue has many VOIP packets, the router should preferentially drop incoming VOIP packets, because it would not be able to send them with low latency anyway. This limits VOIP throughput, which is fine. In fact that's the result we want: VOIP = low latency low throughput, BitTorrent = high latency high throughput.
At least, I hope this is how ISPs implement routing for packets marked as bulk data, because otherwise it will never be adopted.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:4, Informative)
No, the benefit is that their Internet connection remains usable for interactive traffic instead of slowing to a crawl due to the BitTorrent traffic. (The overall transfer rate is likely to be the same either way.) You don't stop using the Internet just because you're downloading something, do you?
If you're not using your connection for anything else, BitTorrent can max out the bandwidth, with or without the bulk data flag. If you have other traffic, the TCP/IP stack will have to make room in the stream of data for those other packets sooner or later -- and when those packets go through really won't affect the final download time because latency is of little importance. However, it may be critical to the other traffic, so it's best to label the bulk data to keep it from being prioritized before more urgent packets.
Really, the only reason not to use the flag is because such traffic could be easily singled out for blocking. However, such action would be foolish, since people would just stop marking the data as "bulk" if that caused it to get dropped. This would cause all the bulk data to be transferred as if it were time-critical interactive traffic, defeating the value of the flag altogether. (Email can be marked as bulk email, but do spammers use that flag? Of course not! They know they'll be blocked.)
It's best for everyone if all bulk data is labelled, the routers prioritize it intelligently, and nobody blocks bulk data transfers.
Re:Bulk data? (Score:3, Informative)
BitTorrent Open Source License (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Great news... (Score:3, Funny)
Looks Slick (Score:2, Informative)
Tried it out throwing down some linux torrent simultaneously.
Downloads save to the desktop by default (although editable) and look like Firefox's Download Manager with details, progress bars, etc. Really nice because opening up 5 torrents used to mean 5 seperate windows. Client worked fine on most of the trackers given by A Quick Google Search [google.com].
Download it quick! I'm sure someone will torrent the executable...
Re:Looks Slick (Score:2)
Re:Looks Slick (Score:3, Informative)
Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent at Stanford.
Update: 3/7/2005, The torrent in this entry was just audio only, but Thomas Winningham has gotten permission from both Bram and Stanford ("Stanford holds copyright on the material but returns the copyright immediately to the speaker, that is, Bram. Get him to agree and go ahead.") to post their video as a torrent on Prodigem. Cool! Updated again since that video posted
Marking Packets Correctly (Score:5, Funny)
Lack of per file settings. (Score:2, Interesting)
--
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]
Idea: Streaming Torrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Idea: Streaming Torrent (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot staff should be ashamed to have promoted it like they did. They did 2 or 3 articles about it, as if it were some great tech sent from the heavens.
Besides the fact that the very notion of it is what's wrong with the internet, and why the government will eventually regulate the hell out of it. The entire point is to trade warez. I did an eXeem search for linux, and didn't get one result - so don't give me some bullshit about slackware isos. Society are like kindergarteners, they had a little freedom, and blew it. Now we're all going to be grounded.
Actually, is that why michael left? It wasn't long after he "wrote" a couple "eXeem is great! get your warez on eXeem!" articles that he left.
Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically it brings my system to a crawl. Java vm (and yes i'm on 1.5) feels like a pig imo. We need a native gtk/qt gui that's in c/c++.
And please don't be a smartass and point out there is the basic gui that the official comes with. It's way too lacking. AFAIK, the only way to throttle is by using the ncurses one. Never mind that you can't set ratio's (I set all of mine to 1:1.), or bind all torrents to one port instead of needing all open. Pretty much all of the other clients do that now, except the official so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
So as you see, there are quite a few things lacking in the official client. I've checked freshmeat periodically but couldn't find anything for linux. I know there is bitorrando and some others but they require access to a mysql server wtf?
My windows friends used to use azureus and didn't fair much better performance wise but now they pretty much all use bitcomet.
I don't mean to knock the azureus team, cause as it is they've made a pretty good functional gui, but java just brings the performance down too much.
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:2)
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:4, Informative)
-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
This will activate the opengl pipeline [sun.com] for Java2D calls. (Swing uses Java2D for all rendering...)
Re:Linux needs a gui alt to azureus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bittornado == no SQL (Score:2)
Initial impressions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Two donation nag screens.
Steals
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.
Re:Initial impressions... (Score:4, Informative)
So if already content with Azureus or BitComet or whatever, nothing to see here... Move along folks.
- shadowmatter
Re: Long-Awaited BitTorrent 4.0 Released (Score:3, Funny)
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see the point in reinventing the wheel as far as clients go when there are far better alternatives already out there. Let other people write the clients, and concentrate on improving the protocol.
Why The Official Client Matters (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Why The Official Client Matters (Score:3, Informative)
> quality POSIX C client. Maybe the OpenBSD guys
> will eventually get around to OpenBT?
Well there is C BitTorrent client. A bit stagnated (meaning developement/releases) but it works usually and is under GPL so it is nice base to start off.
http://ctorrent.sourceforge.net/
Keep in mind that this client is writen in *nix way - meaning that it does not have fancy GUI at all, it does not do queue etc. - it just gets torrents.
I've used to use ctorrent,
Didn't anyone else read the version changes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thoughts about this would be much appreciated. I'm reading through it right now.
Have they multithreaded the client? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:meh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Favourite torrent sites? (Score:2)
Re: The loss of supr? (Score:2)
That and a few others.. Pirate Bay, Demonoid, Torrent Reactor, etc.
Re:Favourite torrent sites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yours truly,
The MPAA
Re:Why is this news? (Score:2)
Re:libtorrent (Score:4, Informative)
When I started writing my OS X client (Shameless plug: Hurricane [keeto.net]. Early beta.) I shopped around for BT libraries and found libtorrent to be better documented than LibTorrent (Sheesh - could that naming issue be any more confusing?). Also, the developer community seems very receptive and active - always a good thing!
Cool Features? Sure! It runs all torrents over a single port in a background thread, offers configuration and stats for damned near everything BT can do, 'fast resume' data for quickly restarting a download and various other niceties.
And great documentation - a rarity for an OSS project