P2P Population Growing Again

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck news is reporting that the file-sharing population has recovered from its mid-year plateau and is once again growing. At 9.45 million users, it is only slightly below its greatest height of 9.6 million users in August. Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."

Re:Trend?

[PhotoBoy]

I thought Half Life 2 came out last year? Unless you mean the Xbox version, but there can't be 9.5M people with modded Xboxes surely?

Link and stuff

[maccalvin5]

Here's a link to the actual survey [slyck.com]. It's not too informative, but it shows the cyclic nature of the p2p userbase mentioned in the article.

Should ISP's shut down P2P filesharing?

[Sheetrock]

There is a case to be made, I think, that if certain ports were disabled for home users a serious dent could be made in this P2P population -- not to mention the great deal of bandwidth freed up for more serious Internet activity.

This is already accepted to some extent by anti-SPAM policies that forbid access to external SMTP servers, and has been used to great effect by university administrators.

It would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.

Re:Bittorrent for the win

[HighBit]

Can someone please comment on how bittorrent differs from other protocols, say kazaa. Is it just that there is no one company to sue, or are the individual users harder to track and sue?

I guess another way to ask this is this: is it safe to use bittorrent to swap copyright protected material?

With bittorrent, you're both uploading and downloading files in the torrent. The client can both accept connections and connect to other clients. Once you get a piece of the torrent, you share that piece with other clients that request it from you. After you have all the pieces, you're considered a seed, and clients can connect to you to finish getting any pieces no one else has, if you're the only seed.

If you're behind a firewall or a NAT, your client might not be able to accept connections. Thus, you will have to connect to clients that are not firewalled to participate in the network. This may reduce your chances of being "caught" by **AA -- they may only be focusing on people that they can connect to.

However, the torrent tracker keeps track of all the clients that are participating in the network. This information can be freely obtained as the tracker must give it out for the protocol to work properly. Therefore, anyone who wants to can make a complete list of all the people who are participating in the torrent, and because of this, no, Bittorrent is not a "safe" way to transfer copyrighted material without a license-- unless, of course, nobody knows about the tracker and the torrent but you and your friends. Thus the private, invite-only trackers that the **AA can't get to.

The only public and fairly safe way to swap copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder would be an anonymizing service-- such as FreeNET, or perhaps TOR, etc.

Re:Doesn't include Bittorrent?

[alfrin]

Um, not really, the difference is there is really no way of completely determining the number of bittorrent users. There is no centralization in bittorrent.

Logical explanation....

[Chaffar]

The temporary rise in various non-BitTorrent P2P networks in November is DEFINITELY due to the launch of Azureus 2.3.0.6.

Thousands of users made the switch after realizing that they're STILL going to have to put up with the infamous NAT Error [aelitis.com], and it STILL drives Ubuntu users [whirlpool.net.au] crazy...

Re:No, they shouldnt

[mugnyte]

Additionally, you forget one thing: The reason certain tools use certain ports or network protocols are because they were unencumbered. Once any portion of the design becomes encumbered with filtering, security checks or anything else deemed "censorship", it will be rebuilt to avoid not just the problem, but the entire *class* of such problems. This will happen for information, and to a slowly degree, hardware hacking, in a neverending march.

  Right now, you can write a P2P client that will check for credentials, register with an authorizing service, and track usage and even use a fob. But the trend of it is not going that way. I see no home-grown networks springing up that will steal mindshare from the existing "free beer" mentality.

  Without overdoing the paraphrasing of folks prior to this post, the it's not the information that must be tracked, but the ability to transfer such information with adequate private security - meaning someone must remove the ability for the internet to work as an open standard completely.

  Of course, such a thing would be completely ludicrous, since the tools and instructions to build an IP network out of almost anything readily exist, and exist off the 'net, most importantly.

  With any movement to privatize the internet through capitalization or censorship, the public can move to their own. Bandwidth, wireless networking, dual core and public knowledge of computer/information theory must be explored religiously to keep such info public and non-commoditized.

    Also, as more and more different markets use the internet, and rely on the cost-of-business of a certain clientel to be online - anything blocking, slowing, filtering, or scaring them off (notice that scaring doesn't require any change in reality), these businesses will complain. The internet is now so etched into business models that any tinkering with the "fast information-of-any-kind per price" theme will bump into negative feedback. I foresee the "pay as you enter" model sticking around for a long time, and folks starting server "channels" that bypass any packet-derived categorization. SSL may get expanded and ubiquitous, for example.

Holy crap, dude.

[TheSpoom]

I feel really sorry for you. Switch ISPs now. Seriously. And while you're at it, publicize the fact that Cox Cable is censoring their traffic, and therefore no longer deserves the title of common carrier, and therefore is liable for the actions of their users.

Ironically, if you think about it, they're putting themselves in danger of getting a lawsuit from the RIAA.

Re:Bittorrent for the win... kinda

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried using a public proxy server? some isps are known to do this, and 9 times out of 10 using a public proxy will solve your issue...

Re:Bittorrent for the win... kinda

[td4guy]

Try switching to port 1720, the standard VoIP port. It works with Rogers Cable in Canada. They don't run packet shapers on any traffic on that port, for fear of lagging VoIP calls.

Re:Bittorrent for the win... kinda

[tenton]

Call them every other day about it. Say you can't play WoW correctly. Encourage all the other WoW players in the area with Cox to do the same. It's impacting a very important usage (WoW being very popular, still).

Re:Bittorrent for the win... kinda

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can switch to a client that encrypts the header. I know that in the world of private tracker BitComet is hated, but it really is a great client once you disable DHT tracking and enable header encryption, although Azureus may support it, too. My university also filters bittorent headers, but once those headers were encrypted, I was back in business.