Will OSX Build In Torrenting?

Cjattwood writes "Mac OS rumors has an article describing a possible implementation of a Bittorrent client into Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", including a unique sharing reward system where the user can share bandwidth and get rewards, such as credit in the iTunes store."

Re:DRM?

[Luscious868]

RTFA. Traffic would occur on non-standard ports and you wouldn't be able to share anything you wanted. You would donate your bandwidth to share content Apple approved like software updates. It makes perfect sense and I'd certianly donate my bandwith at home when I'm at work in exchange for iTunes credits.

Re:DRM?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

DRM? just curious, I can't imagine that they would let you offer the pirated music and movies and then get itunes credit for it...

I think you're confusing the term upload. They aren't talking about you uploading some data you have to get credit to download other data. They are talking about you authorizing Apple to use your machine as a node in a bit torrent network that distributes data of their choice. Thus you click "yes" and they use your spare upload bandwidth to more cheaply and quickly send software updates, podcasts, iTunes downloads, etc. to other computers. The data is all encrypted and chunked so it is not useful to you at all, even though it is on your hard drive. In excahnge, they give a free itunes song or something every month or year or something.

You win, because you weren't using all your hard drive and bandwidth anyway (and presumably it gives your data precedence). Apple wins because they no longer have to pay as much to distribute iTunes data and software updates. Theoretically, they could even expand this to third party software, cheaply distributing up to date version of any software companies want to give Apple a copy of. Hopefully it would be tied to a full service to keep all your programs updated.

The risks are legally, Apple might have copyright challenges to copying little chinks of encrypted music, even if it is unusable, and the security risk of people masquerading as valid nodes to disrupt the network or try to inject fake data (unlikely unless the implementation is very weak).

Re:Want to share updates

[MachineShedFred]

You can already do this.

In Software Update, under the "update" menu, select either "Download Only" or "Install and Keep Package"

You will then find the packages at /Library/Receipts and can copy them to other Macs.

Cheers.

Re:Building things in the OS bad

[2nd Post!]

No, abusing your monopoly is bad.

If MS did not abuse their monopoly, then no problems would have occurred and no one would have complained.

What MS did, specifically, was to extort Compaq by threatening to withhold OS licenses if they shipped systems with Netscape Navigator as the default and on the desktop.

In other words, if Apple threatened Best Buy and Walmart into stopping sales of competitive MP3 players, or PCs, with their iPod dominance then Apple would be in the same boat.

They don't, so they aren't.

Re:Please.

[ZachPruckowski]

Totally concur. Here's another example of this guy smoking stuff:

From the MOSR front page: In the process of researching recent reports from sources regarding Apple's "Gamer's Dream" Macs now in the late stages of development, we uncovered information suggesting that Apple is testing an alternate version of the Gamer's MacBook which would employ an nVIDIA nForce chipset and dual GeForce 7800GTX Mobile GPU's. Memory bandwidth would be slightly less than that offered by the existing Intel chipset in today's MacBook Pro's, but graphics performance would be even higher than the ATi X1800/X1900 based dual-GPU laptop design we've spoken about previously.

Not only does he have no sources, he doesn't have much of a clue about economics or design either. So he's a faker and not a very good one.

Re:BitTorrent still has a better incentive scheme

[mini me]

The term operating system gets thrown around to mean a lot of things. I don't think you're going to see a BT kext. But it's not unreasonable to have it show up farther up the abstraction level, such as in the software update application. Strictly speaking, that may not be part of the operating system, but it is in the minds of many.

Re:Nahhh

[utexaspunk]

FYI- his name is Steve Jobs, not Steve Job. I'm sure you know that, but clearly you don't understand how apostrophes work. When doing a possessive of a word already ending in s, you put the apostrophe after the s. So you'd say "Jobs' first priority". Some people say you should add an additional s, as in "Jobs's first priority", but we all know that's just silly.

Re:Want to share updates

[S'harien]

This works fine for multiple updates, just select them all and then "download and install".

Copy all the updates to the second Mac and launch them all at once, the Installer will run the installs back-to-back and doesn't (usually) get hung up when one requires a restart, it just starts the next one anyway. Sometimes also there are dependencies and a particular package won't install the first time, just restart and run that one again and it should work fine.

You do have to restart manually when they're done, the installer does not restart the Mac for you.