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?

[Distinguished Hero]

The rumor goes that they will give you credit for uploading their software updates to other people (thereby reducing their bandwith bills); they won't offer you anything for uploading anything else...

Movie Store Distribution System

[richdun]

Credit for torrenting? Why would Apple give away iTunes music just for people to run torrents? Well, maybe because those torrents will serve up iTunes movies. Dedicated bandwidth has been the greatest obstacle to getting a full iTunes HD movie store (well, that and the movie companies' agreement, but if the tech is there and economical, the content will follow).

Translation:

[Avillia]

Help us take our hosting cost and we'll help you negate that bill you pay for 30 tasty megabytes of fiber... Yesss...

Personally, this is the best implementation of the BitTorrent technology yet.

$eeding.

Interesting, but...

[Penguin Programmer]

This sounds like a great thing, since it would make BitTorrent more available for non-techie users and add another vote to the legitimacy of BT.

However, if there's a crediting system, does that mean that Apple is watching your BT usage? If I'm not mistaken, Apple has some interest as a content producer and may not like what they see BT being used for. Is this going to be yet another organization watching what people transfer and ratting them out to the RIAA/MPAA/CIA, or will they be Not Evil (tm) and keep their noses out of people's business?

Groan.

[Rob T Firefly]

TFA seems slashdotted already, but given the name of the site I can only take this with an extremely large grain of salt.

Beyond that, it's an interesting concept, but one that could seriously botch up torrenting as it is. Bittorrent works so well (with both legal and shady source material) because every user gets the combined benefit of getting what they want, and helping thers who want the same thing to get it. At the very most, a big ratio gets you get bragging rights on some tracker site. My inner folk-song-singing hippie cringes at what result throwing monetary things like iTunes credit into the mix would have.

Want to share updates

[TeamSPAM]

If we can share the software updates between macs, it would be a good thing. With 3 macs in my house, why should I have to download the updates 3 times? I should be able to get a copy from the mac on my local net that downloaded it first. I just hope they allow the torrent client to have a throttle on it.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Movie Store Distribution System

[rovingeyes]

"...but if the tech is there and economical, the content will follow..."

I wonder how AT&T and Verizon will try to extort money for this to happen. Are they gonna track ITunes bittorrent traffic and charge Apple for it? If they can demand money from Google, Amazon etc for their content, which is incedentally less amount of data (per request probably megs at max) than a HD movie (gigs of data per request), I don't see why these cartels wouldn't eye Apple as their next target.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Want to share updates

[TeamSPAM]

There are 2 problems with this suggestion:

1. This works when there is only 1 software update available. This solution gets ugly when there are multiple updates to install. Doing these updates via the command line end up requiring multiple reboots, where the software update panel will only require 1 reboot if needed. I may need to review doing updates from the command line so that I can do multiple installs.
2. I'm lazy. ;-)
   In the wonderful world of Apple's "it just works", I want the pref panel for software update to have a checkbox that says cache all updates and a textbox that indicates my local update cache.

Re:Want to share updates

[chrysrobyn]

If we can share the software updates between macs, it would be a good thing. With 3 macs in my house, why should I have to download the updates 3 times? I should be able to get a copy from the mac on my local net that downloaded it first. I just hope they allow the torrent client to have a throttle on it.

What if the torrent didn't leave the local network? Azureus can detect machines on the local network -- who needs to throttle when only one machine is downloading over the thin pipe and all the machines in the house share the fat pipe to spread the wealth.

I'd bet Apple isn't looking for help with their bandwidth costs -- with their user base, the support issues may be difficult. But the user experience for multi-Mac households would vastly improve if only one Mac did the slow download (100-200KBps for most of us on cable?) and the rest quickly distributed the patches at local network speed (1-10MBps or more?).

Re:Peer Impact

[microbrewer]

Peer Impact's patent on Incentives for p2p

Here's the Patent

COMPUTER SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ENHANCING THE DISTRIBUTION AND REVENUE STREAMS DERIVED FROM WORKS MADE AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL FORM

Abstract of WO2005038617
Methods and computer systems for increasing the revenue stream from a work made available in digital form are provided. The methods and systems of the invention are particularly useful for musical, video, interactive game files, and artistic or commercial works that can be digitally copied and transferred or distributed, such as via the Internet. Embodiments of the present invention advantageously can form part of a greater system that provides access to digital forms of numerous works or groups of works, such as those that are copyrighted, to thereby extend the revenue-producing capabilities for the copyright holder of digital or digitized works to bona fide purchasers of those works. In turn, bona fide purchasers of a work who later provide copies of that work or other authorized works, or provide transfer or distribution bandwidth with respect to that work or other authorized works may receive incentives. Advantageously, no central warehouse of digital content is necessary with the present methods, and users may introduce authorized content into the present system in a controlled manner, through peer-to-peer systems, while realizing economic incentives for doing so. The present systems and methods also provide a myriad of embodiments of incentive and apportioning payment schedules, configurations and properties.
Data supplied from the esp@cenet database - Worldwide

http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO20 05038617&F=0 [espacenet.com]

Zilla and NeXT and Micropayments

[goombah99]

When NeXT came out every box shipped with ZILLA installed. It was the forerunner of modern screen-saver grid computers. You donated unused cycles to the Zilla organization and they did intersting stuff. In particular they allegedly did much of the four-color map theorem proof on Zilla and some of the early movie CGI work was done on Zilla. Another example of how far ahead NeXT was at the time. (another groovy thing on NeXT was it's early use of Mime and markup formatting for e-mail, something we take for granted now. e.g. all the NeXT e-mail clients had built in voice recording. Neither mac, windows, linux or sun had that at the time. And these days it's not even built in.) The neat thing apple brings to the table here is not the technology to do grid computing like this, but to do micropayments. This has been worked out via the apple stores and even better for them is if they can do barter (itunes) rather than cash. Someday they could do much more than torrent. Maybe they will lease xgrid to say airline companies to do scheduling. You get paid too!