radiotone - Slashdot User

Researchers Warn of Possible BitTorrent Meltdown 294

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 13, 2009 @10:45AM from the domino-effect dept.

secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"

Comment Re:Textbook authors deserve to be paid. (Score 1) 511

by radiotone on Tuesday July 01, 2008 @04:14PM (#24021385) Attached to: Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads

Two things:

1. My daughter recently had to fork over $110 for a basic community-college ALGEBRA textbook. This knowledge has been around for centuries. Other very basic textbooks are similarly astronomically priced considering they rehash the same basic ideas as the 10,000 that have come before them.

2. We have no idea if the huge margins being made on textbooks are being passed along to authors.

Textbook companies like Thompson have slowly muscled out competition by such tactics as out-and-out bribing instructors: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i42/42a00801.htm It's corrupt. That doesn't mean piracy is always justified. But it's not as simple as you are arguing..."pay up or return to the dark ages".

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