p2pnet.net News:- geoTorrent.org is a relatively new BitTorrent website that’s distributing what it claims are legal satellite images and geospatial data, something that would be impossible over HTTP considering file sizes can go up to 87 GB.

geoTorrentgeoTorrent.org is just over a year old and currently has 35 live torrents. They can be filtered by continent and health (dead/alive). Apparently, 25 terabytes of data have been transferred via the site.

The torrents aren’t just made up of normal images: they’re either JPEG 2000 or ECW files. To read the data, you’d need a GIS application such as ER Viewer.

These files contain a lot of data and high resolution images, which makes them exceptionally large.

The largest torrent on the site is just above 87 GB. Distributing them over standard web protocols such as HTTP and FTP would border on the impossible. And this is where BitTorrent comes in.

Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible.

The founder of geoTorrent.org, Richard Orchard writes in a forum post:

Using traditional means, electronic distribution of datasets this size is economically expensive and practically inefficient. If a single file is 5 GB in size, and 1000 people want to download it, 5 terabytes of information needs to be served. If there were 100 high demand files, this would equate to 500,000 gigabytes!”

Orchard says he sees his platform as proof that P2P technologies such as BitTorrent aren’t just used to illegally transfer copyrighted content. “There is a lot of talk in the press about the evils of peer-to-peer technology. However, GeoTorrent demonstrates the benefits a practical, workable use of peer-to-peer technology. Without this technology the distribution of large datasets would not be viable.”

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent has been used to distribute such data. NASA, too, uses BitTorrent for their ‘Visible Earth’ project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth.

Torrentfreak - The Netherlands

[NOTE: If you’re Canadian, check out the Road Network File, “a digital representation of Canada’s national road network, containing information such as street name, type, direction and address ranges” from the National Geographic Database.]

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If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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