The ISPs problem is not only with BT, it’s with all p2p. 6-7 years ago, when the ISPs were engineering their broadband networks they made the assumption that the traffic was primarily going to be asymmetic. The believed that the average customer was going to download far more data than they uploaded. So they concentrated (if I might refernce my analogy from the post) on hiring more lunch ladies and buying bigger serving spoons. They assumed people would eventually be downloading movies, but they would be doing so from a gargantuan server array connected to a 10 ExaByte RAID Farm sitting on a big fat pipe tapped right into the backbone, not from each other.

P2P is an inherenetly symmetic activity. For every byte of data you download, someone has uploaded it, and likely through the little straw that’s given each broadband ‘residential’ customer. That byte is much more taxing than a byte coming from an uber-server that is one hop from the backbone.

The ISPs main problem is that p2p red-lines their backhauls that get the data from their customers to the internet. If you get in trouble with your ISP, it’s from how much you are uploading, not what and how much you are downloading. It’s estimated that approximately 70% of the upstream traffic now if p2p related.

As far as tracking goes, many clients are now implementing DHT (distributed hash table) which essentially implements a distributed tracker, thus there is not single place to go to snoop around and see who is snatching what. It’s far less susceptible to sabotage as it’s quickly apparent if a peer is trying to pawn off corrupt DHT data as the table is extremely redundant. Any attempts at deliberate corruption with find that peer being swiftly shunned by the swarm.

As for attempts at censoring software developers, that’s highly unlikely to happen as BT has numerous legitimate, non-infringing uses. So far Bram has not said one word regarding the ultimate uses of BT, but has said things like “It’s really dumb to use BT for downloading music and movies because it’s not anonymous.” That should keep him on the clean side of the Grokster decision.

–TurboGeek

The basic idea behind Bit Torrent has been used before. A simple example is downloading a web page with several pix, several graphics, regions of text, etc. Your machine will open several TCP connections to the server. Each connection requests one such element of the web page. The browser consumes to data provided, organizes it the way it should be in RAM and then renders the page on the screen. In most browsers, you see the rendering process as the alt-imgs and alt-txts get replaced with the actual content.

Download ‘Accelerators’ do much the same thing. They ask for a download as several ‘chunks’ on the theory that if one chunk has problems, the other chunks will keep downloading while the problem is negotiated between the two machines.

In the first case, we may be talking about perhaps 20-60 elements and in the second, perhaps up to 10.

People routinely use a BT client to snatch an entire DVD. If the torrent is using 512kB pieces, a full DVD is going to contain over 9000 pieces. (4.7GB / 512kB (0.5GB) = ~9400)

What makes BT so technically interesting is the scale and the issues that arise as one deals with larger numbers of pieces being distributed to a larger number of peers who have greatly varying bandwidths across the population that runs from a T3 to a 14.4 dial-up.

What makes BT so newsworthy is Hollywood’s manic-depressive reaction to it. (We hate it! We love it! We love hating it! We hate ourselves for loving it. We love how much we hate ourselves for loving to hate it so much….)

They know it’s a perfect way for them to distribute on the internet, but how to own and control such a thing they have yet to figure out. Unfortunately, those are the aspects of anything new that they consider first, resulting in much hang-wringing and hyperbolic hysteria. whatever was ‘new’ gets either lost in the distraction or mangled with clumsy attempts at ’securing content’

–TG.

The Other thing that makes this method secure is the addition of a program called PeerGuardian 2 This program blocks all the current Anti P2P companies IPs from interacting with your system for ANY reason. Thus even if they are port scanning you looking for files, they have nothing to capture as evidence. Currently there are 814,485,789 IPs blocked in this way. and more everyday.

Next generation Bittorrent clients are building this into their software and also building anti-fake torrent checking into their search tools. The only thing that could happen is the program developers themselves could be shut down, but that would do nothing to stop the existing millions using the system now on the open source versions.

Good job.