BitTorrent Turns 10 203
ktetch-pirate writes "On this day, 10 years ago, Bram Cohen released the first bittorrent client to the public. Most P2P protocols have had a rapid rise and then a drop-off as the subsequent 'best thing' has come out, but after 10 years, nothing has bested bittorrent, and it still remains king of the P2P castle. Just when will it be replaced?"
Pretty much never? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Just when will it be replaced?"
Never? Going distributed is THE way of stopping people from shutting you down. So far only the tracker is fixed (and there are stuff in place to discover clients by seeing the others who you're connected to). So I'd say this is here to stay.
Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Interesting)
But ironically, what BitTorrent got right (and it pains me to admit this, because I'm a big fan of pure P2P solutions) was centralising the hard parts - search and peer location - and distributing the easy part - content distribution.
Another area where BitTorrent struck the right balance between pure P2P and pure centralisation was in content curation. Gnutella made it incredibly easy to share a file, but the result was a ton of low-quality, badly-labelled, nearly-identical files. BitTorrent made it just hard enough that only a few, relatively dedicated people would create torrents, and everyone else would just redistribute them. I don't think that was a conscious design decision, but it happened to hit the sweet spot.
Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the legal balance is just as important. The fact that "BitTorrent" isn't one service or one network but that each site offer their files individually and the Ubuntu torrent has nothing to do with those on The Pirate Bay. That detached the technology and those building the tools from the shadier uses of it. Oh, they've rattled their sables a bit but never really had an legal grounds to shut BitTorrent itself down, unlike Napster, Grokster, Limewire and so many others.
And despite the best efforts to shut down torrent sites, many of them still operate very much in the open. The fact that The Pirate Bay has been all over the media and is in the top 100 most popular sites on the web means they've walked a very fine line and come down on the right side - at least for now. You didn't have to look that very hard in the past either to find it, but it was not that obvious to everyone and their dog.
I think something like TPB model is there to stay, if necessary they'll just move it to be a TOR onion site, still centralized but anonymous. Not the content itself as that'd be sloooow, just the site itself. For the moment that is simply not necessary, but there's now other ways should the public torrent sites lose while still keeping the things that made it a success.
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Sort of. Bittorrent doesn't actually address search at all. Peer identification was centralized initially, which is incredibly efficient. Modern clients use out-of-band methods like DHT and PEX to either get additional clients (same torrent, but on a tracker not listed in the file you have) or to get clients when all available trackers are down (or not listing that torrent). They're much less efficient than a tracker.
But yeah, search isn't part of BitTorrent at all. It works well now that you can sort of ru
Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Insightful)
We're in the silver age of music piracy. The golden age was Napster: everyone had their mp3's in folders instead of managed by applications like iTunes and everything was shared by everyone by default. You could find the most obscure songs. To me it was like a preview of what the internet always promised: a huge library where you could access any data (in this case music) that was out there. A little glimpse of the internet's true potential.
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The way things are with iTunes and iOS, along with iCloud coming up, seems more like the silver age to me. Golden would be if Apple continued successfully while also becoming more open source/IP-free or Linux made a finished product as good as Apple. Napster was the bronze age.
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Golden would be if Apple continued successfully while also becoming more open source/IP-free
Never going to happen. Apple is all about control. Tight control over what you can do, tight control over what you can use with their items.
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Except for the part where they fought hard to get rid of DRM, so that you could use the music you bought from them more freely.
You're letting internet fanboyism do your thinking for you.
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Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays there is such thing as "trackerless torrents". No idea how it works, but it works. A while ago I tried to download some torrent, but the single listed tracker in the .torrent was down. Nevertheless soon the download started, like magic :-) And once one peer was found, many more followed quickly thanks to peer exchange.
BT has in a way been replaced several times already. The protocol from 10 years ago has evolved a lot (will the original BT client even be able to handle to current torrents?), with additions like peer exchange, DHT, magnet links and encryption. The idea behind BT is brilliant and simple, and as such will always live on. It solved most if not all problems from the original P2P protocols: the P2P issue itself (too many downloaders on a single peer), disappearing peers (now you have more than one - download will continue from other peers), and overall download speed. The protocol was found to have some problems itself, most notably the centralised tracker, which is also solved now. The problems that remain are the finding of content, for that there is still no solution to the current centralised databases (aka "torrent sites"), and longevity of the content: as soon as the last seeder stops seeding, the file is lost from the network.
And on top of it, it's not owned by a single for-profit organisation like Napster or LimeWire. When that company goes out of business, the protocol is out, and something new is needed. BT will live long I think. It's an open and free protocol, allowing for it to evolve and have people add features to it. There is no "single point of failure" - by design.
Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Informative)
Nowadays there is such thing as "trackerless torrents". No idea how it works, but it works.
It uses a technique known as a Kademlia Distributed Hash Table [wikipedia.org] (DHT). It's a rather tricky algorithm, which turns out to work beautifully for this particular application.
--jch
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It's not really all that tricky. Instead of a hash, let's just say we assign it a date like April 3rd. You know some peers by birthday, and each peer pays extra attention to people with a birthday like their own. So you just ask the closest you know, they'll know someone closer and so your search is passed until it finds people in the right month, week and finally day. You could easily simulate this by placing people in a big circle by birthday, each get a few long connections and many short connections. Th
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F[ine] magnet links, how do they work?
The magnet link contains a hash of the .torrent file, which happens to be the key to search for in the DHT (it's in the btid field of the magnet link). The local peer consults the DHT, and finds some peers that participate in the desired swarm; it then downloads the .torrent file from those peers. After checking that the torrent matches the expected hash, the local peer just does normal trackerless operation.
-- jch
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The problems that remain are the finding of content, for that there is still no solution to the current centralised databases (aka "torrent sites")
That works beautifully with Kad for ed2k so I've always wondered why nobody has implemented that on top of the DHT in Bittorrent.
and longevity of the content: as soon as the last seeder stops seeding, the file is lost from the network.
Well every block of the file has to be on a hard drive *somewhere*. If people don't keep it around then the bits are gone.
I like Freenet's approach: Every user donates a chunk of disk (like 2GB) for anonymous encrypted storage.
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if it takes the cops 3-24 months to crack a freenet packet, lacking the key you have plausible deniability about the contents of the packet. the crimelab basically made your case for you.
now if you want to avoid the tedious process of getting dragged through court, I would recommend against using freenet or any other anonymous network or even any p2p network.
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The problems that remain are the finding of content, for that there is still no solution to the current centralised databases (aka "torrent sites"), and longevity of the content: as soon as the last seeder stops seeding, the file is lost from the network.
I don't see these as problems. The torrent sites can be made anonymous, and have multiple mirrors. If an entire organization is somehow taken down, a new one will pop up very quickly. The fact that you can't search a tracker or a peer for content is a good thing. And, as to longevity, it means that as long as content is popular, there will be a seeder. It's reasonably safe to say, with the popularity of BitTorrent itself, that if a seed doesn't exist, the content just isn't popular.
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And, as to longevity, it means that as long as content is popular, there will be a seeder.
This is why I still sometimes use eMule to download some unpopular TV show or song. It may take a while, but it usually can be downloaded, since with eMule you share all your downloaded files by default, while you have to specifically keep the torrent seeding, even though you do not move or delete the file itself.
Even the tracker isn't centralized. (Score:2)
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That was my first thought. Editors, can you please learn some basic editing skillz and do you fucking jobs? More often than not the submissions are laden with weasel worlds or flat out misleading summaries. Corrections are rare. I know it requires a tiny bit more effort to check the story but, well, that is what you are being paid for.
The only exception seems to be Taco who usually adds a little bit of balancing explanatory text and maybe straightens out the summary. Learn from him.
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Shocking, Comcast follow the law and serve the notices. They should be on the side of the little guy who just needs to watch Game of Thrones for free or he might be bored! The ignominy!
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Re:Pretty much never? (Score:5, Insightful)
Combining multicast support which is certainly be bettter and more widely supported than it's today is. The reason is looming and it's HD-IPTV. Unicast HD-IPTV is a bandwith consumptive hog and the only practical way is to use multicast for it. That forces many organisations which did not previously bother configuring it reconsider and this will open doors to other applications using it too.
I strongly doubt that. Consider that AT&T uses multicast for their U-Verse service. The problem is that they provide no way to create your own multicast streams. They have no interest in allowing other applications to use it. Why would they? The multicast gives their service a serious cost advantage compared to other live streaming services. Because it is generally viewed as a separate TV service, most proposed net-neutrality regulations would not require them to open it up.
To the best of my knowledge there is no real standards for negotiating multi-cast between autonomous systems. Even if there were, the fact that the packets can multiply inside a network (when they reach a router with subscribers on more than one of the connected (sub)networks) makes setting up peering agreements difficult.
Transit agreements between ISPs generally assume that one packet sent in results in one packet leaving the network, or being delivered to a machine inside the network. With multicast between distinct autonomous systems, that one packet in could result in 100 packets being delivered to in network machines, and potentially one packet to each connected network. How should that be counted for billing?
If each resulting packet is counted, that would require network changes to track how many in-network machines it was delivered to. If it were counted as just the one packet for this network, plus one more packet for each connected peer or transit provider it reached, the required changes would be much smaller.
However in either case that would be really unfair to the sender of the packet, who has no way of knowing how many times an individual packet would be counted. It would also be rough on intermediate networks who may try to track usage and switch packets between multiple transit providers such as to minimize costs. They would only know that they sent one packet of some specific size to a given transit provider who may count it as many more packets.
The whole thing is very awkward. After all despite those issues, ISPs could benefit from the same number of users with the same style of usage resulting in many fewer total packets needing to be sent through the oversubscribed links from the core networks to last mile.
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The interconnect providers generally charge for a given bandwidth rather than for the amount of data sent. Many ISPs also buy bandwidth that way now because that is the way telcos like to charge for ADSL. BT sells 144Mb pipes and you can stick as many customers as you like on there. Both ends are rate limited so if your multicast packet generated 100 packets going out of the network then it would also use 100x the bandwidth from your allowance.
That is why ISPs will never allow it. When they have 50:1 or wor
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Or you can use TOR. The problem is bandwidth. For now, individual users are rarely prosecuted, so going to an anonymous network would only reduce the bandwidth, since now peers will also be used as relays. Since they are also downloading/seeding the same file, you can just ask them to send you whatever they have (and not fetch a piece they are not interested in to just send it to you) to have full speed but you can do that now, without any modification to the BitTorrent protocol.
Basically, connect to the tr
When... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sneakernet (Score:3)
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sneakernet
I still want to see some kind of interface between mass storage devices, wireless and content, enabling WLAN content parties. You rock up, your device sees everyone else at the event and starts sharing, perhaps intelligently based on your preferences, Maybe smartphones hold the answer to this, but they may not offer lots of storage. However this could work on a small scale. You could just turn up to the pub and your device would sort out the rest. It could share your own content and look after the security.
Wi-Fi NAS (Score:2)
I still want to see some kind of interface between mass storage devices, wireless and content
I believe it's called a NAS [wikipedia.org] (not necessarily that Nas [wikipedia.org]). Wi-Fi NAS exists [linuxfordevices.com].
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While the use case is comparatively rare, bittorrent clients will happily enough interact with other nodes on the same LAN. With DHT, you wouldn't even need a tracker(though it wouldn't be rocket surgery to configure the router serving the LAN to have a little captive portal page where people on the LAN could upload
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With DHT, you wouldn't even need a tracker
Actually, you don't even need the DHT. Most BitTorrent clients implement "local network discovery", a protocol extension that allows them to automatically and quickly discover peers participating in the same swarm on the local LAN segment. It's usually disabled by default, for obvious privacy reasons, so you'll want to hunt for the features in your preferences dialog.
--jch
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It's not normal to pay expensive services and that in more than a decade no upgrade has been done to their infrastructures
Are there really non-dialup ISPs that are as slow in 2011 as they were in 2001? Cox cable sure is faster than it was 10 years ago...
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It will be replaced when our ISP monopolies makes it so difficult to use bittorrent, another way must be created. Destruction brings creation.
We're getting there very quickly. ISP data caps will greatly degenerate the usefulness of Bittorrent for many, many people.
And will be elimiated (Score:2)
When our ISPs charge per byte transferred at a totally oppressive rate. Who is going to give up their bandwidth 'just to help out'?
When I2P was created (Score:2)
one of the first apps for it was i2psnark, a built-in bittorrent client.
So, far from being replaced, bittorrent seems to be moving and thriving in at least one vehicle that can skirt ISP obstruction.
File size range (Score:2)
Re:File size range (Score:4, Informative)
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Unless the files are zipped into an archive, a lot of clients will let you choose which particular files you download from the torrent and skip all of the other ones.
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By the way, when you're starting to download a torrent that consists many files, you can select only the ones you want. You don't have to download the big stuff if you don't want to.
There's nothing in Bittorrent that discriminates against small files.
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However, users who don't know how it works will often stuff all those files into a an archive before creating a torrent (usually something stupid like .rar), which firstly is useless as the files are already in compressed formats, and secondly removes any control over file selection.
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Has BitTorrent since become better at transferring small files, or is it still suited only for large transfers?
Whatever issue you're having, I'm not seeing it [btjunkie.org].
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BitTorrent is reasonably good at small files. Other people seem to be claiming that it's *as good*, but that's not quite true. Clients can be reluctant to try to download the same piece multiple times, so any torrent with a small number of pieces gets lower performance than one with a higher number of pieces. (That is, if the number of pieces is substantially below the number of peers you could be downloading from simultaneously, you can see a performance hit.) Also, the whole web browser -> download .to
Re:File size range (Score:4, Insightful)
once you've decided to download the torrent, why do you just want this one single instead of the entire discography in flac and mp3?
Because I want to be able to download other things during the same month without having to pay prohibitive overages.
Share ratio requirements (Score:4, Insightful)
BitTorrent might not be replaced until tracker operators learn what an average is. A lot of private trackers require their users to keep their share ratios at or near 100%. But it's mathematically impossible for everybody to have a share ratio greater than 100%. Share ratio is upload divided by download, but across a whole swarm, the sum of upload will equal the sum of download, making the average share ratio 100%. One can't seed unless there's a downloader on the same swarm. So what are people who get in on the tail end of a swarm, where no downloader shows up for days at a time, supposed to do to keep their share ratios up to the tracker's standard?
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Most trackers only require a ratio of 0.8 or 0.7 for that reason.
However I've never had a problem seeding myself into the positive.
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However I've never had a problem seeding myself into the positive.
If you are among the last to download a given file, how many weeks does it typically take you to seed to 1.0?
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Tracker Seeding ratio is usually measured as a total across all files, not individual files. Trying to get 1.0 on all files is a bit silly.
However most files I download reach 1.5 within the hour.
An overseeded first file (Score:2)
Tracker Seeding ratio is usually measured as a total across all files, not individual files.
True, but if the first file you download at a given tracker is overseeded, then your total across all files will stay low as most downloaders will get their blocks from someone else.
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However most files I download reach 1.5 within the hour.
Ah, you're one of those with massive upload bandwidth who keeps his ratio huge and makes it impossible for normal people to seed.
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Yeah, sometimes if I'm amongst the last to download a big torrent, I don't even bother to seed it because I'm not really needed - I'd rather my uploading be focused on the rare/unpopular stuff and/or the torrents I make.
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Sites with ratios generally have some sort of stimulus program that keeps the credits plentiful. Underground-Gamer for instance has golden torrent weekends, where the most desirable torrents on the site are free leech and 2x upload credit for seeders.
Re:Share ratio requirements (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time. In my experience, the number of torrents you can comfortably seed greater than 1 dwarfs those that you can't. While I have found torrents on private trackers to be typically very well seeded, often to the point of saturation, I've never had a problem maintaining a positive ratio and I usually don't seed more than a day or two.
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The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time.
You are failing at the exact math that you are replying to. For every person greater than 1.00, there is at least one person less than 1.00. This makes it impossible for most users to be over 1.00 most of the time.
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No there's not. For instance you could have four users with 1.2, 1.2, 1.2 and 0.4. In this case the majority has above 1.0.
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The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time.
You are failing at the exact math that you are replying to. For every person greater than 1.00, there is at least one person less than 1.00. This makes it impossible for most users to be over 1.00 most of the time.
No offense meant, but it seems you also fail at math. In the limit you just need one leecher downloading huge amounts of content from all other users, to keep them all at arbitrarily high share ratios.
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In the limit you just need one leecher downloading huge amounts of content from all other users
And in the limit, the leecher gets b&.
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They're Registration Required trackers, or Reg-wall trackers.
I was referring more to invite-wall trackers.
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Actually for a single torrent, the ideal ending is one peer with infinite ratio (the original seeder, since he does not download anything), two peers with 0.5 ratio and the rest with 1.
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A lot of RR trackers are scene based.
Which is another part of the problem. I'd even be willing to make my own original works available for upload, but a lot of the ratio trackers don't want them because "the scene" only cares about ten major distributors.
If it's not on NFOrce then forget it (Score:2)
You are forgetting that there is one surefire way to boost your ratio: upload new torrents to the site.
And get banned from the tracker because the torrents are something other than warez-scene releases. Why does Google have over 4,000 results for "if it's not on NFOrce then forget it" [google.com]?
Another way is to look up the most popular torrents and begin seeding those. This is bit trickier as you need to download the file(s) first, which in turn may eat your ratio.
Not to mention the ISP's cap.
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Depends on the tracker rules. For example, the tracker may require upload speed at least 10 or 100 mbps to get upload rights. If you don't have it, you won't be able to upload.
Could be replaced by anonymous network (Score:3)
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Don't all of those use secret protocols and non-free software? That means that there is only ever going to be the one client, which probably would hamper popularity quite a bit. Not to mention that they won't be used by anyone who cares about free software.
In the free world there's Freenet and GNUnet, which are both theoretically very sexy but still very slow. Probably very, very hard to track though.
10 years & still only 1 broswer supports it, O (Score:3)
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Congrats to the Opera fans, but for the rest of us the "browser that does everything approach" died with Netscape Communicator almost 10 years ago.
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Congrats to the Opera fans, but for the rest of us the "browser that does everything approach" died with Netscape Communicator almost 10 years ago.
How many megabytes smaller is the Opera download than Firefox download again ;)
FF Win32 - 13.0mb
Opera Win32 - 9.8mb
Even if I just want to use it as "only a browser" I guess it's still smaller! Interesting. Oh yeah, and on topic it downloads torrents too!
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And how many addons/extensions are you using in Firefox?
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I see your point, but in my case I'm using Chrome with AdBlock.
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I see your point, but in my case I'm using Chrome with AdBlock.
Chrome installer is like 24+ MB
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Why would you want to "download" a file using FTP in a 'Browser", that's what an FTP client is for.
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I think a lot of legit adoption (ie BitTorrent replacing things like RapidShare for everyday quick uploads) has to do with learning how to seed a torrent the first time, learning to use a tracker, etc.
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Maybe because the GNU/Linux distributions all include a simple client already? Nobody cares about Microsoft Windows users.
You miss the point. Your GNU/Linux distro has an FTP client built in too. Evertimey a DL link happens to start with ftp: do want to have a separate client open or do you want your browser to just DL the file? I bet 99% of the time when you DL something you don't even know if the DL link you click was http or ftp. Nor should you care. The browser takes care of it for you.
This is similar to how Opera handles torrents. For a quick DL you can just click it like I would any other DL and it's in my downl
The following hand gesture is dedicated to Cox... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not too pleased with Cox's 200GB cap that amounts to only a few percent of what my 15mbps down/2mbps up is theoretically capable of.
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I'm not too pleased with Cox's 200GB cap
Cox has a cap? Since when? (I recently d/l'ed much more than 200GB in a month and they didn't slow me down or charge me extra.)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Here in Norway the average is now 7.4 Mbps and the mean 5.3 Mbps. About 80% of all households have broadband, yet we are less densely populated than the US (12 vs 31 people/km^2) and the average Norwegian lives in a town of less than 20,000 people. Yet we're still envious of Sweden and Denmark. Last figure is 14% of the population on fiber, but 20-25 Mbps lines are generally available on both cable and DSL. Most new installations are fiber though, which usually means symmetric speed... P2P when everyone is
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With http download services such as megaupload, filesonic etc... I regularly max out my 25Mbps connection while downloading
Are you are getting 25Mbps download from those services as a free user or as a paid user?
In my experience it's that plus slow seeders. (Score:2)
There is sometimes a "keepalive" seeder for a torrent, but that seeder won't give more than a few K per second. I guess it's better than nothing, but it's really frustrating.
All in all, most things work quite well. Especially anything that is moderately popular.
Don't expect you'll be able to download everything at max speed though. Sometimes there just aren't enough other people offering it.
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Are you sure you're not confusing kb/s with kB/s? A speed of 3Mb/s will result in downloads of around 250-350 kB/s. That's because your ISP will rate your connection speed in megaBITs per second. Your browser and BT client will tell you speed in kiloBYTES (or megabytes) per second. 8 bits = 1 byte. Furthermore, your connection speed will reflect the total number of bits transferred, including protocol overhead, whereas your browser and BT client will only tell you about throughput (the bytes that were downl
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Prince of Darkness: "So what do you want in return for your soul?"
Cohen:"An efficient peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that can't be killed by RIAA/MPAA. Oh wait, eternal youth too."
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Erh... the conditions you describe are met. I have virtually endless bandwidth and big content is selling its content online for less than a buck.
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A buck per track...?
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>But "big content" (oh, populism... you are endlessly entertainingly retarded) does allow people to download things legally, although you have to pay.
Where do I send my money to be able to legally download the just-released Lord of the Rings extended editions in full Blu-Ray quality (including audio and all extras), and play it on whatever device I want?
Seriously, if I could do that, I would. But, "big content" won't let their content out in the format that end users want, and that really is one of the largest reasons why there are "pirates". I "pirate" Blu-Ray disks every week, because there is no 100% legal way for me to copy the content to my hard d
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Tor network
Don't they store anonymous other users' data in encrypted format on your hard drive?
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It was mentioned in TFA: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/02/03/20/0143248/Finally-Real-P2P-With-Brains [slashdot.org]