Comments on: Bittorrent: Solitary. Fashionable. Ethereal.

By: deepgeek

deepgeek — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:44:26 +0000

Just wanted to mention that my favorite CLI download manger is Aria2. It has an ability to download from both http and torrent in the fastest way possible, then seed if desired.

CLI rocks…
—
DG

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 02:13:26 +0000

> As an example, the 2002 Codecon put up their entire
> mp3 collection on bittorrent, to show off the technology…
> and now you can’t get it! The tracker is long gone,
> the seeds long gone. The only place you can get them
> is from me:
>
> http://audio.textfiles.com/cons/codecon2002/
>
> So if someone wants the historically interesting first
> introduction of bittorrent, you have to go to one of
> my websites.

…which is 404ed, ironically enough.

By: ewen chia

ewen chia — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:05:46 +0000

The problem with Azureus is that it is fantastically resource intensive.

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:05:17 +0000

I think we’re mostly disagreeing over the wrong bit. What I’m arguing about is that people are using bittorrent as a way to “archive” and make available stuff for general release, and that the lifespan is very, very short. You say it was “designed to deal with releases”, but it’s being used in all other manner of long-term stuff and then failing. Additionally, it is a galactic pain in the ass to keep running. That’s all I’m saying here. The fact that I have the only copy of the bittorrent announcement online testifies to this side of things.

I don’t think Bram Cohen thought of Bittorrent’s conceptual place within Internet transfers beyond it being a way of having load-sharing abilities that standard download mechanisms don’t have. That said, it was rampant, intense piracy that spread its popularity, not it’s inherent design.

That’s all!

By: James

James — Sun, 06 May 2007 15:36:54 +0000

Now I’m wondering what we’re disagreeing about. To some extent it’s NOTABUG, since it was designed to deal with releases, not be a file-sharing “network” as such. If you want a movie from last decade, use a more traditional P2P network like eMule where you can see what people actually have on their hard drives.

Maybe what I’m saying is that a torrent is not data, it’s a catalogue of data at a certain point in time, ie metadata. And all data is subject to entropy – it gets moved around, compressed, copied, lost and so on. But the metadata in the torrent doesn’t get updated to handle this, and there’s no tool to say “I have this torrent, and this drive full of files – where are the files that go in this torrent so I can seed it?”. If the source torrent of a file was stored in the file itself, then you could reorganise your files to your heart’s content, and just point your torrent app and it would automagically reconstitute the torrent.

Ah, here we go – “The truth is in the file” http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/20/whos-got-the-tag-database-truth-versus-file-truth-part-3/
and http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/14/truth-files-microformats-and-xmp/

PS: Freenet 0.5 is going to die at some point – are you archiving any of the freesites on it?