Comments on: Bittorrent: Solitary. Fashionable. Ethereal.

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?

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Sun, 06 May 2007 09:11:01 +0000

I have to disagree right back. In the case you give, mirrors slowly die. In the case of bittorrent, they quickly, quickly die. I have no doubt there’s the issue of “webrot” across all collections/availability of data, just like there has been with things like mailing addresses and store locations; it’s just that now it’s been accelerated to the point that mere weeks can mean the end of a torrent, and in most cases, since there’s no “main” server, it’s even more flaky.

By: James

James — Sun, 06 May 2007 09:08:23 +0000

I have to disagree – blaming bittorrent for disappearing content makes no more sense than blaming HTTP for disappearing content. Take linux.conf.au 2003 – an archive of the website is at http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2003/ – now try downloading the conference CD .iso, or viewing people’s photos of the event (linked halfway down the page). Most of the links don’t work any more, and it’s only because there’s 7 mirrors that you’ve got half a chance of finding one that still works.

Cool URIs don’t change – but part of not changing is not disappearing. This is an eternal burden that even the best of us have trouble fulfilling, let alone your average joe who has put up his conference photos.

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:19:15 +0000

The problem with Azureus is that it is fantastically resource intensive. Whatever uses it ends up becoming an ‘Azureus Machine’. I use an older client of utorrent before it was bought out and became suspect.

By: Will

Will — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:27:59 +0000

For what it’s worth, Azureus is also cross platform (SWT Java application). It makes my Mac run hot, but it’s got plugins enough to block out the evil ip’s of he RIAA or whomever so you don’t get corrupted sectors. And you can choose which files you want to download within the torrent, so you can easily pick and choose rather than downloading and deleting.