Posted on 07/14/2009 6:54:36 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
These days, Fung is still in Richmond and still fascinated by peer-to-peer technology. The record industry is still in a panic. But other things are different. The movie and television industries, for instance, have joined the music business in fear of wanton file sharing. And Fung is no longer watching from the sidelines. He's jumped into the fray and in the eyes of the entertainment industry has become one of its biggest problems -- a threat to be crushed.....
Created by a Seattle programmer named Bram Cohen in 2002, BitTorrent was an ingenious piece of peer-to-peer software. Where its predecessors had focused on sharing files between two computers at a time, BitTorrent allowed a user to simultaneously download a file in chunks from dozens or hundreds - even thousands - of other computers that had the target file available for sharing. All a user had to do was download a tiny file, called a "torrent," that told his or her computer where target files could be found on the Internet and drop it into an easy-to-use piece of software. Within seconds, the user would be quickly and efficiently downloading files measured in the hundreds of megabytes, be they movies, album collections or software.
After suffering accusations of piracy himself, Cohen formed a company with professional management to promote the use of his software for legitimate business purposes. In his wake, though, came a host of other players operating in the grey area of copyright law. Some were software developers who created their own versions of Cohen's original software. Others created websites that served as search engines to help users locate torrent files online and download them to their own computers....
(Excerpt) Read more at financialpost.com ...
My primary use for bittorrent is to download software. It is slower than a regular ftp/scp download, but is much more stable to suspend and resume. I’ll fire up bittorrent to download the latest Fedora overnight. If it’s not complete by the morning, I shut it down until I’m not using my computer again.
Yeah—that’s what I use BT for as well. Though usually, I can find a torrent that will DL it in only a couple of hours.
You can find torrents using any search engine. A Google search for xyz torrent might route you to isohunt.com, but it still finds the torrent you're looking for and directs you to it, albeit as a third party.
Legal actions based on the reasoning that something can be misused for illegal activities really pushes the envelope for me. That kind of thinking is the rationale behind suing gun manufacturers and could be used as a hammer against thousands of legitimate companies.
Bump for future reference.
You can find almost anything via Bit Torrent except documentation of Obama’s U.S. birth certificate.
Ditto here. The last Debian 5 ISOs I downloaded were via BT.
Fung makes an excellent point. The MPAA is fighting technology rather than developing a new copyright paradigm. Much like the buggy whip industry had to adjust after the model-T the industry has to change and perhaps re-invent itself. The industry thugs of the MPAA and ASCAP, BMI can continue being bullies or re-think how to protect intellectual property in the age of the internet. But being as they are lawyers, I expect a cap and trade of bits on on the internet rather than any real thought on the matter.
Downloaded and tried a lot of the various distros with
BT.Debian is the only one I never could get wireless to
work,great on Ethernet tho.
Really like this SUSE 11.1 linux
Already attempted with blank media.
The fastest download I’ve ever had was BitTorrent to get a copy of Ubuntu Linux. There were thousands of seeds, I was connected to several dozen, and it was coming down at over 600 KB/s. Given the speed of my cable, around five megabits, I think I saturated my line.
Now if only MSDN would use BitTorrent instead of their crappy downloader I’d be really happy.
VMWare would do well to host a tracker for all of the virtual appliances, too.
Think of it this way: People were sharing software a few decades ago too, only they used the postal system. “Mail me a tape/disk” was a very common saying. Mailing tapes back and forth is how Unix grew up.
BitTorrent is just much more efficient, and a lot less costly for the one distributing the data.
I've wondered for some time why they don't do this.
Because users are typically in the business world, and they wouldn't be seeding things on bittorrent.
That's probably true, but I would imagine that a lot of folks looking at these appliances are folk like myself who like to test things out at home and such.
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