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| No. BitTorrent has a TON of legitimate uses . . . by Senor Barborito 05/19/2003, 12:34am PDT | ||||
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| What it does is turn every computer downloading a file into a mirror for that file as the download is ongoing - the more people downloading a file, the faster your download speed. However, BitTorrent also expects you to act as a mirror. You upload the file as you download.
An example of when this is useful is when Slashdot ran a story on one of the Animatrix shorts - they linked to a .torrent file for TheSecondRenaissancePart2.mpg and the end result was that thematrix.com lost precious little bandwidth to what would have otherwise been a lethal slashdotting of epic proportions. Everybody involved got the file more quickly than they otherwise would have. Obviously, the 0-day ISO warez community has taken to BitTorrent like a junkie to a new SuperHeroin, so it is used in warez groups but it isn't a P2P network over which people trade files or anything like that. You would have to use some other P2P network (such as the WWW) to host .torrent files first. All BitTorrent does is near-transparently distributes the burden of bandwidth usage. The only real problem with BitTorrent is the upload requirement killed download speed for people with asynchronous lines (a couple of people here complained about it a while back) and now, OpenBSD has a solution for them in the shape of PF. All the source code for it is free as in beer, too (as opposed to the GPL and most of Linux's 'free as in speech'). Turns out it's a pretty damn good beer. --SB |
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