What makes bittorrents execellent?

What makes BitTorrent so excellent, and what is it's purpose?

bittorrent is the ultimate tool for 0-7 day hot software like Linux ISO images, movies, tv-series, music and anything else which can be stored digitally for that matter.

Each .torrent file has a hard-coded tracker address all the clients connects to upon starting the transfer. Each client constantly reports back to the tracker all the chunks it has received and therefore can send others. A torrent becomes unusable if the tracker stops responding, and they usually do. A torrent also turns to wasted space when there are no users with 100% of the file (called seeders) left.

Bittorrent clients will only give you a good download speed if the other people who are downloading it give you a good upload speed. This can make some torrents slow, so please keep your bittorrent client running with the torrent open for 24 hours or as long as possible after you have finished downloading yourself.

It is very easy to find torrents for tv-series, movies and other fun on the Internet using search engines. You can search Google by searching for keyword filetype:torrent. USENet is a good place to get torrents for misc things. epguides is a good place to find tv-shows release dates.

P2P Traffic to Grow Almost 400% over the Next 5 Years, as Legitimate P2P Applications Become a Meaningful Segment

Team Member - J. Gorman - According to a story via Google news P2P network is expected to as stated in the title, grow 400%. Primarily right now P2P networking is largely used to share music, but the article states there has been a huge increase in video content being shared. Additionally, the use of legal P2P content will increase as content providers see the potential to share their content in a more cost-effective way. With legitimate P2P networking expected to grow 10x faster than illegal P2P sharing, would you pay for this type of service if it were available?

Personally, I think if I'm going to be uploading content continuously, Comcast and other ISPs will need to increase their upload caps for households. Right now, depending on the amount of content you would share legally or illegally you as a user could reach your cap very quickly. Additionally, in the basic sense of P2P networking you're basically paying your ISP so that your household can act as a mini-server for sharing content.

In current configurations for ISPs their service is based on a bandwidth cap, which means you're basically allotted a specific amount of bandwidth. However, if you're continually downloading movies you're going to have an increased load on your bandwidth and basically eating up all of it so that your neighbors will have a slower connection. If everyone started using P2P model for downloading and sharing content, which more than likely would be a continuous download/upload scheme, all users would see a significant decrease in speed. In my opinion, ISPs will need to increase bandwidth in order to support the P2P model, otherwise our 8 meg Comcast connection will start running like a 56k connection from the late 90s.

Link to original article

Downloading torrents and sharing files

Team Member - Kevin Jung

Users browse the web to find a torrent of interest, download it, and open it with a BitTorrent client. The client connects to the tracker(s) specified in the torrent file, from which it receives a list of peers currently transferring pieces of the file(s) specified in the torrent. The client connects to those peers to obtain the various pieces. Such a group of peers connected to each other to share a torrent is called a swarm. If the swarm contains only the initial seeder, the client connects directly to it and begins to request pieces. As peers enter the swarm, they begin to trade pieces with one another, instead of downloading directly from the seeder.

Clients incorporate mechanisms to optimize their download and upload rates; for example they download pieces in a random order to increase the opportunity to exchange data, which is only possible if two peers have different pieces of the file.

The effectiveness of this data exchange depends largely on the policies that clients use to determine to whom to send data. Clients may prefer to send data to peers who send data back to them (a tit for tat scheme), which encourages fair trading. But strict policies often result in suboptimal situations, such as when newly joined peers are unable to receive any data because they don't have any pieces yet to trade themselves or when two peers with a good connection between them do not exchange data simply because neither of them wants to take the initiative. To counter these effects, the official BitTorrent client program uses a mechanism called “optimistic unchoking,” where the client reserves a portion of its available bandwidth for sending pieces to random peers (not necessarily known-good partners, so called preferred peers), in hopes of discovering even better partners and to ensure that newcomers get a chance to join the swarm.

Were you waiting for the release of the new AC/DC album? Why?

Team Member - Bill Frost

Over the weekend, I saw a commerical for the forthcoming AC/DC album "Black Ice". The new album was released in Wal-Mart stores today. Whereas I don't claim to be a huge AC/DC fan, there are definitely songs that I enjoy listening to. "Thunderstruck" is by far my favorite. There are however thousands, probably millions, of fans that anxiously waited for October 20th to arrive. Too bad there were already over 400,000 AC/DC fans listening to a digitized version of "Black Ice".

Reportedly on October 7th, the album was leaked to the popular website BitTorrent and the downloading began. There had been a rumor that Sony had sent false information and fake downloads out to popular BitTorrent sites in an effort to frustrate pirates. There has been no conclusive evidence to this story and it appears the record label is the one frustrated by the "success" of the number of downloads.

Statistics from Mininova, a popular download site, showed four of the top five downloads to be by AC/DC. Although the band as refused to release their music through the Internet, others have been doing so and the results speak for themselves. While the sale of most recording artists music has been declining for the past five years, AC/DC has had remarkable success. Without the release of a new album, AC/DC's physical record sales reached 1.3 million in 2007 in the US alone. Now consider that nearly a third of those total sales were accounted for in just twelve days with the downloading of "Black Ice."

Read the story in it's entirity here.

New Find

Team Member - Mitchell Holloway

Came across this site today. It is basically a site that you can use to find any files. All you do is type in what you are looking for, just like Google, and away you go. A link list generates telling you what sites your inquiry is on. Just wanted to share with the torrent world!

Stanford University bit torrent's

Team Member - Michael Graulich

I read an article on how Stanford University is basically putting a bunch of their online courses up as torrents for downloads so people can learn more about technology that is out there. They have up online currently the 10 most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses.

Here's the url on this story
http://torrentfreak.com/stanford-university-embraces-bittorrent-081018/

Torrents go legal!

Team Member - Kevin Jung

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UICHfudGWYg&feature=related

Here is a little three minute video of making torrents actually legal for users. Some of the positives and negatives of making it legal in the U.S. Hope you enjoy.