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Dec. 1st, 2009 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickLast night we had Learning for Better Piracy.
I do not have television (cable, satellite, or broadcast) in my house. However, I watch House, MD and Dexter religiously every week. The way that I do this is I download those shows from the internet to my computer. What I am doing is called piracy and it's illegal. It's been illegal the entire time I've been doing it. (It's also illegal to drive more than 55 mph on my way to work and I do that every day, too.) Anyway, it's not easy being a thief. Not only do I die all the time in that damn game, I have to keep up as technology marches ever onward or risk being unable to download stuff.
Bittorrent has been the internet technology for casual media piracy since around 2003. The great thing about bittorrent is that it did away with the One-to-Many model of downloading. One-to-Many was where ONE server handed out the same file to MANY downloaders. One-to-Many was bandwidth heavy for the distributor and beat the shit out of servers to boot, particularly when the file was something that everyone wanted. One-to-Many downloading was a strict Server-to-Client deal.
Bittorrent fixed many of the problems with traditional One-to-Many downloading, by letting some client machines with all the pieces of the file serve as SEEDS that handed out files to other client machines with no pieces of the file known as LEECHERS. The seeds and leechers were in a loose association known as a swarm, their communication assisted and facilitated by a clearinghouse server called a TRACKER. As pieces of the files got shared, previous pure-leechers (who had no pieces) turned into partial seeds as they shared the pieces that they had with other partial seeds. The tracker served as a communications hub for the members of the swarm. The aggregate bandwidth of the clients talking to each other in the swarm was much, much bigger than the available bandwidth of the sever to the clients and the result was that big files got spread around to clients faster and more easily than ever before. Bittorrent was a win and it changed things from One-to-Many to a more client-to-client operation, sort of a Many-to-Many but still with a centralized tracker.
Bittorrent is an aging protocol. Legal challenges have taken down some substantial trackers and torrent hosting sites. The problem with trackers is that they are easy to target. They're highly visible. They are semi-permanent. They have upstream bandwidth providers who can be leaned upon. There is an owner to go after. Also, removing a tracker makes it look like something is being done to solve the piracy thing. However, the media copyright holders make a move and the pirates make another move.
The Pirate Bay has stopped running their own tracker and has shifted to providing magnet links. (Their tracker has sucked since sometime this summer. Now they're just not putting it back online.) They still support the use of other trackers but are not providing their own anymore. Rumbles in the field suggest that they're angling for the permanent death of trackers for piracy in the coming months. The deal is that using the DHT (Distributed Hash Table), clients can find other clients and download shit from each other without a centralized tracker at all. Everybody's a seed, a leecher, a tracker. Magnet links remove the need for a centralized tracker and take away the easy target for the legal departments of media companies. Magnet links are way more Client-to-Client than traditional bittorrenting.
The only thing left for centralized sites to do is provide links to content and feedback on that content... so that people can find your stuff and know that it doesn't suck *before* they download it. Is it illegal to facilitate piracy? How much can you do before you are facilitating piracy and legally culpable? We'll see. Is it OK to say, "Hey, there's illegal stuff over THERE and it doesn't suck, actually is what it says it is and stuff." -- is that illegal? I guess the courts will have fun with that. In the meantime, magnet links.
I use Vuze but have to manually edit the link to remove all but the hex stuff in the link because support for TPB magnet links is kind of iffy in Vuze on 64bit Ubuntu. They'll probably fix this in the next revision, particularly if TPB continues to force the issue. I couldn't find anything else that worked -- Deluge (which I prefer) does not handle magnet links yet, utorrent wouldn't install in wine, and I want pointy-clicky and not cli so rtorrent is out. On the plus side, Vuze has really pretty graphics and lots and lots (and lots) of statistics. The statistically inclined will probably sport wood over all the statistics.
I do not have television (cable, satellite, or broadcast) in my house. However, I watch House, MD and Dexter religiously every week. The way that I do this is I download those shows from the internet to my computer. What I am doing is called piracy and it's illegal. It's been illegal the entire time I've been doing it. (It's also illegal to drive more than 55 mph on my way to work and I do that every day, too.) Anyway, it's not easy being a thief. Not only do I die all the time in that damn game, I have to keep up as technology marches ever onward or risk being unable to download stuff.
Bittorrent has been the internet technology for casual media piracy since around 2003. The great thing about bittorrent is that it did away with the One-to-Many model of downloading. One-to-Many was where ONE server handed out the same file to MANY downloaders. One-to-Many was bandwidth heavy for the distributor and beat the shit out of servers to boot, particularly when the file was something that everyone wanted. One-to-Many downloading was a strict Server-to-Client deal.
Bittorrent fixed many of the problems with traditional One-to-Many downloading, by letting some client machines with all the pieces of the file serve as SEEDS that handed out files to other client machines with no pieces of the file known as LEECHERS. The seeds and leechers were in a loose association known as a swarm, their communication assisted and facilitated by a clearinghouse server called a TRACKER. As pieces of the files got shared, previous pure-leechers (who had no pieces) turned into partial seeds as they shared the pieces that they had with other partial seeds. The tracker served as a communications hub for the members of the swarm. The aggregate bandwidth of the clients talking to each other in the swarm was much, much bigger than the available bandwidth of the sever to the clients and the result was that big files got spread around to clients faster and more easily than ever before. Bittorrent was a win and it changed things from One-to-Many to a more client-to-client operation, sort of a Many-to-Many but still with a centralized tracker.
Bittorrent is an aging protocol. Legal challenges have taken down some substantial trackers and torrent hosting sites. The problem with trackers is that they are easy to target. They're highly visible. They are semi-permanent. They have upstream bandwidth providers who can be leaned upon. There is an owner to go after. Also, removing a tracker makes it look like something is being done to solve the piracy thing. However, the media copyright holders make a move and the pirates make another move.
The Pirate Bay has stopped running their own tracker and has shifted to providing magnet links. (Their tracker has sucked since sometime this summer. Now they're just not putting it back online.) They still support the use of other trackers but are not providing their own anymore. Rumbles in the field suggest that they're angling for the permanent death of trackers for piracy in the coming months. The deal is that using the DHT (Distributed Hash Table), clients can find other clients and download shit from each other without a centralized tracker at all. Everybody's a seed, a leecher, a tracker. Magnet links remove the need for a centralized tracker and take away the easy target for the legal departments of media companies. Magnet links are way more Client-to-Client than traditional bittorrenting.
The only thing left for centralized sites to do is provide links to content and feedback on that content... so that people can find your stuff and know that it doesn't suck *before* they download it. Is it illegal to facilitate piracy? How much can you do before you are facilitating piracy and legally culpable? We'll see. Is it OK to say, "Hey, there's illegal stuff over THERE and it doesn't suck, actually is what it says it is and stuff." -- is that illegal? I guess the courts will have fun with that. In the meantime, magnet links.
I use Vuze but have to manually edit the link to remove all but the hex stuff in the link because support for TPB magnet links is kind of iffy in Vuze on 64bit Ubuntu. They'll probably fix this in the next revision, particularly if TPB continues to force the issue. I couldn't find anything else that worked -- Deluge (which I prefer) does not handle magnet links yet, utorrent wouldn't install in wine, and I want pointy-clicky and not cli so rtorrent is out. On the plus side, Vuze has really pretty graphics and lots and lots (and lots) of statistics. The statistically inclined will probably sport wood over all the statistics.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 01:03 pm (UTC)I guess my personal lesson here is "soaps aren't worth it".
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Date: 2009-12-01 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 04:45 pm (UTC)Wikipedia has some explanation of how it actually works. I'd start with more on the Distributed Hash Table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table) and more on Kademlia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia), the DHT more-or-less used by Vuze.