Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads?

Max Sayre writes "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"

Data Caps

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of us stuck in New Zealand or Australia still have data caps to think about. If every download was a torrent there would be a lot more overhead eating into our precious data caps!

Please, think of the Kiwis.

Re:Data Caps

[blackraven14250]

Every ISP has data caps in those areas. It's not an isolated thing.

Re:Data Caps

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there aren't, and no, they don't.

Re:Why?

[xiando]

Because Bittorrent has a reputation issue, for one. The MPAA and RIAA attack it and call it the reason they are losing money (instead of their failing business model).

Try running a perfectly legal BitTorrent tracker. You will find that the MPAA/RIAA criminals both DDOS your server and spam your ISP with DMCA crap regarding files you are not tracking and never heard of. They really dislike BitTorrent.

Re:The bigger question is:

[compro01]

There was apt-torrent, but that project appears to be abandoned.

The thing is probably that there is no pressing need. There are many educational facilities that are are willing to provide mirrors for such things, so there's no real reason to implement a system to borrow user's upstream bandwidth.

Re:No

[cheekyjohnson]

Yeah, I know a bittorrent download is largely unpredictable, but I was just pointing out that, to an extent, so are regular downloads.

Faster Speeds? Yeah right...

[drsquare]

In WoW I have to disable bittorrent if I actually want to download a patch. Otherwise it saturates my connection with upload data whilst only downloading at 1% of my max speed.

Blizzard use bittorrent simply because they're cheap. Instead of using their millions in profits to provide bandwidth, they make the players smash their quotas sending data to each other. I had to install a bandwidth limiter to get Wrath of the Lich King to install because otherwise the outrageous upload speeds stopped me actually downloading anything. You'd think $15 a month would be enough to pay for enough bandwidth to allow me to download the game I've just paid for, but no they have to chase every penny...

Re:Data Caps

[ThatOtherGuy435]

He's making fun of people who believe without evidence in the invisible hand of the free market with regards to broadband competition in the US.

Re:Data Caps

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

Everyone is bitching about lack of competition in last-mile market and all you can come up with is "always thousands of ISPs in all areas of the world". Where I am, there is exactly 1 (ONE) ISP. In the major metropolitan area 15km away, there is exactly 3 (THREE)
    1. cable
    2. DSL
    3. microwave link - kind of expensive and doesn't scale for large number of customers

Re:Only if there's good seeds

[talsemgeest]

Most modern bittorrent client support web seeds, that is using an http-hosted file as a seed for the torrent. Ad the speed from that server to the other people who are downloading and you have much better speeds than if you were to simply download straight from the server. Add to this all the other bittorrent features, like resuming a broken download, and improved error checking and you have a very powerful downloading strategy. Just take a look at burnbit: http://burnbit.com/ [burnbit.com] which takes a normal hosted file on the internet and turns it into a torrent. Everyone wins!

Re:The bigger question is:

[antifoidulus]

The file sizes of most Linux packages are simply not big enough to warrant the use of bittorrent. The 32 bit x86 kernel(usually one of the biggest packages in a distro) is only about 32 megs or so. By the time you downloaded the tracker, found your peers and actually started downloading something you could have had the whole package d/led already. Most big universities and research institutions have to host the files anyway(for internal updates), its not all that difficult to extend the download service to the general public. Not to mention the fact that in order for the torrent to be effective you would actually have to retain the packages after installation which can quickly become a huge pain in the ass.....

Re:Firewalls

[harryjohnston]

According to my understanding of BitTorrent, the client needs to be able to accept incoming connections as well as outgoing ones. See for example Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide [dessent.net].

Also, we use a proxy server for outgoing requests from all of our teaching labs, and we have no trouble downloading stuff. The proxy server is perfectly capable of keeping up with our internet connection. It's not as though it has to do any hard work, all it does is relay data from an incoming TCP connection to an outgoing one.

Re:Data Caps

[AHuxley]

Yes and look at the new plans by Australian ISP's eg. Internode
http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/bundles/easy_bundle/plans/ [on.net]
"Massive 'Any Time' monthly quota - measured as the total of downloads plus uploads. "

DHT Tracker

[pgn674]

DHT doesn't even require a tracker

I thought DHT did require a centralized server, called a bootstrap node?

Re:The bigger question is:

[Cygfrydd]

See apt-p2p [camrdale.org].

Re:You explained it.

[Sancho]

Your acknowledgement packets probably aren't getting through.

http://www.benzedrine.cx/ackpri.html [benzedrine.cx]

Re:File size

[kurokame]

AC knew what he was talking about. Let me spell it out since you (and the guy who modded you Insightful) clearly don't.

IPs in a swarm are visible to anyone who can join the swarm. If you use it for security updates, you are implicitly announcing (a) the security update in question, and (b) how to join the swarm. Q.E.D., most people attached to a swarm who are not yet seeding (and possibly many of those who are seeding) do not have the update installed and are publishing this along with their IP for anyone on the internet to see.

Re:You explained it.

[mirix]

Shaw seems to be throttling torrents, from my experience at least, and a few friends with them. Used to be faster a couple years ago.

Upload has always been rather pathetic with them though... and seems to have gotten worse over time (over subscribing I guess?)

Re:Multicast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why has no one mentioned this?

Because multi-cast doesn't work in practice.

Because almost every gateway router drops multi-cast packets.

Because multi-cast is only efficient if there is more than one recipient on the same subnet downloading the file at the same time.

Because synchronizing the assembly of milti-cast downloads that were initiated at different times (as in, 1 second apart) would require as much work as implementing the bittorent protocol.

Honestly, multi-cast was only really thought out for machines sharing a private network. It wasn't intended for internet-style applications.

Re:You explained it.

[Runaway1956]

That's why you use a traffic shaper on your own network. With Wondershaper, I find my real available bandwidth, subtract a small percentage from the available bandwidth, and throttle everything to that speed. With short queues, everything just moves along nicely, and high priority packets are moved to the front of queues. If you allow the queues to get long, with no prioritization, bandwidth comes to a crawl. Now, don't get me wrong here - I am not advocating that ISP's do traffic shaping. They will do it all wrong, for all the wrong reasons. If most people did the traffic shaping on their own networks, it would relieve the load on the ISP, and the ISP would have less justification for traffic shaping THEIR WAY. So - what does traffic shaping mean, in real life, on my own network? Without traffic shaping, any person can start a download from his desktop (or laptop), or watch a Youtube video, and bring everyone in the house to a crawl. Pages may not load at all for other people. With traffic shaping, I can start huge downloads from all five machines on the network, but all five machines can still browse. Those downloads run somewhat slower than they would have - but no one is screaming, "WHY CAN'T I LOAD MY EMAIL?? WHO IS DOWNLOADING THE ENTIRE INTERNET?" Try it. Put a traffic shaper on your gateway machine, or at least set up QOS on your router. The internet will never look the same again.

Re:You explained it.

[Runaway1956]

Again, traffic shaping. I use Wondershaper, from the Ubuntu repositories. # wondershaper eth1 300 90 Problems solved. Of course, you have to determine your total available bandwidth so that you can determine what speeds will work best for your network. (real speeds, not advertised speeds) You'll likely spend 15 to 30 minutes getting is set up, unless you already know what you are doing. Once done, you'll never have to worry about choking your internet connection again.

Re:The bigger question is:

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, this was discussed in Gentoo land a few years ago and was basically voted down because of
1) The "no pressing need" mentioned above and
2) because if the server needs to restart, then it needs to rehash everything. Hashing the entire repository is gonna be a a lot of IO. Which is bad.
There's a ticket in bugzilla about it.

Re:You explained it.

[haruchai]

Perhaps you'd like to give this a try?

http://www.fireaddons.com/downloads/ [fireaddons.com]

Re:Why not? Here are some reasons...

[Tom]

4) because I prefer to get my bits from the official location. Yea, I know a checksum should be good enough but I'm old school here.

Actually, from a strictly security-POV, a checksum and a distributed distribution model is better, because it makes man-in-the-middle attacks considerably more difficult.

Of course, only as long as you have a trustworthy channel to get the checksum through and actually bother to verify it.

Not corporate friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

BT traffic is seen as "illegal filesharing" in many major corporations and blocked or flagged as likely abusive. I received an email from my IT department (hint: large company and the company name starts with an "O") indicating that I was flagged as having a system which participated in BT traffic and requiring written explanation within X hours or things would be escalated. A couple written email exchanges with the corporate IT police and the issue went away, but BT clients are not even permitted on company systems.

Re:Have you factored in the RIAA?

[Limerent Oil]

Using MSE ISP can no longer simply shape based on protocol. Bittorrent uses a random port which makes shaping based on port equally ineffective.

Unfortunately, ISP's have other options for shaping. Bittorrent traffic is quite distinctive and is detectable to a fairly high degree of accuracy just by analyzing the traffic pattern. Encrypting the packets does not (and cannot) obscure the traffic pattern.