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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla and BitTorrent? 117

Posted by Cliff from the bittorrent-as-a-web-cache dept.
mcrbids asks: "Recently, I submitted this bug report to Mozilla's bugzilla requesting the additional feature that Mozilla should support BitTorrent files natively, so that Moz could support inline image tags with BitTorrent, among other things, so that high-bandwidth sites can survive the dreaded 'Slashdot effect'. However, Torrents (and many other P2P suites) have been used largely for warez and porn. Do you think the potential politics behind this outweigh the benefits of BitTorrent, such as getting a full Linux distro with record download speeds?" Update: 04/29 16:16 GMT by C :One of the links in this article was removed at the request of a site administrator.
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Mozilla and BitTorrent? More

Mozilla and BitTorrent?

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  • No. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:17PM (#5831089)
    Providing inline support of a protocol does not a political issue make. That's like saying "FTP is mostly used for warez but also an excellent place to get distros."

    First.

  • Torrents (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Aurelius42 ( 248409 )
    I think that there is the potential for much more with torrents, even though the main market for it at the moment is warez/porn. I think perhaps tv studios should take note of it as a potential distribution method for a "new market".

    Aurelius (fp?)

  • Problems, Early Adopters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jamuraa ( 3055 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:18PM (#5831100) Homepage Journal
    BitTorrent generally doesn't work very well on small files. This is because clients tend to drop off too fast. In fact, you can calculate the "optimal filesize", that is, the length when even if the client exits right after finishing the file, the torrent will survive and sustain itself. I believe it is at around 1GB, but I don't have the figures handy. Mabye the guy who did the calculations will chime in sometime.

    This brings another problem with BitTorrent - it doesn't work well unless clients are connected for a while after they finish the file. This could be "quick-fixed" by leaving the client open until it has sent at least one copy of the file out (or that many bits, your choice).

    The third problem that it would have is that BitTorrent generally opens a whole bunch of network connections. Many of those are incoming (NAT people won't work as well), and many are outgoing. This large amount of sockets tends to make some of the cheaper commodity cards break. You see alot of these problems on the BitTorrent mailing lists.

    Also, Porn has always been an early adopter of new technology. VCR tapes, DVDs and the internet are excellent examples. Because porn uses it isn't a reason to count the technology out.

    • No (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:29PM (#5831145) Journal
      the length when even if the client exits right after finishing the file, the torrent will survive and sustain itself. I believe it is at around 1GB, but I don't have the figures handy. Mabye the guy who did the calculations will chime in sometime

      There is no such length. Length, usage patterns, and network connection speed are all fundamental factors.

      This brings another problem with BitTorrent - it doesn't work well unless clients are connected for a while after they finish the file.

      It works *better* if this is the case, but it's not really a problem.

      If someone is downloading from the original source, and another person begins, then the first immediately becomes another source.

      BitTorrent isn't designed to make the original source unnecessary...it's designed to simply reduce load on the original source. Which it does quite well. The original source tends to send out around the bandwidth of a single upload at any one time.

      Many of those are incoming (NAT people won't work as well), and many are outgoing.

      As a result, they'll get slower transfers. This is simply a problem with NAT -- NATted users are using a broken network, and have problems with many, many protocols. FTP is included in mozilla, and NAT is even worse with FTP.

      This large amount of sockets tends to make some of the cheaper commodity cards break.

      Sockets have nothing whatsoever to do with the NIC. They exist at a higher level, and will not cause the card to break.

      • Yes, but... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Jamuraa ( 3055 )
        There is no such length. Length, usage patterns, and network connection speed are all fundamental factors.

        The calculations are not exact -- they assume a perfect network, generally. This will be perturbed by the real-world data, but they generally aren't more than an order of magnitude off. The reason is because connection speed doesn't matter unless you have highly asynchronous connections. The client will stay on the swarm as long as it needs to in order to receive the entire file, and subsequently

      • Re:No (Score:1)

        by phug ( 454216 )
        BitTorrent isn't designed to make the original source unnecessary...it's designed to simply reduce load on the original source. Which it does quite well. The original source tends to send out around the bandwidth of a single upload at any one time.

        This is not true, or at least is potentially misleading. BitTorrent's 'original source' is actually a peer setup by the .torrent's tracker operator (therefore seeding the BT network with the .torrent operator's bandwidth). That could possibly be the original so

    • This brings another problem with BitTorrent - it doesn't work well unless clients are connected for a while after they finish the file. This could be "quick-fixed" by leaving the client open until it has sent at least one copy of the file out (or that many bits, your choice).

      Seems to me that running Bittorrent inside the browser would be ideal for this. After the browser donwnloaded the inline image, it could keep the 'client window' open in the background and act as a source for a while. How long it do

  • Heh, this is the first time I've seen /. link to a warez site. This is just wrong guys.

  • Whiny little.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iamsure ( 66666 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:24PM (#5831120) Homepage
    The discussion hasnt even teterred out, and its far from a clear thing. At best, its a misunderstanding/disagreement over how best to handle a new file format.

    At worst, its the Mozilla team saying (rightly) that the best way to handle .torrent files is the same as any other media app - via a plugin.

    From the discussion on the bug report, it sounds like the torrent dev's havent made a plugin, dont realize the power of plugins, or dont want to make a plugin.

    If there was a fully functional plugin that couldnt do some particular thing, that would be different. Instead, its just a standalone app, asking for the Moz team to 'link it up'.

    Again, just my take on it.
    • That's the wrong level. BitTorrent is not a media type, it's a protocol. The media type can be anything: text/plain, audio/mpeg, application/pdf, whatever. Don't let the torrent files fool you. Ideally, they'd be linked with torrent://.

      I don't know if protocols are pluggable in Mozilla, but I doubt it. And torrent would have to be a 'protocol plugin' if it was any kind of plugin. Otherwise, torrent would have to be built into Mozilla to be used everywhere that http is.

      • Ideally, they'd be linked with torrent://.
        Wrong. The torrent:// URL would have to include the *data* of the torrent. Would you want URLs a few kb long?

      • Re:Whiny little.. (Score:3, Informative)

        by sohp ( 22984 )
        Protocols are pluggable. It's easy to write a component that implements nsIProtocolHandler [mozilla.org] and define any URL format you want. So yeh, torrent://hostname/filename would work fine, and the torrent protocol handler would be written to do the magic right thing with hostname and filename. Isn't Mozilla c00l?
      • I don't see how torrent:// is the least bit of ideal. The tracker works over HTTP, not its own protocol. You access the tracker via HTTP, which runs the btdownload program and communicates using its own protocol.

        BitTorrent's official plugin associates with application/x-bittorrent for good reason.

        • Here's what makes it ideal: BitTorrent is a protocol. It's not a file format. There are files associated with the protocol, but fundamentally, BitTorrent is a way of delivering files, not a type of file.

          Treating BitTorrent as a media type reduces the number of things you can do with it. For example, you can't use it for displaying streaming video, since application/x-bittorrent isn't a video format.

          But when you treat BitTorrent as a protocol, you can use it for inline video, or images, or (shudder) Fla
            • I agree with your first paragraph, although there is such thing as a .torrent file. You can save it, email it, and open it with your BT client. But fundamentally, I agree.
            • True, but you can't use BT for streaming video anyways. Streams require blocks to be contigious, BT, in interest of efficiency, does not. Other networks (Overnet, ed2k) don't either, because it creates a problem of last block rarity.
            • Your second, third, and fourth applications of BT are also invalid. Inline video isn't going to be large

  • Can somebody explain what makes BitTorrent unique from other P2P systems? I'm not familiar with it. I don't quite understand why this request would be any different than asking Mozilla to include gnutella.

    What seems rather important here is that P2P appears to be the only solution to at least one other problem besides the "How do we get free music". If So, building a solution to the browser problem into Mozilla seems like a good thing, although I'd prefer SVG support first. On the flipside, what exactly pr

    • Re:Why BitTorrent? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:46PM (#5831236) Homepage
      Well, first off, BitTorrent isn't a P2P system. It is a P2P protocol. It doesn't search for your favorite MP3s. You can't even "surf" through it. You give it a .torrent file (analogous to a URL, though with some interesting features), and it gives you the file(s) that "URL" points at.

      It's unique in that it is a highly efficient and secure cooperative system -- and is very low-profile, as well. It is capable of delivering large amounts of data that is originating from a source which cannot normally afford that sort of bandwidth. It can move more bandwidth than even large companies can afford; when Red Hat 9 [slashdot.org] was released through BT, traffic peaked at nearly 1.5 gigabits per second, or the full bandwidth of ten OC3 connections.

      • Re:Why BitTorrent? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bwt ( 68845 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @11:21PM (#5831423)
        OK, so it's a protocol, like say ftp or http, but different. So it seems, as per the bugzilla discussion, that the problem should be solved by creating a mozilla plugin to handle URL's written torrent://domain.name/localpath/file.torrent .

        I would expect that mozilla can have a plugin that asks to handle a given protocol when it is encountered. Anybody know if my expecation is reality?

        Finally, how exactly do they know what the total bandwidth of distributing RH9 via BitTorrent was?
        • I don't know about Mozilla plug-ins, but if that'd work, then fine.

          As for how they knew what the bandwidh was, BT is based around a central server called a "tracker"; which helps nodes find each other, and also collects statistics.
        • It's more like the files used in most streaming media players (e.g. RealPlayer) which are delivered by http and point to the 'real' file. A plugin (or helper app) would handle this fine (plugin being preferable, since it can auto-install).
        • Finally, how exactly do they know what the total bandwidth of distributing RH9 via BitTorrent was?
          A central server keeps track of who's uploading/downloading what - it can easily count the amount of data transmitted.

        • Quoting from the bit torrent faq:

          I'm behind a firewall/NAT, can I use BitTorrent?

          Yes, but you will get better performance if other peers can connect to you. By default, BitTorrent listens on port 6881, trying incrementially higher ports if it's unable to bind. It gives up after 6889 (the port range is configurable.) It's up to you to figure out how to poke a hole in your firewall/NAT.

          It seems like introducing a new service with new ports is kind of a big step to take for Mozilla from that standpoi

        • OK, so it's a protocol, like say ftp or http, but different. So it seems, as per the bugzilla discussion, that the problem should be solved by creating a mozilla plugin to handle URL's written torrent://domain.name/localpath/file.torrent .

          The real problem is that it doesn't use just one protocol, it uses two protocols. The first protocol is the traditional protocol (http, ftp, email, whatever) you use to download the dot torrent file that contains the description of where to get the proper file. The seco

  • Move it to the proxy... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Polo ( 30659 ) * on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:33PM (#5831171) Homepage
    Maybe it should be supported in squid.

    Squid normally runs on a gateway machine and usually has better connectivity internally and externally.

    It could connect better and provide the cache benefit both internally and externally. There would be no need to configure your browser to share files, while it might be possible on your proxy. Actually, squid almost does this with it's proxy-to-proxy protocols, which is almost like what adding BitTorrent would do.

  • What BitTorrent really needs... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GeorgeH ( 5469 ) * on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:40PM (#5831208) Homepage Journal
    ... is a way to distribute web page archives. A single tarball that contains HTML files with relative links and images, and a flag in BitTorrent to let the clients know that it is a web page archive. Then slashdoted sites could be put into a torrent and displayed in the browser with a single clickthrough, instead of "Open Torrent File," "Save Tarball," "Decompress," and "Open." Freenet is awesome in this respect, because you can link to Freesites from the public web, but BitTorrent's lack of anonymity makes it a lot faster and more useful.

  • Bit Torrent is great (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:45PM (#5831229) Homepage Journal
    p2p file sharing is great, and we all know why. But it has one serious flaw. Searching a p2p network is complete ass compared to searching google. But a web server doesn't do well at serving very large files. So if someone wants to have say, a video blog, they shouldn't have to pay for the zillions of megabytes in bandwith, nor is it a fast/reasonable way to simply link to the file and use http/ftp. And pointing all your visitors towards a p2p program like WinMX or Kazaa is ok, but it has problems. You can't guarantee visitors will get the file. Many will not care enough to go through the effort. The file could be renamed, or altered or otherwise false.

    Bit Torrent allows webmasters to overcome these problems. Because of BitTorrent you can put a link to a video on your web site, without paying out the ass or crashing and burning from the load. Your visitors have to go through very little effort to get the file. Even if nobody else is sharing, you have to be, so at least they are guaranteed to get the goods. And they are guaranteed to get the correct goods. And they don't have to search relentlessly for it.

    One thing that pisses me off, however, is that every time I want to download something with bit torrent I have to open up Internet Explorer. I used to use IE until I discovered Phoenix(Firebird) months ago. I don't want to have to keep opening IE every other day to download a single file. If BitTorrent doesn't work with Moz it's either a fault in Moz or a fault in BitTorrent. And it should be fixed either way.
    • Go back and read the previous slashdot article about BitTorrent. I'm using phoenix 0.5 for windows right this minute, and torrents work just great for me without using IE. I bitched about the same issue in the previous article and was bitchslapped back into place.

    • Re:Bit Torrent is not understood by /.ers (Score:4, Informative)

      by Splork ( 13498 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @11:32PM (#5831469) Homepage
      So if someone wants to have say, a video blog, they shouldn't have to pay for the zillions of megabytes in bandwith

      What?!? Of course they should. If someone wants to have a video blog they sure as hell are going to have to host it somehow. bandwidth doesn't grow on cat5 trees.

      slashdotters obviously have no clue how bittorrent works and the actual details about what bandwidth it can actually partially recover. so i'll explain something to all of your deaf ears and eyes:

      it is only going to be useful when the bandwidth load on the server is high due to sudden large instant demand (ie: slashdotting) for large objects (cd images, large distributions, hi-hi-red images, videos, etc). at that point many of the peers downloading will help save bandwidth by serving the portion they have already downloaded to others. but after the initial rush is off, not many seeds will be left as most people have downloaded it and bittorrent has been closed or exited on its own (nor should there be any) as the server has plenty of bandwidth to satisfy requests itself at that point. that's the servers job. to be the reliable source of content. bittorrent just helps lower the peaks during high load (peaks over short periods of time are often what server-colo sites charge for).

      quit trying to use bittorrent as your sole hosting solution so that you never have to use any bandwidth. that's what MNet [sf.net] is for (distributed storage and hosting) or possibly freenet.
    • > Searching a p2p network is complete ass compared to searching google

      I propose torrent.google.com

    • A solution already exists. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Visit Bitzi.com [bitzi.com].

      Search for the file you're looking for. View the ratings people have given files, click on the 'magnet://' link for the file you want.

      The 'magnet://' link (actually a crytographic hash) opens in Shareaza (see Shareaza.com [shareaza.com] for the excellent Windows client, bitzi lists a few other clients for other platforms), finds the exact file you're looking for (or waits and keeps searching every now and then if it's not available) and downloads the file.

      When downloading (while simultaneously uploading
    • One thing that pisses me off, however, is that every time I want to download something with bit torrent I have to open up Internet Explorer.
      Save the .torrent to disk, open your bittorrent client.
    • One thing that pisses me off, however, is that every time I want to download something with bit torrent I have to open up Internet Explorer.

      Why is that? I've been using BitTorrent with Mozilla for several weeks now, and it works great! Just set up the MIME-type (and file extension) correctly and it should work fine!

  • Don't click on the Torrentse link (warez and porn) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lazyhound ( 542184 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @10:53PM (#5831276)

    It redirects to Tubgirl now.
  • While I think Bit Torrent is a great idea, I don't think it will have a veryh good adoption cycle. As the article says, it is used for warez and such things, and has thusly been grouped in with the other 'P2P' clients. Many packet shapers, Universities, and so forth already filter Bit Torrent along with other P2P protocols like Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
  • BitTorrent support isn't really what you're looking for -- the bug is talking about IMG targets.

    I agree that generic BitTorrent support in Mozilla would be great. The problem is that it's really not all that useful for most *images*, which are perhaps up to 100KB. BitTorrent needs larger files to chew on to help much.

    BitTorrent would be great for downloading game demos, isos, etc.
  • Wouldn't it suck to be stuck out in a torrential downpour of bits? As in, a core dump?

  • This idea is based on misunderstanding (Score:5, Informative)

    by henrypijames ( 669281 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:34AM (#5831718) Homepage

    This RFE does not make much sense.

    First, I like to point out that the name of the protocol/application in question is not "Bit Torrent", but "BitTorrent".

    This aside, let's differ between two kinds of possible content to be handled via BitTorrent: web content (HTML, images, Flash animations, etc.) and offline content (software, music, video, etc.).

    The first kind of data is not suitable for BitTorrent because they are too small. (This is a "basic knowledge" about BitTorrent, if you don't understand why, please refer to general technical readings regarding the protocol.) The second kind of data is mostly not suitable for being embedded into a website, people normally download them and proceed with them outside of their webbrowser.

    But even if any data of the second kind is indeed embedded into a website (like a video, although I never watch video embedded in my webbrowser), it's not a good idea to bind this embedding process to BitTorrent, because every "BitTorrent connection" has a lifespan which need to be specifed by the user himself. A file keeps being uploaded after its download completes within BitTorrent, until the user decides to "finish" this file. If a video embedded into a webpage is downloaded via BitTorrent, when should the upload of this same video stop? Immediately after the download completes? Or when the user leaves the website? Both are rather too soon to keep the file healthy alive.

    What would make sense, however, is to write a BitTorrent download manager plugin, perhaps a sidebar, similar to the new download manager of Phoenix/Firebird. The user could handle his BitTorrent downloads within the interface of the webbrowser, and at the same time keep control over the lifespan of each of the files being transfered.

    In the end, I fully agree with Olivier (Bugzilla comment #1 [mozilla.org]), this is a plugin issue and WONTFIX.

    No offense here, but I think the original "bug reporter" has not understood BitTorrent's field of application and mode of operation quite well (and, has not got the name "BitTorrent" right).

    Henry 'Pi' James
    BitTorrent dev team member

    PS: My opinion here is personal and does not represent Bram (the author of BitTorrent) or any other co-developers, although I'm pretty sure they would agree with me.

  • show some initiative (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sohp ( 22984 ) <.moc.oi. .ta. .notwens.> on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:55AM (#5831823) Homepage
    It's open source, for pity's sake. Get your lazy butt in gear and write it yourself, it's really not that hard. That is, if you know the first thing about writing code and aren't just a selfish immature punk who expects freebie handouts. Scratch your own damn itch [catb.org].
  • If you like Recoat.net, are a Slashdot reader and don't like Tubgirl, may I suggest one of their fine mental exercises [redcoat.net].

    Don't cheat!

  • hey cliff when you name something "warez and porn" you better know what your talking about Nice going cliff, why don't you watch your classifications!

  • BitTorrent is not suitable for webpages (Score:4, Interesting)

    by skookum ( 598945 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @03:51AM (#5832258)

    First of all, torrents are not that useful for small files. If a website had a LOT of images it might be reasonable since you can create a torrent of a number of files and somewhat avoid the small file penalty.

    Second, the BT protocol is far from established and stable. Bram mades non-trivial changes in minor release numbers, eg the 3.1 to 3.2 changes. He is very interested in backwards compatibility but things are still at the stage where that is not guaranteed and there are all kind of extensions that people would like to add to the protocol.

    Finally, BT would be of little use to the "average joe who has a few pictures of his backyard roller coaster" that gets posted to slashdot and dies. First of all, he or she would not know that a slashdotting was coming, and therefor would have to have a tracker running all the time, ready to serve the torrents. Currently the "reference" tracker is written in Python, which means joe schmoe needs to somehow get that running on their server... in the case of peoples' homepages that are susceptible to slashdotting, usually it's lightweight/free hosting and they don't have the option of saying "Hey sysadmin, can I run this Python server on some funky port (that will need to be opened on your firewall)?"

    Also, any change in the web site would require the torrent to be rebuilt, and the old one removed.

    Finally, the tracker would die under a slashdotting. While BitTorrent allows the "heavy lifting" of the transfer to be spread out amongst the swarm, every user that wishes to join must contact the tracker... indeed, as users download they constantly contact the tracker to get updated peer lists and keep the tracker's info fresh. If a site cannot survive serving a slashdotting through Apache (which is highly tuned for what it does) then it's certainly not going to be able to provide the CPU and Ram that the poor little python tracker is going to require to manage a swarm of tens of thousands. Go to any of the illicit trackers (such as torrentse.cx) and note that while the web pages may be relatively snappy, the tracker is what gets killed and always has very long connect times and LOTS of timeouts. The admins of torrentse say that they are getting about 4000 hits a day, and they are pulling their hair out writing custom trackers in php and mysql (and spread over multiple ports) to cope with the load. Now, how for the love of god is joe average's tracker supposed to support a near-instantaneous 50,000 hits or more? It makes no sense.

  • the warez and porn link (http://torrentse.cx/) that is.

    First slashdot troll article summary?
  • Half of the point of putting the domain name after a link is to prevent us from clicking through to fsking tubgirl/goatsex links again and again. So why should article summaries be exempt?
  • - of course I think a technology shouldn't be restricted due to a small minority use that has little impact ((complete descruction of all media companies being small impact naturally)), especially as to restrict it is to shoot oneself in the foot

    We're gonna see big political change on IP but before we get it it looks as if lots of people are going to have to suffer 1st, inc. record companies and p2p'ers.

    - p2p? gossip as analogy. Imagine there's a rumour going around at work about you and so-and-so, and

  • Some of this is the hosting problem's fault... (Score:4, Informative)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @06:04AM (#5832548) Journal
    If you want to simply use Mozilla to launch your bittorrent client and you set up the correct help app info, but when you click a link, it displays garbage in the screen, it's not the fault of Mozilla, it's the fault of the web server.

    The web server needs to send out the correct content-type info. Does BitTorrent have a mime type? Or just an extension?

    For example, on some sites if you click on a file that ends in .wmv it doesn't open in windows media player. .wmv is not in the mime.types file of your standard RH distro (at least as of 7.3). The solution is to add..."

    video/x-ms-wmv wmv
    " to the mime.types file on the server, apache then sends out the correct content-type, and if Mozilla has the wmp client registered for that mime type, all works wbell.

    The reason IE works is that Microsoft will trust a file extension to determine content type over content-type info, and that little tidbit has been the source of many an exploit over the years...

  • I get > 300 KB/sec (yes, kilobytes) from some RedHat mirrors, and thats the limit (roughly) of my cable modem. There is no bandwidth crunch.
  • Linux needs a decent implementation of bittorrent ... the protocol is a good idea, but the author's own implementation really sucks. AFAIK, there aren't currently any other options. Since bittorrent is used through a web browser anyway, it would make sense that a torrent client is included with the moz distro ... whether it be native, plugin, or external doctype handler, its not a bad idea. Anything but the current nasty python implementation would do just fine!

    BTW, I've never been successful at getting

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