The BitTorrent Frenzy

My computer recently hooked up with BitTorrent, a booming file-sharing protocol is now accounting for more than 1/3 of web traffic according to some reports. At least many of schools/universities/record-labels/movie-makers feel the waves in case of you haven’t, your madness begins with a broadband line, because the line doesn’t disconnect, you can use it anytime of the day. Now I don’t switch my computer off just because I always have something coming in whether it’s music/movie/TV-show. Most of the time I look for Asian TVs and movies, however lately I’ve discovered a lot of American torrent sites including isohunt and lokitorrent. You’ll be amazed of what you can find in these sites. Apparently, there’s one more needed to be mentioned, Supernova, it was forced to shut down by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) at Christmas. I guess they simply cannot manage the legal fees to back up their service, or they may lose the legal challenge even provided with sufficient cash. Lokitorrent, another giant of torrent search/hosting service is asking their users to make donation to keep the site alive. They wrote on the home page, “We are looking at a cost of $30K per month in fees”. Unlike the Napster lawsuit against RIAA few years ago, torrent is a different thing, Guillaume Champeau at p2pnet claims torrent file is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which means such a file contains nothing about the file you intend to download, and it contains a hash code of the file and the addresses of tracking server, again, such server holds no files. Hence, a torrent file doesn’t infringe the copyright law by conventional wisdom. P2P applications such as WinMX/Kazza/Morpheus only favor small to mid-size files (5-100MB), when 1GB+ files come into play, BitTorrent is the primary choice of sharing. Since the invention of such protocol from Bram Cohen in 2001, BitTorrent has been useful for large file sharing such as Linux Distro download, however, the illegal adoption of the public overwhelmed it. Now, you can find every piece of commercial software available on the marketplace, for free. But certainly, ISPs and hard drive manufacturers are at least benefited from this BitTorrent phenomenon, for instance, myself is going to get a 200GB drive to replace my “little” 40GB drive very soon. Yay!

Watch out from Exeem, a new product from Supernova folks, they’ve been tight-lipped about its technical details, I’ll write something about it when I know more. As far as I know at the moment, it is an improved version of BitTorrent used to offset the heavy loads of its tracking server. However, it doesn’t backward-compatible with BitTorrent.