Wednesday, April 2, 2003

More BitTorrent When Bram was first rolling out BitTorrent to the world, he needed to test scalability. How do you generate massive traffic on the Internet? FREE PORN! From Bram's original post: I'm now in the very bizarre position of having to beg for people to download porn. The page of the current load test (a 700+ meg file) is http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/porn.html. I have actually known Bram for a little while through a mutual friend. Not long after BT was released, I ended up redoing the command line "UI" for Bit Torrent and committed the changes to the SourceForge repository. If I can find the time, I have a few ideas that I would like to apply to the OS X client. But that isn't what this message is about. This message is about the other uses of BitTorrent besides distributing OS seeds. BitTorrent seems to have found a healthy following in three very specific nitches: The Anime community is actively using BitTorrent to distribute various random hunks of content. A Google search reveals the various tracking sites. I'm not a big fan of Anime, so I have no idea what is what in that community. A subsection of the Etree Community is using BitTorrent to trade live music. Etree is devoted to spreading extremely high quality recordings of various artist's live performances and only when the artist has given permission for recording of their performances. I have grabbed literally hundreds of great live performances from Etree back when I ran an Etree FTP server. However, grabbing large hunks of content via FTP is a total drag when the content is popular; it is hard to get a login, hard to maintain the connection, and hard to get the complete download. BitTorrent + Etree is a natural fit. Another google search reveals a number of sites that maintain lists of live music that have been actively seeded via BitTorrent. BitTorrent is also used by TV fans-- mostly SciFi & Simpsons fans, it seems-- to distribute content into markets that don't otherwise receive the show. A friend used BT to watch FireFly recently. One example tracker. 5:55:55 PM  pontificate