Wil Wheaton: Yo Hollywood, Let Me Download Ubuntu

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2012/05/an-example-of-the-usefulness-of-bittorrent-for-entirely-legal-purposes.html

by macco • 14 years ago

288 163 14 years ago

wilwheaton.typepad.com

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

Yo liberals, let me go hunting with an AK-47.

sp3324• 14 years ago

An AK is an assault rifle, not so good for hunting. A nice Remington 700 will do you better. But if you really want to... who's stopping you?

nfriedly• 14 years ago

It is illegal in at least some parts of the USA... still not sure how it's related to bit torrent and Linux though.

subway3• 14 years ago

While a Rem 700 would certainly be a more accurate and effective rifle, it is also significantly more expensive to purchase and feed than an AK variant or SKS would be. 7.62x39mm is dirt cheap, as are rifles capable of firing the round, and that is a strong selling point for impoverished families who help feed themselves by hunting.

GFKjunior• 14 years ago

Not a good choice for hunting. AK's have pretty terrible aim, sure you can throw them in mud or have rocks in the magazine and they will work but the accuracy is hardly worth it. I have an ak merely because it looks cool. If you must use a semi-automatic to go hunting get an ar-15.

sasha-dv• 14 years ago

Sure, compared to some other rifles it's not as precise, but I can shoot you in the head from a distance of 150 m - and I'm not exactly Thomas Beckett. There were guys in my ex-platoon who could shoot you in the eye.

(Not that I want to shoot you :)

rmc3• 14 years ago

Comparing hacking tools to weapons might be a clever hack to get the US courts to allow you to use it, however that'll be used against the rest of the world. "Sorry we have to ban this, it's a weapon! Even the US courts think it's a weapon!"

Please consider hackers all over the globe.

dfc2• 14 years ago

Clever hack of the legal system? Good luck. A similar argument was tried in the old days of ITAR v. Crypto and it never worked.

jes5199• 14 years ago

That takes me back to the days of "military strength encryption", in the 90s, when you weren't allowed to let any code that used a longer than 40-bit encryption key to leave the country because it was too dangerous.

kprobst• 14 years ago

Good luck hitting a whitetail at 400 yards with one of those.

Sanddancer• 14 years ago

You can, even in pinko California. Just make sure you get a bullet button kit for your AK and you're set to go. If you want an automatic, I'm not finding any hard and fast rules for if fish and game allows it, but if you pay your $200 tax stamp and get approved by the sheriff, it's totally cool.

I don't think your decision is very logical, though. An AK-47 is a pretty craptastic rifle -- unless you're going to be trudging for miles and miles without a cleaning kit, you don't need its legendary reliability. If you need the rapid fire, then there are one of two issues here. The first, is that the deer are coming at you in such quantities and ferocity that suppressive fire is needed, then you're going to need at least a platoon sized group here, possibly with airstrike backup, and well-coordinated plans for dealing with the cervine hordes. Either that, or you are a pretty crappy shot, and need to spend some range time before you try hunting.

whalesalad2• 14 years ago

The funny thing is, as far as I can tell, these are the only two widespread uses of BitTorrent.

1) Pirating movies, music, etc...

2) Downloading Linux distributions.

aphistic• 14 years ago

More and more games are using it as a patching tool these days. Blizzard has been using BitTorrent to distribute patches for years with WoW.

whalesalad2• 14 years ago

Indeed I have noticed this. I think it's great technology and more services should be using it. The Blizzard case is a great example of it being used pretty transparently/behind-the-scenes. I'd love to hear more non-transparent cases though. I genuinely cannot think of a time i've used it aside from stealing an album or grabbing debian.

masklinn• 14 years ago

Companies also use it to deploy servers, although that's internal so it's not hampered by ISP blocks.

bithive123• 14 years ago

Interestingly, Blizzard's implementation is so bad that I actually get better throughput by disabling P2P.

It makes no sense but I had several hours to play with it while waiting for SC2. I found similar complaints on their forums so hopefully they'll fix it someday.

mjwalshe4• 14 years ago

yeh but the PTP dowload for wow sucks I get faster speeds turning it off

sp3324• 14 years ago

It's used for a lot of legal videos as well, like Sita Sings the Blues http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSi... also Vodo uses BT to distribute their movies. http://vodo.net/ Revision3 used to run their own tracker with only their own videos listed, but there was some legal trouble so they shut it down. I'm seeding Geocities from http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities but that's pretty niche :) I'm also seeding a bunch of videos from a hacker conference (CC licensed).

nsmartt• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter what the common use-case is. BitTorrent is better than traditional server->client downloads.

"Oh, pirates are the most common users of BitTorrent? But BitTorrent is better than traditional server->client downloads. More companies/people/whatever should be providing BitTorrent alternatives for downloading."

"Oh, pirates are the most common users of BitTorrent? But BitTorrent is better than traditional server->client downloads. It's a shame, but I guess we have to hinder BitTorrent traffic. Oh, what could have been!"

cookiecaper• 14 years ago

Really there's no reason Firefox and Chrome shouldn't support torrents as a normal download mechanism, default to 1.0 share ratio with a cap of 1/3 upload speed (obviously adjustable), and just let web sites start using it transparently for every file over 20 megs.

BitTorrent is a GREAT content delivery mechanism. It decreases download time, decreases bandwidth costs (for everyone), ensures that file remain available as long as there are seeds (i.e. no way to censor a rogue file from a central point of control (assuming DHT is in use of course)), and checks every chunk and automatically redownloads if corruption is discovered. It's really pretty awesome.

AjithAntony2• 14 years ago

Opera does has built-in torrent support

jedberg• 14 years ago

It's a privacy issue.

Imagine I'm an Evil Doer(tm) and I decide to go to a porn site and download "Sick fetishes 3" just so I can publish the list of IP addresses that were part of my BT swarm.

With BT right now, you as a user are probably savvy enough to know that risk and accept it, but if it was built right into the the browser, a lot of bad things could happen.

It's too bad too, because I'd love to see a much bigger adoption of BT.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

1.0 is too high since the original server is willing to serve a reasonable amount of content and that doesn't even really count as seeding.

jurjenh• 14 years ago

I could imagine a very efficient and quick way for system updates could be built this way. Would reduce hosting and bandwidth costs for the system developers / maintainers and could improve the speed and availability of updates.

The only immediate concern that springs to mind is that if you manage to crack into this channel, you could potentially gain access to millions of computers in next to no time. In fact, I believe botnets work similar to this (from what I can remember of the Reddit botnet AMA...

riobard• 14 years ago

If I remembered correctly, Facebook uses this method to deliver their 1GB PHP-converted-to-C++-then-compiled binary to their server farms because that's the only way they can update without crashing some central servers.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Kazaa already did it. That was their business model.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

Bittorrent exists to make it easier to download large files or sets of files. Large files tend to fall into two major categories: media (video and audio), and large software distributions (.isos or other software updates). So, it doesn't seem at all surprising that bittorrent primarily gets used for downloading media files and software distributions. Both of those categories include many perfectly legitimate downloads, as well as some that infringe someone's copyright.

_delirium• 14 years ago

It's used for distributing large data sets as well, though I suppose whether that's a widespread use is arguable.

Freaky• 14 years ago

In the past 5 months I've downloaded via BitTorrent 35 music albums, 4 game patches, and 2 full games, all acquired legally.

chc• 14 years ago

What legal outlet distributes music via Bittorrent?

dfc2• 14 years ago

http://bt.etree.org

kzrdude• 14 years ago

Miro tried to make it popular, by using it to download periodical video episodes (like news) updated using RSS with .torrent attachments.

PuercoPop2• 14 years ago

3) Downlading World of Warraft

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

3) Game patching (Blizzard (WoW, Starcraft, Diablo), Wargaming.net (World of tanks))

4) Distributing music and movies legally (Sub Pop, Nine Inch Nails, CBC)

5) Backend updates for distributed server systems (Facebook, Twitter)

Etc.

antidoh3• 14 years ago

Louis CK's non-DRM shows got some HN love the other day.

I paid my $5 and proceeded to download, but I have a crappy connection and kept getting disconnected. LCK puts a 4 download limit on his shows.

Easiest thing to do was to find a torrent. I'd already paid my $5, so I felt OK about it. Bonus: it downloaded faster than from his site, and he didn't have to serve all the bits.

smcl• 14 years ago

Wait he's got no DRM but he's slapped a 4 download limit on them? Unless I've misunderstood that seems a bit weird

antidoh3• 14 years ago

"Downloading Linux distributions"

Except at my work, where they monitor and squash torrent connections. Sigh. OK, so I'll tie up the work internet downloading one big file from one busy place.

marquis• 14 years ago

Nine Inch Nails distributes their public remix material by BitTorrent. With session files getting into the many-megabytes I don't believe they'd be able to afford this without BitTorrent, given the number of fans downloading their raw material to remix.

avbor• 14 years ago

Maybe for the client, but another place you can see extensive use of P2P is in gaming. Quite a few game clients have the Peer to Peer downloading built in.

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

I think this is a bit of a straw man. Hasn't the FCC already made it clear that blocking entire protocols is illegal?

And, I don't know that I can recall many content folks arguing that BitTorrent as a whole should be blocked. My memory is that they complain that BitTorrent is heavily used for piracy (which is factually accurate), and propose ways to stop the piracy. For example SOPA did not target BitTorrent as a protocol or technology, but instead tried to shut down foreign websites that provide links to pirated content.

megaman821• 14 years ago

Why do ISPs even bother try to shut down BitTorrent? It is not the protocol that makes people share files. If file-sharers had to they would be sharing files over SMTP. Instead the media companies and ISPs should be using BitTorrent as a way to reduce their distribution costs.

nkassis• 14 years ago

Because it's very bandwidth efficient. It will try to maximize the bandwidth it has available to download and upload which ISP do not want. Sustained 100% usage of your bandwidth is not what they optimize for.

At least that's what I think is their reasoning.

rmc3• 14 years ago

Because lots of people only can BitTorrent. If you stop BT, then lots of your customers who are using bandwidth will give up and get their pirated files elsewhere. A dedicated advanced minority will not.

The purpose of blocking isn't to block all pirating (which it fails at), but to significantly reduce bandwidth (which it does).

ticks• 14 years ago

BitTorrent moves the bandwidth load towards the street-level networking gear, which is expensive to upgrade because there's lots of it. The copyright lobbies just give them a convenient excuse for getting rid of the problem.

ender7• 14 years ago

I just installed Diablo III, most of which was delivered to me via BitTorrent. It worked pretty great.

In theory, Apple et al could also use BT to distribute movies, yes? Have iTunes run a modified BT client that only connects to other approved clients?

libraryatnight• 14 years ago

If there were a TV network sponsored torrent site with a monthly subscription, and no DRM, I would throw my money at them so fast. I doubt this will happen, though.

periferral• 14 years ago

DRM or not, this seems like a great way to distribute content.

hmottestad• 14 years ago

Well. NRK (Norwegian national tv broadcast service) puts a lot of its content online. Since they don't have the bandwidth to handle the large spikes in activity, they publish a lot of this content as torrents.

http://video.nrkbeta.no/torrents/

rvkennedy• 14 years ago

I think BBC iPlayer uses torrents internally to deliver its programmes. There's DRM, but it's not very restrictive. I throw my money at them once a year.

gcb2• 14 years ago

Does valve publish it's bittorrent support anywhere?

besides hiring the guy? i mean, one would think responsible news outlets (are there any?) would request valves comment everytime they publish the RIAA side, since valve profits buckets from it.

MartinCron4• 14 years ago

I've often thought that Podcasts should be distributed over BitTorrent. Every so often Ira Glass comes on the This American Life podcast and mentions that it costs over $100K a year (or whatever) for just the bandwidth of hosting the podcast.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't give directly to support your favorite public radio shows and/or your local public radio station, naturally.

wmf3• 14 years ago

People have been putting torrent links in their RSS for years.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Couldn't he put the file in Dropbox or Google docs get free downloads?

legulere• 14 years ago

There are two problems with it:

First you have to create the possibility for the people to download your podcast as a torrent. This sounds easy but is additional work. A new project that wants to tackle this is http://bitlove.org/ where podcasters just have to add their regular feed and the site will create a bittorrent feed and seed the torrents (extensive German descrpition: http://metaebene.me/2012/05/06/bitlove/)

The other problem is that users need to be able to easily download the torrent feeds. Some bittorrent clients support feeds, but right now only one podcast client understands bittorrent: http://http://www.getmiro.com/

billybob• 14 years ago

I've heard him make the same statement and had the same thought. Is there any downside for them to add a BitTorrent option? Maybe it's just that they can't track the number of downloads?

If that's all, it seems like a small price for drastically reduced hosting costs. And if there isn't already, there should be a protocol for "distribute via BitTorrent but ping the original seeder to let them know".

ralfn• 14 years ago

Miro promotes and supports torrent based (video) podcasts. http://getmiro.com

yanokwa• 14 years ago

I asked some folks at NPR about this a few years back.

I can't seem to find the exact message they sent me, but I believe the issue is that their licensing of content (mostly the music) on the show has specific rules about how that content is distributed (or not distributed).

kschults• 14 years ago

Did you check the actual numbers on that? I was impressed with the speeds I was getting, and figured it must be because they were using a P2P mechanism, but when I looked at the download statistics (in the downloader, there's an option to show network information), and was very surprised that it was almost entirely directly downloaded. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something on the order of 1-2% of the total download.

That said, as someone else alluded to, maintaining that CDN with that bandwidth is probably crushingly expensive, and is something only Blizzard and a few others could pull off.

shin_lao• 14 years ago

Blizzard is a known BitTorrent user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29#Softw...

frio2• 14 years ago

Yes -- and no. You have to remember that outside of a few countries, unlimited internet isn't ubiquitous. Admittedly, NZ is basically a worst-case scenario (we're connected to the rest of the world by a single pipe, access to which is - was - priced expensively), and we've recently seen an explosion of data caps ($130 for 550GiB from one provider, now), but that's only a very recent development. Some ISPs charge up to $2 a GiB - still.

So, using BT and seeding becomes a less valid option. Still, I'll happily admit that things are changing, and if NZ is a yardstick of the bad, then BT as a distribution mechanism (backed by, say, Akamai or other CDNs) for legal content could definitely take off.

uggedal• 14 years ago

Woulden't bittorrent be beneficial in NZ for popular torrents since not everybody needs to download the entire content through the Southern Cross Cable but instead could download some from local NZ peers?

zurn• 14 years ago

> outside of a few countries, unlimited internet isn't ubiquitous

Reference?

oskarth• 14 years ago

There are some somewhat big, and most importantly legal, actors that do this already for music :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Technical_information

gcb2• 14 years ago

you just made their case against bittorrent easier!

Ubuntu have a bittorrent client, and everyone knows that's only used to pirate movies and music! so it's a facilitator.

radarsat1• 14 years ago

It's too bad debtorrent hasn't taken off. It won't happen until it's made available by default.

B-Con• 14 years ago

> One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things. Efforts to explain that this is not necessarily true are often met with hands clamped tightly over ears, accompanied by "I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA."

When has this actually happened? I don't know of anyone who has said that bittorrent is inherently illegal, they've just argued that it's mostly used for illegal activities. It's not that bars are illegal, it's that 80% of the people in that bar meet to smuggle things on the black market. That invites attention toward the medium.

It's a valid complaint. Bittorrent is abused for piracy a lot. It's silly to pretend otherwise. But this is a case where you can't shut down the medium just because it's abused. In some cases it actually is a perfectly valid solution, but this just isn't one of them.

I think that they might come to understand that, but I don't think they assume bittorrent is itself illegal. They just see it as a medium for copyright infringement. Who wouldn't at least consider attacking a widely abused medium?

throwaway54-762• 14 years ago

What's faster than one mirror and works when bittorrent doesn't? Twenty mirrors:

  aria2c --split=20 MIRROR1 MIRROR2 MIRROR3 MIRROR4 … MIRROR20

readme• 14 years ago

Of course the people who wont listen to you are probably ignorant enough to think that using free software is stealing the opportunity of a proprietary software developer to make a sale.

todd3834• 14 years ago

Ubuntu is the only thing I ever use BitTorrent for and I'm so happy BitTorrent exists when I need to download Ubuntu

rglover• 14 years ago

I think Hollywood should try one of the following:

1.) Limited, free, online streaming of films (a la NPR doing previews of new music releases).

2.) Seed torrents of films that are heavily advertised. Essentially, give consumers the whole film, but overlay ads during it or edit in commercial breaks.

3.) Post the first :30 minutes of new films as torrents/streaming and offer a few bucks off your movie ticket if you check it out in theaters.

Any of these could easily be attempted for a new major release. Pick a film that's almost guaranteed to be a hit and try one of the above. You're bound to get some interesting data either way.

mjwalshe4• 14 years ago

No one realy needs to use bit torrent to download distros I must have built 10 od machines from distros in the last 9 months - just dowload the net isntall (which is tiny) and do it that way

Will is clutching at straws here

yalooze• 14 years ago

Bittorrent integration with Steam would be a godsend on release days. Obviously they would need to consider those users whose uploads count towards their limit, but still.

mcos• 14 years ago

I've always thought that using some sort of internal torrent mechanism would be a good way for applications to download their updates, especially something like Chrome, which updates quite frequently.

Wil Wheaton: Yo Hollywood, Let Me Download Ubuntu

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