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BitTorrent Still Dominates Internet’s Upstream Traffic
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- larrik 11y ago"While BitTorrent has many legitimate uses most data is transferred by pirated files." - is this just an assumption, or is there actual data to back this up? Seems like it may not be the easiest thing to track (especially with a lot of people trying to claim all torrent traffic as piracy).
- Thaxll 11y agoLet's face it, 99% of torrent is copyrighted material. It's no secret.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoI'd wager that rates of copyright infringement over HTTP are also exorbitantly high (think of how frequently images are reproduced, for instance). This is the fallacy of equating a neutral distribution medium to the contents shared within.
- jhasse 11y agoIs World of Warcraft still using Bittorrent?
- ultramancool 11y agoNot sure if Blizzard still does, but even Windows 10 does peer to peer updating now.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoAmazon uses bittorrent to transfer things in their cloud as well.
- riskable 11y agoI'm guessing that actually 100% of BitTorrent traffic is of copyrighted material. There may be one or two torrents of content in the public domain but last I checked everything is copyrighted. Of course, whether or not something is copyrighted has very little to do with whether or not it is legal to distribute via BitTorrent.
- Xylakant 11y agoLet's face it, 101% of all numbers on the internet are made up. It's no secret.
- nitrogen 11y agoEspecially when preceded by "let's face it" or "let's be honest".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sp332 11y agoUnlicensed copyrighted material. Everything is copyrighted by default and almost nothing has expired yet. But if you get a distribution license, then it's not illegal to distribute copyrighted software.
- api 11y ago"While some hookahs are indeed used to smoke tobacco..."
- throwaway1119 11y agoMy startup monitors bittorrent traffic globally. 80,000 data points a second. I have been monitoring bittorrent traffic for 9 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As of this second, there are 9,151,043 torrents in the system. Out of the 9,151,043 torrents, 9,056,412 are pirated copies of either Software, Games, Music, Movies or TV. 98.9%
- mikeash 11y agoHow do the numbers look if you compare data transferred rather than just torrent count? Seems like that would be a better measure. I'd expect that to actually skew even more towards pirating, though.
- mirimir 11y agoWhat's the breakout on a throughput basis? I'm maybe a little surprised that Linux ISOs account for so little. But then, I'm obviously out of touch.
- larrik 11y agoI guess my question becomes, does the articles description of 'bittorrent' include all p2p file sharing? I feel like a ton of video games and even software like Linux use p2p for downloads and patching. Your answer was the sort of thing I was hoping for, although % of torrents may not be an accurate representation of share of traffic. Of course, it could very well be.
- Bedon292 11y agoDoes that take into account private trackers? And I too would like to know more about the actual amounts download.
- exelius 11y agoI would say that's a fairly accurate statement. While there are some legitimate users of BitTorrent (Blizzard is the most notable example) the vast majority of torrent traffic is pirated files. And it makes sense, as those pirated files have largely been driven away from being served over HTTP/HTTPS, whereas for "legal" file distribution, HTTP/HTTPS are often a lot easier to set up.
- dorfsmay 11y agoThe comparison is confusing... "Netflix", "Google Cloud", "HTTP", "SSL = OTHER". Aren't Netflix and Google cloud using http and https? Also, no mention of video chat. I believe google hangout, zoom.us, appear.in etc... work in peer to peer fashion when conferencing one on one, which is probably more difficult to measure, but I'm sure are significant contributor towards upstream usage. This is really important because the upstream bandwidth offered by ISPs right now is ridiculous, and if the perception is that only "pirate" using BitTorrent use upstream, it's not going to get better any time soon.
- jo909 11y ago>The comparison is confusing... "Netflix", "Google Cloud", "HTTP", "SSL = OTHER". Aren't Netflix and Google cloud using http and https? Obviously this means "all HTTP(S) traffic we could not associate otherwise" > Also, no mention of video chat. I believe google hangout, zoom.us, appear.in etc... work in peer to peer fashion when conferencing one on one, which is probably more difficult to measure, but I'm sure are significant contributor towards upstream usage. Facetime is listed as 2.55%. I would guess all other video chat providers are way smaller. > This is really important because the upstream bandwidth offered by ISPs right now is ridiculous, and if the perception is that only "pirate" using BitTorrent use upstream, it's not going to get better any time soon. Well you could also say that over 70% of upstream bandwith is used for other protocols.
- Xylakant 11y ago> This is really important because the upstream bandwidth offered by ISPs right now is ridiculous I see it as an indication that the current internet infrastructure is geared towards delivering content from a centralized instance rather than peer-to-peer services such as video chat, content sharing, streaming etc. Many consumer ISPs explicitly forbid serving content. It's a pity since some applications would benefit from symmetric lines. However, if everybody would be running their own home server we'd require a level of competence that's just not there in the general population - and probably never will since not everybody can be an IT expert. (just like I tend to rely on medical professionals if I need to). In that respect, I find the notion of "X dominates the upstream" when X is one of the few applications where people currently use upstream on a constant basis pretty useless and unsurprising.
- hackuser 11y agoHow is Netflix second in upstream traffic, at 6.78%? What are users sending to Netflix besides an occasional request for more data and maybe some telemetry?
- jhasse 11y agoI guess it's not only counting users but also Netflix' servers sending their streams to users all around the world.
- josu 11y agoThen, shouldn't the up and down stream be symmetric?
- jhasse 11y agoMaybe not if North Americans are uploading more then downloading ;)
- andreasley 11y agoIf that were so, the statistics for Upstream and Downstream would be identical. All upstream is downstream for someone else. Very few packets get lost. :) The question is: What is meant by "traffic" in this report? Is it the amount of bytes? The number of packets? The number of requests? It's not entirely clear.
- sjbase 11y agoI had the same question. I could only find info from 2013, but it seems like the content protocol for Netflix ("DASH") is heavily synchronous [1] where "the client requests one chunk [of video] at a time via HTTP." Really small video chunks == more responsive controls (e.g. rewind) but chatty control band. [1]: https://technifyme.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/netflix-uncovered/ https://technifyme.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/netflix-uncovere...
- jo909 11y agoMost of that are "I got that packet, now you can send more" aka "ACK" packets.
- riskable 11y agoI'm skeptical of these figures. Nearly all BitTorrent traffic is encrypted and is indistinguishable from HTTPS/SSL traffic. How do they know that a host sending encrypted traffic to a handful of other hosts is BitTorrent traffic? It could be any number of things.
- ultramancool 11y ago> I'm skeptical of these figures. Nearly all BitTorrent traffic is encrypted and is indistinguishable from HTTPS/SSL traffic. Since when? While most Bittorrent traffic uses encryption, but that encryption is not SSL, it does not use standard HTTP or HTTPS ports, in fact it often uses uTP which is not even TCP but UDP based. No bittorrent client I'm aware of makes any attempt to masquerade as HTTPS traffic. Some VPNs do, but that's about it. Bittorrent traffic using these protocols is trivially detectable and measurable, you just can't see inside of the connections (ie: know what content is being uploaded or downloaded) without doing an MITM, as they use a simple key exchange to prevent passive snooping, but you can see plenty of metadata, ports, protocol handshakes, etc to identify the protocol as a bittorrent protocol.
- rakoo 11y ago> While most Bittorrent traffic uses encryption Just to be clear: there is an extension to make bittorrent use "encryption" (http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Message_Stream_Encryption http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Message_Stream_Encryption), but while it does use crypto primitives its design make it closer to an "obfuscation" scheme than a real "encryption" scheme. In the words of the author himself (https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/ https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inven...): > The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping.
- sandworm101 11y agoHow was this measured? From my perspective, from knowing and chatting with semi-professional sharers daily, most bitorrrent traffic is encrypted. Torrent clients can all encrypt and are generally set to use only encrypted connections. And serious sharers have switched to VPNs en mass. So how was all this bittorrent traffic identified? Fyi, there are some tricks for overcoming bittorent encryption. I've used them to identify what was is shared across private networks (schools) but the techniques involve some trickery that is probably illegal on the public internet.
- nitrogen 11y agoMy guess: metadata. Any outgoing packets to IPs that don't reverse resolve to a non-ISP with high source and destination ports could be BT. Add a flow-based heuristic and measure packet entropy and maybe you can be quite accurate.
- exelius 11y agoThat's basically how you do it. Torrent packets have a certain "signature" (you can usually even determine the client from this, even if all traffic is encrypted). That, and torrent traffic is pretty leaky... even if you are encrypting, not all of your peers are.
- david_shaw 11y agoEven if the traffic is encrypted, it's still identifiable as BitTorrent. As another example, I can also see and measure HTTPS traffic, even though I'm unable to read the data itself. Assuming the traffic's being analyzed at a backbone level, it shouldn't matter that it's over VPNs, either -- it's still going to be BitTorrent traffic from some address, even if the "actual" source is unknown.
- sandworm101 11y agoNot really. Https traffic is easily identifiable via port numbers. Bittorrent does have its preferences but isn't tied to a particular port. Encryption was specifically designed to prevent torrent traffic from being identified as such by ISPs, to prevent throttling efforts. So any successful identification of bittorrent traffic by at the ISP level is an issue to be addressed. My usual client (transmission) actually picks a random port every time it starts. That does seem the norm for serious filesharers, which I also assume are responsible for a large percentage of torrent traffic.