4 ms·

Honest question: is bittorrent even still a thing?

• iwaffles 8y ago
  It is. For both legitimate and nefarious uses. Bigger software/game devs still use bittorrent to distribute patches and updates—World of Warcraft is an example.
• d33 8y ago
  It definitely still is. And with the concept of private trackers, it's not really a simple thing to turn off. Companies like IP Echelon tend to automatically bully US/cloud users, but in general they're IMHO far from killing the network. The only problem is that there's fewer and fewer torrent search engines...
  • sametmax 8y ago
    tameme.fr is my new fav.
• sametmax 8y ago
  Last month I download 2 linux ISO with it for work. This month all the seasons of the pretender for fun. Facebook used to deploy their code using bittorent. I doubt it has changed. A lot of blizzard video games update using bittorent as well. If you play Starcraft 2, you use bittorent. Streaming services like stremio are basically bittorent. After netflix, it's my main source of video content. If you want to download the internet archive, that's the saner option. Same if you are a pentester, as a lot of heavy leak or hash db are so huge only bittorent makes it practical. Too expensive to host for one small actor. It's also more resistant to take down notice. We talked a lot about RSS lately, and how to revive it, while in comments people said it actually never died. Bittorrent is a lot like that. Great tech, great standard, it works flawlessly and fill its use case perfectly. The only reason it's not more adopted is because it's not in the browser by default. Otherwise the hosting benefit and the dl speed is such that it would be an instant hit.
  • scrollaway 8y ago
    Blizzard games no longer use BitTorrent but a proprietary http-based protocol called ngdp. BitTorrent was causing a lot of issues with firewalls so users were disabling it, so they had added http mirrors to them... And then CDNs became a thing, the rest is history. I'll be happy to give more details on ngdp if you are curious.
    • sametmax 8y ago
      Please.
      • scrollaway 8y ago
        Here, I pulled my docs for ya: https://gist.github.com/jleclanche/91f2f5c0f2042a81db1c61464ae6d459 https://gist.github.com/jleclanche/91f2f5c0f2042a81db1c61464... They basically created their own git protocol + virtual filesystem, optimized for asset patches inside large compressed binary files. I wish they'd open source it.
        • exikyut 8y ago
          That was interesting to poke through. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140257
• coolspot 8y ago
  If you are asking about torrents and pirate community, then yes - it is alive and well. However it is usually through VPN, not Tor.
  • mirimir 8y ago
    Torrenting through Tor overloads relays, increasing latency and throttling bandwidth for other users. Also, it's unworkably slow. Just use nested VPN chains.
• Rjevski 8y ago
  If my movie library is of any indication, yes it’s definitely still a thing. (And before you say anything, I do pay for Netflix and have video included in my Amazon Prime membership - none of which had those movies)
• toxican 8y ago
  Of course it is. It didn't go away because you don't use it.