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I can imagine a few things : 1. BitTorrent has a bad rep. Most people still associate it with just illegal download. 2. It requires slightly more complex fire
by maeln 1y ago
I can imagine a few things :
1. BitTorrent has a bad rep. Most people still associate it with just illegal download.
2. It requires slightly more complex firewall rules, and asking the network admin to put them in place might raise some eyebrow for reason 1. On very restrictive network, they might not want to allow them at all due to the fact that it opens the door for, well, BitTorrent.
3. A BitTorrent client is more complicated than an HTTP client, and not installed on most company computer / ci pipeline (for lack of need, and again reason 1.). A lot of people just want to `curl` and be done with it.
4. A lot of people think they are required to seed, and for some reason that scare the hell of them.
Overall, I think it is mostly 1 and the fact that you can just simply `curl` stuff and have everything working.
I do sadden me that people do not understand how good of a file transfer protocol BT is and how it is underused. I do remember some video game client using BT for updates under the hood, and peertube use webtorrent, but BT is sadly not very popular.
- simonmales 1y agoAt least the planet download offers BitTorrent. https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/
- lostmsu 1y agoSo does Wikipedia https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents Truly the last two open web titans.
- _def 1y ago> A lot of people think they are required to seed, and for some reason that scare the hell of them. Some of the reasons consists of lawyers sending put costly cease and desist letters even to "legitimate" users
- skrebbel 1y agoFor seeding map data?
- swiftcoder 1y agoParticularly if your torrent traffic is encrypted, they don't always bother to check what you are torrenting
- skrebbel 1y agoAre you just theorizing, or is there precedent of this? I mean of lawyers sending cease and desist letters to people torrenting random encrypted streams of data?
- swiftcoder 1y agoWhen I was working in p2p research, we used to get regular C&Ds just for scraping the tracker (not even downloading anything!). IP holders be wilding
- skrebbel 1y agoAppreciate your response, madness indeed!
- squigz 1y agoDo companies send out C&Ds for your average user torrenting? I've gotten thousands of DMCA letters but never a C&D, and I've only ever heard of 1 person getting one, and they were silly enough to be hosting a collection of paid content that they scraped themselves, from their home. DMCA demands are, as far as I'm aware, completely automated and couldn't really cost much.
- Fokamul 1y agoLol, bad rep? Interesting, in my country everybody is using it to download movies :D Even more so now, after this botched streaming war. (EU)
- maeln 1y agoWhich is exactly why it has a bad rep. In most people mind BitTorrent = illegal download.
- _zoltan_ 1y agodownloading movies for personal use is legal in many countries.
- ahofmann 1y agoThis is a useless discussion. Imagine how the firewall-guy/network-team in your company will react to that argument.
- loa_in_ 1y agoThis is not a useless discussion just because it'll inconvenience someone who is at work anyway.
- _flux 1y agoHow about the uploading part of it, which is behind the magic of Bittorrent and default mode of operation?
- lobochrome 1y agoReally?? Which countries allow copyright infringement by individuals?
- Pooge 1y agoNone. Because you projected your country's laws in the discussion, you failed to see that the countries that allow copyrighted material to be downloaded for personal usage do not qualify that download as "copyright infringement" in the first place. To answer your question with the only answer I know: Switzerland.
- joao 1y agoAt a previous job, I was downloading daily legal torrent data when IT flagged me. The IT admin, eager to catch me doing something wrong, burst into the room shouting with management in tow. I had to calmly explain the situation, as management assumed all torrenting was illegal and there had been previous legal issues with an intern pirating movies. Fortunately, other colleagues backed me up.
- Yoric 1y agoHey, ages ago, as an intern, I have been flagged for BitTorrent downloads. As it turned out, I was downloading/sharing Ubuntu isos, so things didn't escalate too far, but it was a scary moment. So, I'm not using BT at work anymore.
- Symbiote 1y agoI left a Linux ISO (possibly Ubuntu) seeding on a lab computer at university, and forgot about it after I'd burned the DVD. You can see this was a while ago. A month later an IT admin came to ask what I might be doing with port 6881. Once I remembered, we went to the tracker's website and saw "imperial.ac.uk" had the top position for seeding, by far. The admin said to leave running.
- belter 1y agoS3 had BitTorrent support for a long time... "S3 quietly deprecates BitTorrent support" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549
- em-bee 1y agoseeding is uploading after you are done downloading. but you are already uploading while you are still downloading. and that can't be turned off. if seeding scares someone, then uploading should scare them too. so they are right, because they are required to upload.
- foobarbecue 1y agoSome BitTorrent clients make it easier to set than others, but if it's a healthy torrent I often limit upload rate to so slow that it doesn't transfer anything up. Ratio is 0.00 and I still get 100s of mb/s.
- ProtoAES256 1y agoIf you are in the scene long enough, you should have known that there are some uncooperative clients that always send 0% (Xunlei being one of the more notorious example with their VIP schemes, and later on they would straight up spoof their client string when people started blocking them). Being a leecher nowadays is almost a norm for a lot of users, and I don't blame them since they are afraid of consequences in a more regulated jurisdiction. But a must seed when leech requirement? Hoho no, that's more like a suggestion.
- account42 1y ago> Hoho no, that's more like a suggestion. For public trackers maybe.
- maeln 1y ago> but you are already uploading while you are still downloading. and that can't be turned off Almost every client let you set uploading limit, which you can set at 0. The only thing that generate upload bp usage that cannot be deactivated would be protocol stuff (but you can deactivate part of bt like using the DHT).
- alternatetwo 1y agoTransmission allows turning this off by setting upload to 0. It's simply a client setting, but most clients don't offer it.
- out_of_protocol 1y ago> It requires slightly more complex firewall rules, and asking the network admin to put them in place might raise some eyebrow for reason 1 Well, in many such situations data is provided for free, putting huge burden on the other side. Even it it's a little bit less convenient it makes service a lot more sustainable. I imagine torrent for free tier and direct download as a premium option would work perfectly
- thomastjeffery 1y agoI wish... I overpay more than double market value for my connection, and am not allowed to configure my router. This is the norm for most apartment dwellers in the US as far as I'm aware.
- out_of_protocol 1y agoVPN is a thing
- thomastjeffery 1y agoSure, but I would also like to be able to forward ports. Right now, my best workaround is tailnet, which requires a client.
- amelius 1y agoBad rep ... You know what has a bad rep? Big companies that use and trade my personal information like they own it. I'll start caring about copyrights when governments force these big companies to care about my information.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoWebtorrent exists. It uses webrtc to let users connect to each other. There's support in popular trackers. This basically handles every problem stated. There's nothing to install on computers: it's just js running on the page. There's no firewall rules or port forwarding to setup, all handled by the stun/turn in webrtc. Users wouldn't necessarily even be aware they are uploading.
- account42 1y agoSTUN is not always possible and TURN means proxying the connection through a server which would be counter-productive for the purpose of using bit-torrent as an alternative to direct HTTP downloads as you are now paying for the bandwidth in both directions. This is very much not a problem with magic solutions.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoAgreed! But STUN's success rate is pretty good! As the number of peers goes up it should be less likely that one would need to use TURN to connect to a peer, but I am skeptical webrtc is built to fall back like this, to try other peers first. The advantage is that at least it's all builtin. It's not a magic solution, but it's a pretty good solution, with fallbacks builtin for when the networking gets in the way of the magic.
- account42 1y ago5. Most residential internet connections are woefully underprovisioned for upload so anything that uses it more (and yes you need people to seed for bittorrent to make sense) can slow down the entire connection. 6. Service providers have little control over the service level of seeders and thus the user experience. And that's before you get malicious users.