The geeks will always win!
Written by Ernesto on February 08, 2006In a reaction to the BitTorrent encryption article posted two days ago, futurist, trends and innovation expert Jim Carroll pointed me to a related keynote address he gave during the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers conference last month.
Carrol warns the cable companies not to make the same mistake as the music industry did by “going [...]
In a reaction to the BitTorrent encryption article posted two days ago, futurist, trends and innovation expert Jim Carroll pointed me to a related keynote address he gave during the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers conference last month.
Carrol warns the cable companies not to make the same mistake as the music industry did by “going to war” with it’s (geeky) customers.
In his talk he advised cable engineers to embrace new technologies like file-sharing and Ip-tv and Voip instead of fighting new technologies like the music industry did with MP3’s.
“Do you really want to go to war with your customers?” he asked. “The music industry went to war with its customers and look where it got them. Do you want to repeat that history? The geeks will always win because they can always rewrite the code”
Carrol urged cable officials to view the new technologies as market opportunities to be exploited rather than competitive threats to be squashed (full article).
Apparently cable providers like Shaw and Rogers don’t agree. They continue to limit the use of BitTorrent, the most traffic consuming filesharing protocol hereby starting the war between the “traffic shapers” and the “encrypters”.
uTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeus one of the pioneers of BitTorrent encryption is motivated to fight the BitTorrent throttling. In an interview with Slyck he states:
I’d like all users to be able to use BitTorrent and be able to upload and download. After all, BT is being used in many legal things, including distribution of public domain content, patches for games, and so on. An ISP shouldn’t be able to block a legitimate protocol.
Sounds fair to me…
Previously: Opera integrates BitTorrent in their Browser
Next: BitTorrent to sue misusers of it’s name
30 Responses
geek? speak for yourselves….but yep its true all hail the geeks
I am working on my degree in geek…as for this article, we can’t even stop terrorist from using the internet and sharing video’s of training idiots how to blow themselves up…stop fussing about my uploads and do something constructive, like save peoples lives.
As much as I find i annoying that ISP’s throttles BitTorrent, I must say how much I hate when people say that “BitTorrent is used for many legal purposes as well” because that’s just not true. 99.9% of the traffic is illegal.
“As much as I find i annoying that ISP’s throttles BitTorrent, I must say how much I hate when people say that “BitTorrent is used for many legal purposes as well” because that’s just not true. 99.9% of the traffic is illegal.”
By Boudreaux on 02.08.06 3:01 am
I believe you’ve misread that statement. “BitTorrent is used for many legal purposes AS WELL”. Not solely.
C’mon Boudreaux! 99.9%?? Where exactly did you get that figure?
I guess you are one of the .1% of people that use bittorrent legally?
My Ass! The truth is that there actually IS quite a bit of LEGAL content on the bittorrent network….
Go get a job with the MPAA already!
I for one downloaded fedora core from the official fedora torrent, and there were about 2000 peers and as many seeders. That is more than any illegal torrent I’ve ever seen. The most on an illegal torrent I’ve had would be around 100. So as far as 99.9% being illegal, I think you’re making things up just because you think people will believe you.
I’m also starting my “geek” degree this year, and I can say that we will always win because as the article says “we can re write the code.”
The way I see it, I pay almost 50 bucks a month for a 6 meg connection with 60 gb up/download. I should be able to use it as I please.
I agree that Bordeaux’s comment is hardly true, a closer guess would be aroun 50-60% of traffic is illegal. As far as Poohed goes, you are paying for the right to use the bandwidth, if your isp decides that you aren’t using it legally or are violating there terms of service than they can do what they want.
Big Companies need to remember, you can beat a (Proper noun) but you can’t beat a (common noun ie. online community).
The fact remains that BT can be implemented rather easily for legal file sharing. My ISP shouldn’t have any say in how fast I download the new Ubuntu Linux live cd, just because I’m using BT to get it.
I think some MMORPG {Online games} use bit torrent / file sharing for patches? {World of Warcraft?}
But most people use it for illegal stuff.
“…Big Companies need to remember, you can beat a (Proper noun) but you can’t beat a (common noun ie. online community).”
By MasterBuck on 02.08.06 4:14 pm
To be fair, if “Big Companies” constitutes a proper noun, I can’t see why “online communities” doesn’t as well.
If I read too much into the capitalization of “Companies” then I suppose that would make big companies merely a common noun, and therefore, according to your cute saying, something that can’t be beaten.
@John: Jeez, that was really anal.
@Boudreaux: Prove what you said. Show me that 99+% of BT traffic is illegal. And don’t even think on common sense, bring me facts.
If you can’t, then stop talking rubbish.
Just a thought…
Government’s job is supposed to reflect the will of the people…
If most of the people are doing something illegal…
Doesn’t that mean that it’s a problem with the government, not the people?
Well how exactly do the ISPs plan to ban bittorent??? When all you have to do is change the ports and presto! no more banning…thinking they can just ban the the regular bittorrent ports wont work. unless they monitor your upload/download traffic and start capping you.
“When all you have to do is change the ports and presto! no more banning”
As an example, Rogers has software they created that is *supposed* to recognize what the traffic is and deny passage to what they decide shouldn’t go through. It’s impossible to make a computer think critically, they just do what they’re told by a programmer and the user.
WELL LET THEM BAN WAT THEY WANT, OR EVEN SHUT DOWN THE NET, BUT BEFORE THEY ACHIEVE THAT IT`S OUR TIME
“When all you have to do is change the ports and presto! no more banning”
Doesn’t quite work like that.
Bandwidth shaping technologies look into the packet header and determines the protocol from that – so regardless of what port you use, P2P traffic gets blocked.
This is why header encryption of the bittorrent protocol is causing such media attention – because their expensive new software to shape your bandwidth is not going to work.
I wish that ISP’s would not block bittorrent protocol’s like everyone else.But where i live its not only the ISP’s doing the blocking now.
I worked at a college property not long back as a maintenance tech.And out of my apartment there i built custom computers for clients of mine.
The property had a 1 GIG download limit there.When i hit that limit for the first time the server shut my internet off.
When i asked why my net was shut off i was told by my manager that this had been done to stop p2p and bittorrent programs due to virus’s getting into thier system.
My opinion “no matter how this is viewed
it is another right being taken away from us”
Well i think many of you are arguing about the wrong thing. I would agree that most of the data transfered is illigal but thats not the point.
but if i were you i wouldnt worry to much.
Look what happened when napster died. 20 new ones sprung up to take its place.
And anyway soon the internet will be so standard and unoposed the big companies wont have any choice their connections will soon be given away for free.
some are already doing so. so what do they care.
As more and more rules are enforced, more and more ways and reasons appear to break those rules. No matter what they impliment to prevent illegal activity, no matter how complex their solution. There will always be one person (or perhaps many) who are better skilled than those who implimented it and can therefor develop a way around it. The only question is, how long before it effects someone with those skills.
All this trouble to shut down p2p technology, the ability to share files.. They must have realized that if they cant even keep there software from being reverse engineered, that there gonna keep the online communities from comming up with ways around the bandwidth limiting.. All there doing is fighting a lost cause to many stupid people paying smart people lots of money to stop something that cant be stopped..
BitTorrent is used mainly for sharing illegal content. Have you ever did a search for a copyrighted software on music from isohunt.com or raphustle.com They even have movies. Raphustle.com shows how many times a download has been completed. I’ve seen movies on there that are completed 12000 times. The minimum music is illegal shared is 2000-8000 times. I can’t say I ever seen a site with legal content for torrents. The first time I used a torret was to download linux software. Since then torrents are used to search and get much more illegal material. I think torrents should be banned, it’s just napster without the search program, so you go to a website and search for the illegal material.
@whocare: that’s just asinine. Banned? The torrent protocol isn’t a network like Napster, and unlike Napster, torrent clients are not designed or advertised specifically for transferring questionable content. There are many beneficial uses to it. Our own government (US) angencies even use it! NASA has all of their huge files available on torrents and run their own trackers and seeders.
Banning torrents because they _can_ be used for illicit content is just silly.
By your logic, we should also ban the ftp protocol as well, since it is also widely used for illicit content.
In fact, peer-to-peer transfers with instant messengers and DCC’s with IRC can also be used for illicit content, so lets ban all of those to.
Guess what! There’s a lot of illicit content using the http protocol as well! So lets ban that too.
You can find illicit content on the newsgroups, so lets ban the nntp protocol.
You can even get illicit content through mail-reply servers like in the 80’s. We’ll have to ban pop3/smtp/imap4 too..
In fact, any protocol you can use to transfer a file, can be used to get illicit content, so we’ll have to ban _ALL_ file transferring protocols, so that just leaves us telnet.
Hmm, no wait. We used to use Z-modem and uucico with telnet connections, so we can transfer files with telnet too, so we’ll have to ban that.
Bottom line, is the tcp/ip system itself, is designed for transferring data. Only way to be sure would be to ban the whole internet itself…
Your position is stupid. The torrent protocol is on par with the ftp protocol and other protocols.
I suppose if someone gets shot and killed, you think it is the gun’s fault too?
Get real, and take your head out of your ass…
– Smoovious
shudder rill?reflexively squat!Pasternak screwball redesigned Sally?
This is what i think… I think you guys are little prissy bitches that just want another thing to bitch about. In defence to Bit Torrent.. Ive gotten terabytes and terabytes of GREAT downloads. You guys just want another thing to bitch about just enjoy the free downloads. And look at it like this, if there was no bit torrent.. there would just be another way to get illegal stuff. As soon as bit torrent is put to rest… theirs going to be something new and improved to get around the laws. So bitch about that you fuckin tree huginf hippies.
Hey,
Great stuff here!
I’ll definitely bookmark this place and come back soon.
Rhett
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