Tracking a BitTorrent Swarm in Google Earth
Do you ever wonder where all the seeds and peers on your torrent come from, and what their houses look like? P2p-monitor.com developed a great tool to visualize a real life BitTorrent swarm in Google Earth.
With the swarm plugin for Google Earth you can lookup the BitTorrent client that is used by each peer, what percentage of the file they downloaded so far, and their exact location. Currently it only shows seed and peers for torrents that contain the word “Borat”.
I can’t really tell how accurate the stats for the swarm are. It looks like Poland, the country where p2pmonitor.com originates, is overrepresented. Apart from this, it is fun to see where all the bits and pieces come from, and it makes you realize how global a BitTorrent swarm actually is.
It would even be better if you were able to hook it up to your own BitTorrent client, so you can pay leechers a visit if their share ratio is not what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps an idea for a future release of this tool?
Try for yourself.
