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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty glad that torrents have started to break out of the "it's only for warez" stereotype. It's a useful technology, regardless of what made it popular.

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That happened around 2008. Or even earlier; Linux distros were being distributed via Bittorrent back in 2006. https://torrentfreak.com/popular-linux-distro-torrents/

When I was younger I would only download these via bittorent because our connection was extremely unreliable and bittorent was always restartable.

Even now I do the same. In india direct downloads are slightly slower. I guess it's to do with the mirror location or something else. Torrent makes it much faster

Probably because tcp or http or both are throttled somewhere. Bit torrent uses any port and lots of connections so throttling is much less effective.

Same in China. The Chinese firewall throttles TCP connections making direct downloads very slow. Not uncommon to have an unbearable slow connection while browsing web pages and then when starting a torrent download, you immediately get 2 Megabytes per second download speeds here.

A tip is to use a tool like axel (https://github.com/eribertomota/axel) to do direct downloads. This will usually speed it up.

>My name is Eriberto and I am not a C developer. I imported Axel from its old repository[1] to GitHub (the original homepage and developers are inactive)

Uh oh. Thanks to the repo owner for updating the README, but that's not a good situation.

I'd also like to suggest aria2c for this purpose: https://aria2.github.io/

I think the grandparent was talking about the general perception of torrenting

Oh, I know that programmers and hackers and whatnot knew torrents were cool; I'm talking about non-technical people.

For example, until fairly recently, if I mentioned a "torrent" to my non-technical mom, she would assume I meant ThePirateBay or something like that. Nowadays, she knows it as just another means to download files.

Not sure Academic Torrents is the best example of a use of torrents for "non-technical people".

That's a fair point; I guess what I was trying to get at is that when I worked for NYU, I think it would have been an incredibly tough sell to use torrents in any capacity, because of the stigma of piracy. However, I think if I were to pitch it now, there would be serious consideration.

Actually, World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and I think it used BitTorrent for patch distribution from the beginning.

So very legitimate uses date quite some time back (as you would expect).

I remember a game called "GunZ" (the 2005 one, i think) internally using torrents to propagate updates. But it was a long time ago.

I saw a game do that recently. It makes a lot of sense to use torrents and reduce bandwidth on their servers.

A huge number of games used torrents for patching since around that time, notably in the MMO scene. WoW and every Nexon game come to mind. AFAIK the Battle.net launcher still downloads updates via torrent.

The Blizzard updater is actually a very cool download utility, worth hacking/poking at.

AFAIK it pioneered the concept of "web seeds", using HTTP GETs with a Range: header to download specific chunks from a CDN that were not healthy/available in the swarm.

I completely forgot about GunZ doing that. I guess I was wrong; torrents have been taken seriously for awhile :D

None of that changed the popular stereotype. And Linux distros, etc. have never been more than a fraction of the volume of warez torrents.

I wish it was use more for distributing Linux package updates, a la DebTorrent.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent

This could take off it only a big player like Ubuntu pushed it. I don't see why we depend on a set of centralized servers for a bunch of files that a huge number of people download on a very regular basis.

And yet, the idea has been stagnant for years.

Edit: By which I mean, it works, but not enough people use it.

I totally agree; what really bothers me about current OS's is that they all depend on something centralized, so if, for example, Canonical went broke, I wouldn't be able to install new packages on my Ubuntu laptop.

I'm aware that you can swap out the PPAs as needed, but I would really like something distributed and decentralized.

It's all listed in your link, but the biggest reason is that Bittorrent was inherently built to distribute static content, and the packages is an ever-changing list. Which means that you'd have upstream servers constantly calculating new torrent files and distributing them. Moreover Bittorrent makes it real easy for an observer to know what packages you're installing, and thus what version you have.

See this alternative that uses similar idea but not real Bittorrent, they worked around the 1st problem: http://www.camrdale.org/apt-p2p/

So not entirely stagnant ;)

I still don't see why Ubuntu/Debian/et al don't take this (or something like it) up in a more official manner. I can see why it's not a default of course, but it could be made a question during installation for example.

An additional benefit would be that you'd be able to source packages from machines on your local network, with fallback to the internet, and it would all be pretty much automatic and configuration-free.

I'm pretty sure the security issue (Everybody knows you have old packages) is a good point against this system, but it's true, I'd love to see this system more widespread.

For the local network part at least, it's really not that complicated to implement, all you have to do is to listen for announces on the network and ask those peers before asking remotely; there is a standard example for archlinux in pacserve (http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/pacserve/) with my own very crude reimplemantation (https://github.com/rakoo/paclan)

apt-p2p and debtorrent are entirely dead. The person who created them seems to be MIA from Debian. The bootstrap nodes are dead. Both packages are orphaned. apt-p2p will not be in the next release of Debian and debtorrent was removed from the last release of Debian.

Agreed...although it is rather ironic that "CrackStation's Password Cracking Dictionary"[1] tops their list of most downloaded by a respectable 9% over 2nd most downloaded "Arizona State University Twitter Data Set"[2].

[1] http://academictorrents.com/details/fd62cc1d79f595cbe1de6356... [2] http://academictorrents.com/details/2399616d26eeb4ae9ac3d05c...

At least back in 2010, Facebook and Twitter were both reportedly using torrents to do code deploys.

https://blog.twitter.com/2010/murder-fast-datacenter-code-de...

https://torrentfreak.com/facebook-uses-bittorrent-and-they-l...

Are you serious? This is the original purpose of BitTorrent. It was not invented as a "warez technology", but as a way for service providers to save on bandwidth costs when serving huge files. Back when BitTorrent spec was written hosting a collection of large datasets like this meant paying thousands of bucks in hosting expenses, making it prohibitively expensive for most independent developers.

Torrents and mesh networks were breaking out to be the future of internet during mid and late 90s (Also why Skype was P2P and why it was successfull). I'm not sure what happened to it though.

Torrent (or p2p in general) when used for distribution a la Blizzard can be a win-win-win scenario if setuped correctly.

1. Consumers can get higher speed in ISP network.

2. ISPs get lower external bandwith usage

3. Lower resource usage for distributor.

Relevant HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12380797

And yet, Comcast still illegally throttles torrent traffic..

Yes. It should be built in in browsers.

Opera used to have it, but it was much slower than a dedicated client

Isn't this technically warez?

How so? It's meant to be used by researchers distributing the datasets for their own papers. (Notwithstanding the fact that people seem to already be uploading textbooks/lectures, which seems against the stated intent).

Some of the articles seem to be journal articles. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it, but isn't this partially what Aaron Swartz was indicted for?

Since it isn't illegally acquired and distributed software, no.

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