If a file exists, there is torrent of it. If not, it will be burned | Hacker News Reader

If a file exists, there is torrent of it. If not, it will be burned

burnbit.com

221 pointsblasdel58 comments

I'm having trouble with their use of "burn". Is this a common idiom? I keep thinking it's like.. burning a disc? If you burn a file is that creating a torrent of that file?

I agree. When trying to coin a new terminology, try not to use one that's already been in use for 15 years or so... <i>especially</i> when they're both related to ways of transferring files. It makes even reading about their product confusing.

However, optical media is declining.

I'm probably not representative, but I haven't burnt a disc in years. It may be the right time to overload the term.

Neither have I, but I think its still much too soon to reuse the word. I think it'll be a few more years yet before people disassociate burn with writing to optical media.

Further, burning a disc has certain internal logic to it: Oh, the laser changes the medium's colour (like a sun burn, or a fire). This use of burn for a torrent doesn't really make sense to me. Why not grind or chop? (as in make a bunch of little pieces). Or maybe dice... this opens the door for silly puns quite nicely too.

It hurts my eyes to the point where I'm tempted to register torrentizr.com (it's available) and set up a competing service just so the terminology is corrected.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

think feedburner

I still don't know what that is.

It seems like every time I stop paying attention for a week somebody has invented a new verb.

I've heard of Feedburner (and had an account for a few years), and I didn't make the association. It's not just you.

... and yet you still won't tell me what it means?

Sorry.

Basically, FeedBurner was a startup that was acquired by Google that lets you input an RSS feed, and they produce another feed. You keep the original one secret, hand out theirs, and you get analytics and other features.

Compare

http://watch.steveklabnik.com/posts.rss

http://feeds.feedburner.com/watch_steve_episodes

to get an idea. They called this 'burning' a feed. I guess this is what they're alluding to; give me your media file, and I'll turn that into a torrent.

I had exactly the same issue with Feedburner's name.

I thought feedburner's connotation was making a feed burn more brightly. I think burnbit is playing more off 'burning a CD/DVD'. I hadn't heard 'burn' used as a synonym for 'torrentize' before.

Every file in S3 can become a torrent just by appending ?torrent:

http://carltonbale.com/how-to-create-and-seed-a-torrent-down...

Add one more little thing to this: a way to expire the original torrent after 24 hours and you have the torrent equivalent of wikileaks.

After the 24 hours have past it's whackamole time.

I started building something like that a while ago when wikileaks did their 'shut down' play.

Wow, I can see this making major waves. It seems like this would be legitimately useful tech for any site with legal media downloads, but the fact that the top of the site deliberately links to torrents of movies etc means it probably won't be used this way.

Does this technology expand the scope of who the authorities go after for piracy? Will takedown notices extend from beyond the torrent to the site that seeded the 'burn' of it? Or am I misinterpreting what it does?

So BitTorrent clients will use the real server as a "peer"? That's really cool; seems like the best of both worlds.

"Web seed" has been supported by various clients for a while, it's good to see someone finally taking advantage of it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Web_seeding

And the spec for HTTP-based seeding: http://bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt

If clients implemented that spec then burnbit wouldn't work because it requires specific server support. Here's a different spec using standard HTTP range requests, which makes a lot more sense: http://www.getright.com/seedtorrent.html

I forgot about that one. It is much simpler to implement on the client-side, as well. And Bram and Arvid apparently contributed to its development.

The main benefit that I can see to the bittornado spec over getright is that it wants to be able to "Intelligently tell peers how long they should wait before retrying." Which seem like a pretty reasonable things to want to have the server be able to tell the client. Rather then simply block the user.

And how do they search for mirrors?

Registration does not support email+stuff@domain.wut.

It should.

Shame it doesn't support HTTPS yet.

Would be nice if there was an option where you simply go to:

http://burnbit.com/directburn?url=http://example.com/somefil...

And then a .torrent file was returned in that single http request. Rather than a webpage being loaded which contains a link to the torrent file.

I have been looking for a way to do this for a really long time -- Amazon supports this by adding ?torrent at the end of S3 files, however it has always been really flaky. I am really, really excited about this!

From my understanding of the service this seems like an excellent idea. The one main weak point of torrents is that old torrents die or get painfully slow. Keeping them alive for longer is a superb service.

Just burned the final Python2.6 release to play with this

http://burnbit.com/torrent/153621/Python_2_6_6_tar_bz2

I've downloaded and will seed for a couple days or so, at the least - in the interest of testing. :)

Also, I've uploaded my album for a little larger test:

http://burnbit.com/torrent/153663/Daychilde_Journey_Beginnin...

I added the file to my torrent tool, but the only seeder online (you) somehow won't start to transfer the file.

You wrote it to a disc? It's better that marketers don't coin terminology - we end up with tweets and bings.

But it consumes a lot of bandwidth of the service provider to burn these torrent, doesn't it? I'm wondering how the business to be sustainable?

No, it doesn't.

If you're asking about the bandwidth incurred by burnbit.com, no. They're just acting as a public bittorrent tracker, which does nothing other than tell its clients to connect to other people. Bandwidth consumption is trivial for a tracker.

But burnbit.com has to download the file and computes the hash signature to build the torrent file, if the URL hasn't been submitted by somebody else before. Did I miss anything here?

Maybe they have free incoming bandwidth.

I still wish there was a popular, easy way to send large files directly, without using 3rd-party bandwidth.

This requires the file to be available on http. If my grandma wants to send me a large video clip, she's not going to know how to put it on a web server. (Also, a web server is 3rd party in this case.) IRC direct connect and AOL's IM client are the closest I can think of, but neither are at the level of popularity/ease-of-use for my grandma, not to mention the technical hurdles of firewalls (and the security concerns firewalls are addressing.)

As far as I know, this is an unsolved problem that has created a work-around market (dropbox, rapidshare-style services.) But perhaps the work-around market exists for a reason: there is no revenue in letting users directly connect to one another.

My confusion was along the lines of only the torrented web will survive?

That's really nice and I like the semi-fluid layout of the site. Trying to burn www.burnbit.com says connect recursion ;)

it's pretty cool idea to let people create their own torrents for their files on their blogs/sites/etc. they provide the torrent tracker server so you don't have to use thepiratebay or something like that.

  toy.story3.flv 46.5% complete 1.67 GB  =)

http://openbittorrent.com/ have been providing a free torrent-tracker service for a while now. At least originally, OpenBitTorrent's trackers happened to have the same IP addresses as TPB's trackers, although I'm not sure that's still the case.

TPB doesn't run a tracker anymore, they just host .torrent files (and magnet files). They depend on Peer Exchange and Distributed Hash Tables for clients to find each other.

Clearly this is an omen for what this service will become: A haven for pirates.

Or, you could think of the legitimate uses ... someone who just wants to offer something for download, and then has to pay a fortune in bandwidth. Instead, someon uses this service, and we all benefit! -- Ayjay on Fedang

The fact that you used the word 'haven' and 'pirate' makes it sound like salty pirates on the high seas of swashbuckling adventure. Why not just say illegal file-sharers and skip the pretense?

Why the hell would you download toy story 3 as an flv?

Wow, but I guess this doesn't work on file sharing sites like mediafire and some such?

Nope.

It'll work with anything that will give you a direct download link. Since the business model of file sharing sites depend on making you look at ads before letting you download the file, they don't have any reason to do that.

Most of those services give you a link that only resolves to a direct download once you've looked at ads and filled out a captcha and even then only if you haven't hit some download limit (or, alternatively, if you're signed in as a paying customer). I don't see how it could work with those.

Yeah, the captcha-ed file hosting sites popular in the segment they're after are a major problem.

Especially if the "web seed" is hosted by burnbit, I think people will end up using this with private Dropbox URLs instead.

I'd guess we solve the normal way - googling the filename with '+filetype:torrent'?

It probably does not, but probably could: JDownloader (http://jdownloader.org/home/index?s=lng_en) claims allow access to the content on those type sites.

However, having said that, there are probably clear legal lines between merely making a torrent file for any given content and actively circumventing interstitials. IANAL.

How is this different from BitTorrent Inc's DNA?

http://www.bittorrent.com/dna/dna-overview

Hmmm.. I am not sure if any file needs a torrent. For eg, my /etc/passwd file.

Someone needs to make every file exists into an NZB, with RARs and PARs.

Personally, i still maintain thats the best method of downloading large content at full speed with a built-in mechanism for error-checking

All the techs you're mentioning are workarounds for downloading large files from usenet, a protocol mindnumbingly inappropriate for that task.

BitTorrent has errorchecking, and it's very good (SHA-1 hashed of each chunk, sized 32k-4m). RARs error-checking is geared towards fixing permanently damaged files, because re-getting a broken chuck was infeasible. Re-downloading up to 4mb is not an issue in this day and age, if it is ever necessary - which it's usually not.

BT also supports multiple files, no need to deal with RARs or ZIPs or whatever.

And what's the deal with full speed? The structure of the data being downloaded has zero bearing on the speed in BT. I have yet to come across a well-seeded torrent that couldn't max out whatever bandwidth I threw at it.

I'm not sure if you're kidding, but why would you prefer NZB/RAR/PARs over bittorrent?

Bittorrent has basic hash checking, will re-download as needed from peers and most usefully you don't have to extract anything afterwards.

I'm certainly not kidding, but nor am i technically adept as your goodselves, so i'm more than happy to stand corrected.

I havent used BitTorrent in a very long time, simply because i was endlessly frustrated waiting for peers to come online for many files so that i could see from them.

Seems like a constant constraint to me.

My experience with usenet has been quite the opposite. No dependency on peers, and no uploading of my own necessary.

I understand that BTs error-checking may very well be good. I dont have any personal experience of it., but so far as extracting the files and combining them and whatnot is concerned there are many clients available today that automate the whole process upon presenting a single NZB file.

Anyway, this is just my limited experience, and maybe i'll begin to like BitTorrent again one day.

PS. Using binaries from usenet, i also have the option of simultaneous connections (20+) as well SSL and header caching.

You have to connect to someone to download stuff. The protocol doesn't change that.

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