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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

Why don't large companies use it for updates? I have a lot of trouble downloading the 10+ gigabyte IOS downloads on DSL for some reason but torrenting works fine for larger files and stopping and resuming does not break torrenting unlike Apple's update process.

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Some have. Blizzard used a variant of BitTorrent about 10 - 15 years ago to distribute the multi-gigabyte patches for their online games. Peak demand was very high with hundreds of thousands of users all on the same day.

It was built into the game installer / launcher. I think they've switched away from that since. I remember it causing some consternation at the time given some people pay by the byte for network service and felt it was unfair.

iirc Windows does have a way that computers on a shared network can share the update with each other.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-d...

I don't know how they do it but when I download from Steam there are multiple streams and I get about 200% of the throughput of a single ADSL.

Steam downloads are plain HTTP in separate file chunks. Easy to cache and load balance across connections.

They are also slow as dirt.

I don't know if this would be of interest to you, but https://lancache.net/ is really fun to setup. I assigned an old (unreliable) 500gb SSD to a Linux VM and run Lancache on it. A couple tweaks to Pi Hole and every system in your house will use with no configuration (and fallback to Steam if it's down).

If you only have a single gaming system it won't matter but if you have a few it's fun to watch the second one get 100MB/s Steam downloads in a house with 20MB/s internet.

Taxes killed p2p...

https://youtu.be/5-sF7N1bfv0

Or more clearly stated, tax havens and offshoring revenue killed p2p.

Even without the tax havens, the jurisdictional issues seem killer -- if I pay for software in Kansas and download blocks from Texas, California, Puerto Rico and Canada, who all do I owe sales tax to?

Musescore is planning to use P2P sharing to download sample libraries (>1gb) and updates in version 4 (coming in the next few months).

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