the hydra-headed beast of stupidity that is Wired

[waider]

So before Christmas, I complained about Wired basically doing a Ha Ha Fuck You MPAA article under the guise of a Christmas list. And now they publish a memo to the new head of the MPAA which among other things refutes a lot of what was said in the first article, and completely fails to understand BitTorrent.

For those of you following from the peanut gallery, BitTorrent is a huge boon to the downloadee, and not quite so much to the downloader. No matter how many people are offering Scrubs_Season_1_Episode_1_FULL.avi via their BitTorrent clients, it still has to find its way byte by painstaking byte through my 56k dialup. Which makes it no different in that respect from any of the Napster derivatives, such as gnutella, mutella, grokster, kazaa, etc. The upper limit on download speed is most likely to be your own connection. Apparently Wired's editor-in-chief believes that if more people offer the file to you, the bits get to your harddrive faster, regardless of whether you're already maxing out your dialup.

In all, the article says nothing new, other than a few things that are completely wrong, and is making me consider whether it's worth keeping Wired's RSS feed on my aggregator. Of course, it's also making me appreciate the aggregator for allowing me to prescreen crap like this without visiting wired.com...

Update: Having thought about it a little more, asynchronous broadband (i.e. your download speed is multiples of your upload speed, and more to the point of your source's upload speed) doesn't change the picture hugely; there's a certain ratio of providers-to-consumers that will keep all the pipes filled, beyond which there's no useful benefit, and that ratio doesn't help the non-broadband folks either way since even the worst broadband service has a better (stated) upload rate than the fastest dialup's download rate. I will state for the record that in my neck of the woods, any broadband is rare enough since the local telco is such a hulking dinosaur, so most people are still on 56k dialup or maybe 128k ISDN. I've no idea what the ratio of broadband to narrowband is in other places, but I think I've got a reasonably sound argument above.

Comments

[vspope.livejournal.com]

I have DSL and have been playing with BitTorrent, and I can't say that I'm entirely sold on it. It has its advantages, but it's far from Jack Valenti's worst nightmare.

The download-chunks-from-multiple-sources thing is nice, but it's not innovative; eDonkey does it that way, and I think Gnucleus (front-end for Gnutella) does it too. It's highly dependent on the trackers being advertised, which means that big clearinghouse pages like suprnova.org are somewhat vulnerable to the same thing that brought Napster down; take down the central server that acts as a file directory, and the distributed users can't find each other and trade anymore.

Download speeds vary extremely wildly for me, no matter how many people are online. I've had plenty of times where my full upload capacity was available (or being used) and my downloads still went drip drip drip. Async really does make a difference for high-demand files; when dozens of people are downloading at 768kb or 1.5mb but uploading at 128kb, it cuts the available bandwidth considerably. Yeah, it beats 56K, but it still takes days to download 700MB files sometimes. DSL people often feel like they might as well be on dialup when their downloads are pinned in single digits...

Frankly, USENET is more efficient for the downloader, though it obviously removes all pretenses of anonymity for the uploader.

The article did get one point right -- DVD-R drives (and better yet, DVD+/-R drives) are getting very close to the price point that'll make them common items. I'm toying with the notion of getting one myself once I can get a sense of the competing standards and whether I should wait for the next wave of drives or not.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I got a DVD burner for christmas which appears to happily handle all formats including the rewritable ones. However, all the burners on the market thus far appear to be stuck at single-side, single layer, giving you 4.7GB in place of the 27 (?) or so you can get onto a full commercial-standard DVD. While this isn't an issue for either transcoded-for-download files or shorter movies, it does mean you won't be burning off copies of LotR with the full compliment of audio doohickies any time soon.

The other sucky thing mentioned in one or other of the articles was the implication that the presence of DeCSS and its ilk is what makes it possible to pirate DVDs. While that's true for small-scale use, like squishing LotR onto a few VCDs or something, for proper pirate work you just need an industrial bit-for-bit burner. Which I'm sure anyone with half a clue already knows, but anyway.

[boutell.livejournal.com]

I must say, bittorrent makes a huge difference for me, as a DSL user. Things that are widely desirable but not actually profitable to anybody to distribute often are oversaturated at the server, or the server is downed outright. bittorrent solves that problem rather elegantly. I've used it with great success to get movie trailers otherwise slashdotted to death at that moment, and to download ISO CD images of Linux distributions.

I can't speak for the bittorrent experience of 56k modem users. And it may be that speakeasy.net (my ISP) is a particularly lively community of bitorrent users, so that I tend to find the things I want conveniently available from users topologically close to me. But hey, that's a very cool thing for those in that situation and worth crowing about.

I haven't read the Wired article, though, so I'll take your word for it that they make wild-eyed claims about bittorrent and 56k bit-bangers.