Thursday, December 30, 2004
Wired: "The BitTorrent Effect"
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 06:00 PM
"Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Cohen showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who need a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics. It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. If any one of them misses their favorite TV show, no worries. Surely someone has posted it as a "torrent." As for movies, if you can find it at Blockbuster, you can probably find it online somewhere - and use BitTorrent to suck it down."
This is a great article about BitTorrent, and the guy who started it all. Great read! I'm kind of amazed at the number of people using BitTorrent though, because when I was trying it I found it insanely frustrating to use. The problem was searching - I tried several Torrent portals and it was just an awful mess trying to find the right link to download the file with.
This is a great article about BitTorrent, and the guy who started it all. Great read! I'm kind of amazed at the number of people using BitTorrent though, because when I was trying it I found it insanely frustrating to use. The problem was searching - I tried several Torrent portals and it was just an awful mess trying to find the right link to download the file with.
