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Microsoft Reinvents Bittorrent
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jul 28, 2007 01:18 PM
from the but-do-they-give-credit-oh-no dept.
from the but-do-they-give-credit-oh-no dept.
Anon E. Muss writes "Microsoft has a new Secure Content Downloader tool that sounds an awful lot like a Bittorrent clone. It's described as a 'peer-assisted technology' where '[e]ach client downloads content by exchanging parts of the file they're interested in with other clients, in addition to downloading parts from the server.' Right now MSCD is just a time-limited preview, intended to support downloads of select Microsoft beta releases (e.g. Visual Studio 2008). If this test goes well, Microsoft will probably start using MSCD for all their large downloads. How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?"
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bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Informative)
Are you kidding? Whenever a patch came out, the chief complaint in the forums was the bittorrent downloader. Blizzard even lists alternative (third party) download sites on their patch page because of this. Besides, they didn't re-invent bittorrent. They stated from the beginning what protocol they were using.
I see nothing wrong with MS doing this just like I see nothing wrong with bittorrent.
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Insightful)
I surely hope Bram Cohen patented his little invention...
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Interesting)
Another expected build in, Microsoft will probably implement a way for "content owners" to remotely delete the metafile and all data if they so choose, regardless of how valid their claim is. I also fully expect traffic shaping to ignore this new protocol while throttling bittorrent.
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Interesting)
Me personally, I won't give any of my bandwidth to Microsoft. Let them pay for it. Now if Microsoft wanted to pay me to use my bandwidth, I would consider that option.
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Informative)
The definition of a double standard is to apply one standard to judge two groups differently for the same infraction because of issues external to the matter at hand. In this instance you want to condemn MS and give Blizzard a free pass because of your stance on open standards. (this seems a bit dubious, every standard Blizzard has is closed, they have sued people in the past for trying to make servers that do the same thing as battle.net and so forth, but I digress) So what you are doing is prettymuch the classic example of a double standard, judging one group differently than another for the same infraction because you dont like them for whatever reason.
I am not sure if you were being sarcastic or not by asking how applying different standards to different groups based on whether or not you liked them constitutes a double standard. If you were joking then my bad.
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Re:Three things about your "double standard" (Score:5, Insightful)
But again, what on EARTH does any of this have to do with it being acceptable for one company to use your bandwidth when you are streaming files from them but when another does it they are 'stealing' your bandwidth or whatever?
Its like some people on here think that because MS was judged to legally be a monopoly that means they cant do things that are perfectly normal for other companies to do. I swear one day I will read on here that MS shouldnt be allowed to be registered in a phone book or something because they are a monopoly and should be held to a different standard. Utilizing a swarming protocol does not equate to abuse of monopoly powers.
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Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are doing is kind of like a democrat proposing a policy and then someone yelling "Well your party used to support slavery so I dont think we should listen to anything you say."
Or when Google tries to get its way with net nuetrality the telecoms shouting "Well you guys are censoring content in China so I dont think anything you want with net nuetrality should be granted."
Or when Apple tries to sell you a sell phone you could say "You guys had that options scandal where you defrauded shareholders, if I buy this iPhone I will be supporting corruption!"
See? Can you find any organization of any size that you cant use that sort of logic against? This is why the legal system and just about everyone with common sense looks only at the issues at hand rather than using their preexisting biases and stereotypes.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why real net neutrality is so important (and I am talking about real net neutrality, not the fake one that some are advocating that still allows packet shaping).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Something doesn't fit there. There are a lot of things you can trash MS for, but their development tools are absolutely top notch. I work with ASP.net 40 hours a week, and it's amazing just how bad it makes PHP, J2EE, Rails, and most of the other frameworks out there look in comparison.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Informative)
1 on an OLD system
2 using a Mac and have a system level spell checker
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:5, Funny)
You sir, are worse than Hitler!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft does bad things: 5% of Slashdot articles
Microsoft does perfectly innocent things, but Slashdot declares them bad: 95% of Slashdot articles.
Of course Microsoft does "bad things." The problem here is that, on Slashdot, the term "bad things" is basically defined as "Microsoft does it." It's self-fulfilling. Hell, when Microsoft gave a free 3-year warranty on Xbox 360s, somehow that was construed as a "bad thing" on Slashdot...
The bashing here is entirely out of control. It makes the
Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft does perfectly innocent things, but Slashdot declares them bad: 95% of Slashdot articles.
I don't buy your figures. But I do agree that there are certainly times when articles or comments are beyond the pale. Microsoft does occasionally get skewered over non-issues. I'm 100% behind calling those out. They detract from the real issues.
Which issues are "real" is probably the point where we would disagree.
By the way - cute use of colorful terminology while decrying other's over-use of catch phrases. Reality distortion field indeed.
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Re:bllizard, wow patcher (Score:4, Funny)
When I receive the proper embrace, I extend. If all goes well, we extinguish the lights?
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Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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no surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
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Flamebait much? (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent didn't invent P2P. And the idea is used by many other applications including games. The last article with a premise this ridiculous I've seen was the "Hotmail drops 98.88% of all attachments, MS to be broken up and fined $10 billion dollars for fraud!" article.
Seriously, what is the point of this nonsense article, just to get the groupthink all riled up?
Re:Flamebait much? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is forcing anyone to use this p2p technology. If you have something against it, just don't download things from Microsoft. Common sense...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flamebait much? (Score:5, Informative)
If bittorrent is patented... which it doesn't appear it ever can be, then this would be a problem. If Microsoft claims they invented it, that's pretty major BS, but that's it. If this stays visible as a variant of p2p file sharing, then it will hold some ground for the rest of the industry. Maybe the best thing to do is to use this to point out that p2p has solid legal uses and value.
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Typical anti-MS /. bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly how many articles has
Old news (Score:3, Informative)
Rob
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Did you mean: *kaching*?
Subsidizing MS bandwidth? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not Bittorrent. It's better. (Score:5, Interesting)
"How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's bandwidth costs?"
Frankly I don't give 2 shits as long as they don't patent the hell out of it (and sue existing P2P solutions). But this came out of MS Research, so I doubt that'll happen (one of the only decent groups at MS).
By the way, MS has been messing around with P2P for years. How do you think Xbox Live works? Every time a game is played multiplayer, at least one Xbox/Xbox 360 is hosting. Not a single MS server hosts a game. Question this all you want (why pay $60 a year then?) but the fact of the matter is that from a technological standpoint, it works well.
Far be it for me to disagree with Microsoft. (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh?
In bittorrent, no block is more important than any other.
And the only bottleneck in bittorrent is when a specific block is only available from a single seed with limited bandwidth. The moment that block is uploaded to another machine the bandwidth expands.
I'm not understanding that either. You need updates as to who has what. This will be changing constantly as different peers download different blocks.
Why would you need to? All the client has to do is connect to as many peers as necessary to find each block a minimum number of times. The only time there is a problem with this is when there is only one seed with limited bandwidth.
There is no way that a "globally rarest" will appear more often in your peer group than it does globally. This seems more of a seeder issue than a swarm issue. And it has been solved with the "super-seeder" enhancements. The seeder feeds more blocks to the guy who seems to share them the fastest.
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Double standards? (Score:5, Funny)
The same way I feel about Canonical's. Or Fedora's. Or Gentoo's. Or Blizzard's. Or Demonoid's. Or iPodNova's. Or the eDonkey network's. Or ThePirateBay's.
It's P2P, remember, the thing everyone here loves? And now there's more of it! Must be a good thing. Although I'm sure if Microsoft started handing out free chocolates and flowers, before going on to start selling Linux distributions and releasing the entire code of the Windows kernel under the BSD license, you'd find some reasons to kick up a fuss about that, as well.
Better download integrity, yes please. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since I downloaded the last MSDN library no less than 9 times and each time got a corrupted file (yes, a 1.9GB corrupted file), I would have welcomed an official MS P2P download route - one of the more useful feature of BitTorrent on large files is that each chunk is hashed, and thus has good integrity.
Instead, there was just an MD5 checksum buried in the small print on the page, which is no help at all. The checksum validation in the install routine can detect that the archive is corrupted. Ok, it's nice to be able to tell if you got a pirate zombie MSDN library (presumably with some pages containing subtle advice on how to implement code with security holes - now we know why Windows is so insecure....) But what I really needed was a download protocol that provides for more error correction than HTTP.
Go, I say. Even if everyone disables the ability to upload, and all the data still comes from MS, it's still an improvement.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Each file showed corruption throughout the file, each file had a different, incorrect, MD5 hash - I actually went so far as to write a "chunkhash" util to hash chunks of the file to see if I could construct a single "good" file fro
Microsoft Reinvents Bittorrent (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good that they are using their own protocol. That way those who have no use for anything from Microsoft will be in no danger of inadvertently doing them a favor.
here's how I feel (Score:4, Funny)
Kinda dirty and used, but no different from how I felt after installing Vista.
BitTorrent promotes competition for clients (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I'll be sticking to BT unless something better comes along that actually has a useful (i.e., open) license. One wonders about the motivation for developing this when they could have just used BT to distribute their patches and downloads. Is it just NIH, or something more?
not a "troll" at all (Score:5, Interesting)
From a practical point of view, no matter how "secure" the protocol may be, if this thing is running on a host as part of a P2P network, it is essentially broadcasting to the world that (1) the host is running Windows, and (2) that it's not up to date with its patches. That's not a smart thing to broadcast.
Re:How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's c (Score:5, Funny)
AWESOME! They're going to pass their savings onto me, right!?
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yes, they are! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:How do you feel about subsidizing Microsoft's c (Score:5, Funny)
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
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