![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/tonnee.jpg\")
As usual, the Dowbrigade is lagging behind his geekier
\n goombahs, bringing up the trailing edge of the early adopters. This
\n time it is the next generation of file sharing which has captured our
\n attention and pushed us once again into the world of not-quite-ready-for-prime
\n time software.<\/p>\n
The technology in question is called Bit Torrent, and after hearing
\n people raving about it for months, and at least a half-dozen attempts
\n to have it explained, we finally read an explanation that made sense
\n to us.<\/p>\n
The basic idea is as follows. Suppose a friend of yours just bought
\n the latest Smack Mack Daddy CD, and decided that it was such an astute
\n and insightful commentary on modern America that everyone he knew should
\n listen to it. So he posts the tunes and sends all his friends
\n an email saying, "Here is the link to this music, listen to it."<\/p>\n
Now suppose that ten of the friends want to download the CD, which has
\n 10 tracks, or songs as they used to be known. In a traditional peer to
\n peer system, each of the ten would start downloading the CD file from
\n the beginning, dividing the original posters upload bandwidth 10 ways,
\n until they all had a copy of the complete CD.<\/p>\n
Using the Bit Torrent technology, however, each of the 10 would download
\n A DIFFERENT TRACK, and less than a minute after starting the download
\n would start RE-UPLOADING the data to others of the 10 didn’t have that
\n part yet. By the time the first cut is completely downloaded, each of
\n the tracks is
\n being distributed by several of the users, and the complete transfer
\n of 10 complete copies of the original CD file would be completed in a
\n fraction of the time it would have taken in a traditional arrangement.<\/p>\n
Which is of course not to imply that any friends of yours or ours would
\n ever contemplate so egregious a violation of common decency and copyright
\n law. That was an unreal hypothetical, as we say in the speculating business,
\n and was just meant to illustrate how the damn thing works.<\/p>\n
So great, it made sense finally, and a clever idea it was, but we still
\n couldn’t get it to work in real life. For one, the paradigm is completely
\n different from the
\n traditional
\n file-sharing standards
\n we know and used to love, until the RIAA turned it into the new
\n love that dare not speak its name. In Bitstream, instead of searching
\n for music by title
\n or author
\n from a search window within the application, like you do in Kaaza
\n or Lime Wire, users must search for web pages full of "pointer files"
\n which end with .torrent. One downloads these files, which point to movies
\n and TV shows, mostly, and once they are on your computer you can click
\n on them and Bit Torrent will automatically fire up and start looking
\n for folks to swap the file with. In theory.<\/p>\n
Apparently there are numerous client clones on the Wintel side of the
\n street, but for Mac there is only the original Bit Torrent application
\n from Bram Cohen (ported to OS X by Andrew Loewenstern). So we downloaded
\n and installed, fired it up, and waited for something to happen. Nothing
\n did, and we never got beyond the absence of a search window. How
\n the heck are we supposed to find the files to download, we wondered.
\n It must be like a secret society with member’s only web sites and obscure
\n usenet newsgroups where they meet and share goodies.<\/p>\n
The second time we tried, several weeks later, we had finally grasped
\n the idea of those ."torrent" files, and had located a number of them
\n on semi-pirate web sites. They included what claimed to be pointers
\n to such enticing files as the latest Lord of the Rings and complete season
\n files for series like the Simpsons, West Wing and the Sopranos, or the
\n aggregated live tapes of every concert the Grateful Dead played in 1971,
\n or ’72, or ’68. <\/p>\n
We
\n tried everything we could think of to get the damn things to download
\n – drag and drop, open file, open url, single click, double click, option
\n click. Nothing worked the most promising results we got were a set
\n of empty folders with the names of each episode of the fifth season of
\n Friends.
\n We gave up again.<\/p>\n
Finally, on the third try, we figured out that in order to make Bit
\n Torrent work, one needs to open Bit Torrent’s preferences panel and enter one’s
\n IP address in a little box. Who knew? Luckily we remembered that
\n that information was available in the Network Preferences section of
\n the System Preferences, by choosing Built-in Ethernet from the pull-down
\n menu.<\/p>\n
Once we entered our IP address, it worked like a charm! It was after
\n midnight at that point, and Norma Yvonne lay asleep at our side, but
\n we were wide awake with anticipation as we saw the first kilobytes start
\n to flow into and out of our iBook. We started downloading everything
\n in sight.<\/p>\n
Most of the downloads failed, or were so slow it was obvious they would
\n never be finished, but there was one that was racing over the cable at
\n over 100 kbs. As we watched with incredulity, the download speed pushed
\n past 150 and into uncharted territory in our brief history as a file-sharing
\n fiend. It toped out at about 240 kps. The file was an episode of the
\n Soprano’s called "The Two Tony’s". There was no indication which season
\n it was from.<\/p>\n
Video files are big. To anyone used to downloading mp3’s, they
\n seem huge. Even at that breathtaking velocity, a single episode of Sopranos
\n was going to take about 38 minutes to download. It was now almost 1am,
\n so we went to sleep while the file compiled silently in my bedside laptop.<\/p>\n
In the morning we eagerly reached for the iBook even before putting
\n on our glasses. Through squinting eyes we saw that – wonder of wonders
\n – there was a complete episode of the Sopranos on our hard drive, in
\n AVI format.<\/p>\n
Of course, we immediately tried to fire it up, and of course, it failed
\n to run. Turns out that although .avi files theoretically play on the
\n Quicktime Player, you need to download a special file called a "codec"
\n which converts the avi into the .mov formula that Quicktime likes best. <\/p>\n
You’re not done yet, though, because if you also want to listen to the
\n file you want to view, and it has a soundtrack in mp3 format, you
\n need a special program
\n called
\n DiVX
\n Doctor
\n 2 to convert the soundtrack to a format the Quicktime Player can handle.
\n Three hours and numerous visits to the Apple site, Info-Mac and Macintouch
\n later, the opening shots of Tony Soprano on the New Jersey Turnpike filled
\n my screen. Even more impressively, the funky beat of Leonard Cohen’s
\n theme song filled our earbuds.<\/p>\n
To our surprise, the episode was the very one that had debuted this
\n week, the first show of the 5th season. Two days later, it was available
\n via Bit Torrent.<\/p>\n
Since that day (Friday, two days ago), we have tried to download at
\n least 100 files, including the Hulk, Brazil, Kill Bill in English, Spanish
\n and German, 6 episodes of our favorite animated
\n series,
\n "Reboot",
\n Pirates of the Caribbean, 28 Grams, Lord and Commander, all of last season’s
\n West Wing’s in a single file, a Lakers-Kings game from the previous night, The Iron Chef’s Greatest Shows
\n and a two-hour Timothy Leary special.<\/p>\n
Not a single attempt has been successful. This could be due to Comcast,
\n which is introducing a new, Super Broadband service in our area and may
\n be mucking up existing service to induce people to move to the faster,
\n more expensive version. Most of the connections which have gone through
\n have been downloading at less than 10 Kps. When the download slips
\n below 1 we usually pull the plug and consider it a mercy killing.<\/p>\n
But we still haven’t given up. In fact, at this very moment we
\n are downloading the entire 8th year of the Simpsons in a single file. Let
\n us check how it’s coming. The 2.14 Gig file is 11.4% complete. We
\n should have the whole thing in a short 524 hours, 36 minutes and 27 seconds. Unfortunately,
\n since we are leaving the country in about 480 hours, we may have to wait
\n quite a while to catch up on our missing Simpson’s episodes.<\/p>\n
Andrew Grumet<\/a>, our Main Man at MIT, is all excited because he has managed However, we cannot unequivocally endorse Bit Torrent just yet, at least As usual, the Dowbrigade is lagging behind his geekier goombahs, bringing up the trailing edge of the early adopters. This time it is the next generation of file sharing which has captured our attention and pushed us once again into … Continue reading
\n to meld Bit Torrent with RSS. He thinks this combinations of technologies
\n will make our dream of a video aggregator possible. We certainly hope
\n so, as since we went public with our dream we have wandered across, been
\n sent and pointed to quite a collection of video feeds in need of aggregation. Who
\n knew there was so much independent video available already? Watch this
\n space for some reviews of some of the video streams we have discovered.<\/p>\n
\n until someone comes up with a simplified and intuitive Mac interface. It
\n is just too darn complicated, and has too high a failure rate for the
\n general public, which does NOT like having to figure stuff out, or dealing
\n with failure in any shape or form. Still, we have our one episode of
\n the Sopranos to remind us of what the future holds, and we will certainly
\n keep trying. Tips or leads appreciated.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"