Do I Look Like a CEO?(businessweek.com)
businessweek.com
Do I Look Like a CEO?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105046863317.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories
29 comments
> The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it.
This part had been well-validated before BitTorrent came out. People were already using Napster, Kazaa, and AudioGalaxy, all of which relied on people leaving files available for upload after they finished downloading them.
Using an HTTP tracker was a pretty courageous act though, and I don't think the rest of the protocol would work without it. At the time, everyone was doing desktop clients and trying to make things as anonymous as possible, since they were all afraid of copyright-infringement lawsuits.
I kinda wonder whether Bram really didn't know it would be used for copyright infringement, or if he just says that because he's smart enough not to get sued. Every other P2P filesharing system was used to share music, and the mainstream media was going on and on about how Napster was the death of the music industry. You'd have to be living under a rock not to make that connection.
This part had been well-validated before BitTorrent came out. People were already using Napster, Kazaa, and AudioGalaxy, all of which relied on people leaving files available for upload after they finished downloading them.
Using an HTTP tracker was a pretty courageous act though, and I don't think the rest of the protocol would work without it. At the time, everyone was doing desktop clients and trying to make things as anonymous as possible, since they were all afraid of copyright-infringement lawsuits.
I kinda wonder whether Bram really didn't know it would be used for copyright infringement, or if he just says that because he's smart enough not to get sued. Every other P2P filesharing system was used to share music, and the mainstream media was going on and on about how Napster was the death of the music industry. You'd have to be living under a rock not to make that connection.
That's nothing, every operating system was used for copyright infrighment too! Bill Gates has clearly contemplated mass-scale music downloading when creating windows, unless he was living under the rock.
Sarcasm aside, universal tools are like that - people use them for many things.
Sarcasm aside, universal tools are like that - people use them for many things.
My curiosity is because every other P2P filesharing tool written before BitTorrent was used for copyright infringement. Bill Gates is a different situation, because there were no PCs before he wrote Altair Basic. There were plenty of P2P filesharing services before BitTorrent, though.
You can't predict the future, but you ought to have a pretty good idea what's happening in the present.
You can't predict the future, but you ought to have a pretty good idea what's happening in the present.
Yes, but there was no client when Bram did it. It was a download window like in a browser.
Same goes for Audiogalaxy. (Doesn't AudioGalaxy's founder occasionally show up on this board?) It was a web page where you could see what music people were sharing, search for it, and then download it. When you downloaded a file, it would download a small stub (via the browser's mechanism), which would then be opened by the AudioGalaxy service on the client, which would queue up the file for later downloading.
I remember arriving at college, where each person had their own pet ways of downloading MP3s. Within a week, my whole dorm had basically standardized on AudioGalaxy.
I remember arriving at college, where each person had their own pet ways of downloading MP3s. Within a week, my whole dorm had basically standardized on AudioGalaxy.
with kazaa/etc, you share all the files in your library. so if i download one, then unless i remove it from the library folder i share it every time i download anything. so it's kinda different. bittorrent doesn't share old stuff.
The real genius of bittorrent is how it brings together many people who are interested in sharing the same file all at once so you get great download/upload speeds. This mostly isn't even due to the protocol itself but in the way that torrent sites tend to present the torrents chronologically.
Plus there is no bandwidth wasted on sharing content other than what you are interested in. Almost every other client wants to make you share all kinds of other stuff to even use the network: emule, freenet, tor, i2p, gnutella, etc.
Finally, pure luck has allowed the laws to progress in a way that hasn't resulted in the immediate shutdown or blocking of popular torrent sites. It should be noted that in certain countries this isn't the case and bittorrent has been a total failure there.
Also, on the majority of American college campuses today, bittorrent is a huge failure because it is easily fingerprinted and will get you banned from the network. Maybe they have finally added some stenography to protect against this but not that I know of. Then, there are the large ISPs that are degrading or blocking bittorrent now.
Of course, everyone knows that the real reason bittorrent beat freenet is because bittorrent was python and freenet was a big steaming pile of java:)
Plus there is no bandwidth wasted on sharing content other than what you are interested in. Almost every other client wants to make you share all kinds of other stuff to even use the network: emule, freenet, tor, i2p, gnutella, etc.
Finally, pure luck has allowed the laws to progress in a way that hasn't resulted in the immediate shutdown or blocking of popular torrent sites. It should be noted that in certain countries this isn't the case and bittorrent has been a total failure there.
Also, on the majority of American college campuses today, bittorrent is a huge failure because it is easily fingerprinted and will get you banned from the network. Maybe they have finally added some stenography to protect against this but not that I know of. Then, there are the large ISPs that are degrading or blocking bittorrent now.
Of course, everyone knows that the real reason bittorrent beat freenet is because bittorrent was python and freenet was a big steaming pile of java:)
Along that tangent:
The use of torrent files as a universal link to the downloadable material is also genius. It removes the need for implementing a costly peer-2-peer search mechanism (Gnutella and Kazaa spent quite a lot of resources on search), and a potentially cluttered GUI. Instead, the torrent files can be distributed in any way people find convenient, eg. www, e-mail or RSS.
On top of that, including the tracker-URL transparently in the torrent file is a huge usability improvement. No more searching for lists of super-nodes to enter the network, as was the case with Gnutella.
The use of torrent files as a universal link to the downloadable material is also genius. It removes the need for implementing a costly peer-2-peer search mechanism (Gnutella and Kazaa spent quite a lot of resources on search), and a potentially cluttered GUI. Instead, the torrent files can be distributed in any way people find convenient, eg. www, e-mail or RSS.
On top of that, including the tracker-URL transparently in the torrent file is a huge usability improvement. No more searching for lists of super-nodes to enter the network, as was the case with Gnutella.
This was really what took him out. Nobody at the time thought to use a file to share all the meta information. It was always about urls or ip addresses or so on. He did not try to reinvent the world, he just took things that worked and put them together.
But isn't also BitTorrent much faster than other protocols of that time, because of the way it distributes packages? (Meaning that all downloaders become uploaders almost at the time they start downloading)
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The real genius in bittorrent does not lie in it's technological superiority, but in it's bravery and simplicity.
This is true of many, if not most gamechanging breakthroughs. Skype wasn't the first IP telephony provide - but they made it simple and were brave.
This is true of many, if not most gamechanging breakthroughs. Skype wasn't the first IP telephony provide - but they made it simple and were brave.
An amazing story about Cohen. As an engineer, I know it is hard sometimes to break oneself from the confines of logic and structure to take a more emotional intuitive approach to understanding the world.
There are two books that I must recommend for any engineer that is in the same situation as Mr. Cohen.
Blink, By Malcom Gladwell. This book explains the concept of intuition and thinking with the subconscious. I think this is something that is lost to a lot of science people that have to rationalize everything in life with concrete details. In my opinion, I think that our subconscious is a much more logical real life processing unit than our conscious because it can link concepts much more quickly. As the old adage says, sometimes you have to trust your instincts.
How To Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This book goes into incredible depth with a bunch of narratives explaining the proper way to deal with people. Very interesting book, in fact, this is the one book PG recommends EVERY startup entrepreneur to read, and I couldn't agree more.
There are two books that I must recommend for any engineer that is in the same situation as Mr. Cohen.
Blink, By Malcom Gladwell. This book explains the concept of intuition and thinking with the subconscious. I think this is something that is lost to a lot of science people that have to rationalize everything in life with concrete details. In my opinion, I think that our subconscious is a much more logical real life processing unit than our conscious because it can link concepts much more quickly. As the old adage says, sometimes you have to trust your instincts.
How To Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This book goes into incredible depth with a bunch of narratives explaining the proper way to deal with people. Very interesting book, in fact, this is the one book PG recommends EVERY startup entrepreneur to read, and I couldn't agree more.
The Python source to bittorrent is worth reading as well, even if it doesn't quite follow the best coding practices.
http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/BitT...
http://bittorrent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bittorrent/BitT...
It's worth mentioning, while we're talking about the "real genius of BitTorrent" --- and fine, it's better work than I've done, but ---
BitTorrent is an implementation of an idea (group delivery of content using FEC) that was quite popular at the time. There was already an open-source C language startup doing it, and more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain, which Michael Luby started during the tail end of the boom. The Fountain guys even tried to standardize it, as a protocol called FLID-DL.
The relationship between BitTorrent and the kernel of its idea seems to be approximately the same as the relationship between Napster and IRC XDCC, or between WinAmp and MP3 players. I think that's a compliment, by the way.
BitTorrent is an implementation of an idea (group delivery of content using FEC) that was quite popular at the time. There was already an open-source C language startup doing it, and more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain, which Michael Luby started during the tail end of the boom. The Fountain guys even tried to standardize it, as a protocol called FLID-DL.
The relationship between BitTorrent and the kernel of its idea seems to be approximately the same as the relationship between Napster and IRC XDCC, or between WinAmp and MP3 players. I think that's a compliment, by the way.
> more notably the idea was the foundation for Digital Fountain
IIRC Luby came up with a rateless encoding algorithms while working on overcoming content delivery issues in lossy networks. It had less to do with a group delivery per se, and more with the lossy transmission medium. They did initially focus on a single-sender setup, and in that they were quite a bit different from BT. Only after DF was founded they started looking at alternative applications of their (patented) ideas and resurrected the swarm-casting stuff.
In other words I wouldn't mix DF and BT together. They are certainly related, but they are more different than they are similar.
IIRC Luby came up with a rateless encoding algorithms while working on overcoming content delivery issues in lossy networks. It had less to do with a group delivery per se, and more with the lossy transmission medium. They did initially focus on a single-sender setup, and in that they were quite a bit different from BT. Only after DF was founded they started looking at alternative applications of their (patented) ideas and resurrected the swarm-casting stuff.
In other words I wouldn't mix DF and BT together. They are certainly related, but they are more different than they are similar.
You'll probably win an argument about Luby's CV, but I'm just going to point out that the signature technical detail of BitTorrent is FEC, and Luby is an FEC, coding-theory, and crypto luminary from way before the first bubble.
I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01 that was directly in this space; we implemented basically the same system as BitTorrent for group file transfer. We definitely felt like there was significant overlap with Digital Fountain (though we were using off-the-shelf PD coding schemes, like BitTorrent did).
"Lossy transmission medium" is another way to think about multicast congestion, and multicast congestion is another way to think about "how to get content to a large, diverse audience of people", which I think sums up BitTorrent.
The big difference between BitTorrent and DF is that BitTorrent is P2P, and DF isn't. That sounds huge, but realize that "P2P vs. Planned" is an informal way to describe the major approaches to multicast reliability protocols.
I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01 that was directly in this space; we implemented basically the same system as BitTorrent for group file transfer. We definitely felt like there was significant overlap with Digital Fountain (though we were using off-the-shelf PD coding schemes, like BitTorrent did).
"Lossy transmission medium" is another way to think about multicast congestion, and multicast congestion is another way to think about "how to get content to a large, diverse audience of people", which I think sums up BitTorrent.
The big difference between BitTorrent and DF is that BitTorrent is P2P, and DF isn't. That sounds huge, but realize that "P2P vs. Planned" is an informal way to describe the major approaches to multicast reliability protocols.
> I founded a VC-funded startup that ran from '99-'01
Feel like sharing a name of the startup ? :)
Feel like sharing a name of the startup ? :)
It's not too hard to track down, but, no. We weren't particularly successful. I've got a blog post or 50 to write about that whole experience, when it's less raw.
I am being lazy. It is trivial to track it down.
The intriguing side of the article is not so much about BitTorrent, but about Asperger syndrome.
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I was really hoping there was nothing on that page but a picture and two radio buttons for yes and no. That would have been amazing.
Sounds like there is a market demand for amiaceoornot.com...
Original request for test porn downloads: http://www.ntk.net/2002/07/26/
I believe this is the first mention of Bittorrent when still under development.
I believe this is the first mention of Bittorrent when still under development.
No and BitTorrent doesn't look like a company either.
The idea that people will continue to upload the file after they have downloaded it seemed silly before someone actually did it. Using a http tracker was going against the trend that all the other protocol designers were following at the time.
Then someone made it, and it became a big hit. Just like YouTube - it sounds technologically silly before it is done. NOW it's easy to see how obvious it is, but before it was done, it was not the same way.
Bram Cohen is the polar opposite of Ian Clarke, and that's why his project is so much more successful.