| | Its people like him that I'm yet to work out if I personally think we need more of...or less of. Sure the bittorrent protocol is his baby and that is amazing, it a really effective and expandable protocol which has taken off and become the most bandwidth efficient method of distributing opensource software. There are many far more dubious uses of the bittorrent protocol but that is the way things go.
Since these uses came about the RIAA and MPAA have taken it upon themself to attack the standard in their never ending quest to waste money trying to stop piracy, but thats another story altogether. ISPs then took it upon themselves to limit traffic for the protocol to save themselves for actually having to give you the bandwidth you pay for and keeping themselves out of the spotlight. Now for the illigitimate uses of torrents I can understand but for getting legitimate software it poses a problem since it doesn't differentiate.
Newton once said, for ever action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction. That holds true in various ways, since the equal and opposite reaction was obsfucation, disguising the data stream so it couldn't be easily identified as bittorrent traffic. The ISP could detect it still but only with great conviction, which the majority seem to lack. Mr. Cohen, being a seemingly idealistic fellow, thinks that obsfucation particularly by header encryption is the wrong way to go about things and was totally uneccessary. His bigger concern seemed to be that it created incompatibility between clients, since some people (like me) won't even allow and incoming connection with plain excryption.
Now onto my point, yes there is a point, out comes the bittorrent mainline client version 5.0.7. We got off to a rocky start since the rpm file distributed on the website needs a few obscure python modules to be installed before it will work (One of which I was unable to find for Fedora Core 6). I realised that I should've just googled the fc6 client, which I did and it worked. Now the new version supports encryption and is natively compiled for linux, a huge plus for me since azureus seems to have an occasional connection crisis and I suspect it has something do with Java but maybe I'm just crazy? Then again, I've had my share of problems with Java so I do have trust issues,  . Our idealistic friend Mr. Cohen has decided not to allow you to choose your poison but his new client will, be default, make the connection based on what the client requries to ensure compatibility.
His method does give way for a very compatible client but what is more important, his singular vision of how he wants the bittorrent client to go forward or the wants of the community which made his protocol relevant? While his dream of perfect connectivity is wonderful, he seems to be a parent that can't quite let got of his child. Of course users like me, that shifted back to mainline hearing about encryption, will go back running to azureus or some other client which allows me to control my ecyption settings.
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| | Posted 5/18/2007 5:59 PM - 18 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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