KaZaA has been around for a while and those on the ball have been tuning into BitTorrent, too. What are they? Means to the end of sharing files — and the implications for control of digital media are immense. Slate reports that BitTorrent has made sharing films easy. The technology is remarkable and incredibly simple:
The problem with file sharing is that most computers on the Net have ample download capacity but much slower upload speeds. If you try to download a file from my computer, my DSL connection only lets me upload it at 128 kilobits per second — not much faster than a dial-up line. You might have a 1 megabit line to your house, but a measly 128K is the most you'll get from me. BitTorrent solves that problem by finding other computers that also host the same file. By downloading, say, one-tenth of the file from 10 computers at the same time, BitTorrent puts your download capacity to full use. In fact, the more popular a file is, the faster it downloads because there are more computers with copies sharing the load. Other peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA have added this multiple-source capability, but BitTorrent seems the most efficient and aggressive at optimizing the collective bandwidth of its user population.
Link via anil dash's daily links (28.2.2004)
