Bad torrent and Bittorrent's fear

Browsing through some Azureus wiki, i was intrigued with their idea of identifying bad torrent. Basically, torrent is the centralized component, control peers interactions in the Bittorrent network. A torrent manages one particular file, it contains information of seeds and leechers (peers) that are all interested / or possess the file.

Successfull of a download depends on how many leechers and seeds in the swarm. For a new file, a seed must stay at least until it has completely upload one copy of the file. Braced with some smart algorithms, it's possible then for all leechers to finish their downloads by themself (without presence of any seeds). However, having many seeds in a swarm enables both fast and sucessfull downloads. The problem with 97-99% completed (and then stop) is mostly due to unavailability of seeds. Bad torrents were ones that falsely advertise their capacities (number of seeds and leechers).

All these would mean nothing but theories, you think, until you got so frustrated at your 2-days downloads becoming useless. And it does not happen just once. Today unsucessful download bring up my failed downloads to 66%. The torrent was advertised in isohunt.com with more than 2000 seeds and more than 3000 peers/leechers. As being naive as usual, i believed in a superb fast download. Until, of course, everything stops at 97.4%. Now i know the reason was bad torrent. For entire duration of the download, no single seed was present in the swarm. Assume that default number of peers is still 50 per swarm, there would be around 20 seeds at any time. But it didn't turn out that way. Life sucks.

For not being self-centered or all-time whiner, lets move away from my problem and think how bad torrent would effect the Bittorrent network. The recording/entertainment industries (RIAA and MPAA for instance) could deliberately poison the network with bad torrents of the popular music/movies. Just the way they hired Overpeer to poision the Kazaa network, which was so sucessfull that some papers showed upto 50% of all files in Kazaa are either virus/worm or poisionous. The Bittorrent network looks a bit more resilient, as different tracker website (be it isohunt.com, bittorrent.com, piratebay.com ...) maintains different set of torrents, therefore would take more effort and money to launch a similar attack. But still, threats are presents, if the RIAA and MPAA get enough money (from sueing individual users), they could again do it. Any day in the future, but certainly not the day after tomorrow :).

Venice is coming to town

Been a long time from the last post, just hope i still remember how to write.

Venice, the lovely city that i missed out the chance to visit this summer, is the chosen code-name of a big project that supposedly is the next big thing. The Venice project, being developed by two creators of Kazaa (the same guys who created Skype) promises the best mergence (if it's even a word) of the three hottest digital issues: TV-shows, peer-to-peer, and digital copyright. Simply speaking, it would allow you to upload/download latest tv-shows/drama via a p2p infrastructure, and use them in the conformance with some sort of digital right protection.
So good content, high speed, prosectuion-free. What would we want more ? As those two Kazaa/Skype creators have established such good reputation, this project is highly anticipated, even though there had not been very clear documentation describing exactly what are the main features that it would include.
The beta version of this project had been released from yesterday (15-12-06) to a limitted, through-invitation sets of of users. This guy was one of the lucky to get hold of it very early, when lot (like me) are still checking the mailbox every hour hoping for an instruction to download. Screenshots look good.

Hopefully after using i would have a clearer idea of the benefit of this project compared to Bittorrent or other file-sharing network. Hope it really worths the pretty name (of Venice).