Besides Linux isos and piracy, what are some common uses of torrenting?
It's kind of silly, but I still really dig the idea behind torrenting and peer to peer sharing of data. It's cool to think about any old computer helping pass along some odd bits & bytes of data, whether a goofy drawing or strange story.
I don't think they do it anymore, but spotify started out with a p2p network on the backend.
Super smart way of bootstrapping such a thing without having to upfront huge server costs.
Took it out ten years ago. It was super smart, and there are still situations where it would be helpful, like when a new Taylor Swift album drops that takes the service offline.
Downloading actual linux ISOs with bittorrent is soo much faster than downloading them directly from the distro's mirror. I always use bittorent to download new linux distros I'd like to try.
Also, I believe p2p protocols are still popular in korea because ISPs there actually charge website operators for bandwidth delivered to korean customers. Twitch pulled out of korea because of this. I think their competitors there, e.g. AfreecaTV, uses p2p for their streams.
This might be stretching the definition of "common" and "torrenting," but BitTorrent created BitTorrent Sync with similar tech for personal file synchronization. It was later rebranded Resilio and still exists today.
I would consider this to be one of the intended functions of torrent files. Torrents started as faster ways to share files peer to peer. If a few people had a large file on their machines they could each upload part to someone who needs it essentially multiplying their upload bandwidth. This became less popular as internet speeds increased, except for "illegal" stuff. I would definitely try one of these...if I had more than one computer.
A common use case for SyncThing is keeping a password file up to date between, say, your PC and your phone. It'll even work remotely, thanks to the presence of relays.
(The downsides include pretty heavy battery usage )
One funny use I discovered when I was cloning a lot of computers is that even on a closed lan, BT with local discovery was stupidly fast in distributing a big set of files across a pile of computers instead of rsync. Also, setting it up was much easier.
Clonezilla uses bittorrent for one of its massive deployment modes. I work at a university, and whenever we have to deploy an OS image, the ten gigabit uplink between the storage server and the classroom switches always gets saturated in unicast/interactive mode. Using bittorrent mode gets around this issue because once a computer has downloaded a chunk of the image, it can seed it for the rest of the computers within the subnet. One massive limitation is that the target computer has to have enough storage space for both the downloaded image and the deployed OS too.
There's Syncthing and it's proprietary counterpart Resilio that allow you to sync folders between machines and send individual files over p2p. Very neat software.
I podcast I listen to says that they used to distribute episodes by BitTorrent, way back in like 2006, as a way to keep bandwidth costs down when they were new. I'm pretty sure they had stopped that option by the time I started listening in about 2008/9.
Transferring files to several other computers. I've done it in the past before I used KDE connect to transfer files rather than use ftp or just memory sticks.
It would be useful at a LAN party to get several copies of the software distributed. (Kinda piracy but doesn't have to be if the game is free or everyone owns it legitimately).
I torrent old out of print books that I can't find anywhere else. The scans are usually pretty good.
There was also a podcast I used to listen to called Caustic Soda. When they ended it, they released all of their episodes through torrenting so the fans could have them.
I remember when it was relatively new and controversial BBC's iPlayer hadn't been around very long and they said they were going to start using Bittorrent tech for streaming. Guessing that never came to fruition though.
If you just mean peer to peer, I feel like magnet links (often using bittottent) are still found for downloading large files from time to time (not just ISOs). Things like open source games and software, though if I'm being honest I can't think of a single one that still uses them. You used to find magnet links all over the open source scene but I guess with github offering free hosting it's not so common anymore.
Its a really interesting question. I wonder what the underlying economics and ideologies are at play with its decline. Economies of scale for large server farms? Desire for control of the content/copyright? Structure and shape of the network?
I guess it has some implications for stream versus download approaches to content?
If I recall, Spotify moved away from it just because the client/server model got way cheaper and the P2P model had some limitations for their future business plans. I remember them mentioning that offering a family plan was a challenge with their P2P architecture when people on the same network/account were using it at the same time.
It was probably also part of the move to smartphones. Spotify was just a desktop program for a long time and, while I’m not an expert, I would guess the P2P model made a lot more sense on desktop with a good connection than early smartphones on flaky 2G/3G connections. They might have had to run a client/server model for iOS and/or Android anyway.
Very interesting, thank you. I guess then the centralised server must have some sort of economy of scale.
In my head, I'm comparing the network to the electricity grid with certain shapes of network making different technologies more or less feasible. I would guess the internet network is probably similar to the electricity grid in most places having fewer hubs and lines of high bandwidth rather than a more evenly distributed network. Maybe the analogy is bad though.