John Miller was gracious enough to provide an update for Torrentocracy for Myth's recent DB api changes in Myth 0.17. Thanks! CVS has the update. As the link above will show you, the myth community is still generally ridiculously scared of uttering the word torrent in the same sentence as Myth. Alas, this poor attitude combined with my lack of time for the project will only hurt development. Given that there are still some outstanding problems which need fixing and the likelihood that there are many out there that could easily fix these, it's quite a shame.

Also, Larry Silverman has provided alternative screen resolution numbers to make Torrentocracy look correct on 1024x768 resolution:

torrentocracy.cpp:
/* Rewritten for 1024x768 resolution */
void Torrentocracy::setupContentBrowser(bool expanded)
{

if (expanded) {
contentbrowser->setFont(QFont("Arial Narrow", 14));
contentbrowser->setHScrollBarMode(QTextBrowser::AlwaysOff);
contentbrowser->setVScrollBarMode(QTextBrowser::Auto);
contentbrowser->move(38,290);
contentbrowser->resize(942,400);
contentbrowser->setContentsPos(0,0);
}
else {
contentbrowser->setFont(QFont("Arial Narrow", 12));
contentbrowser->setHScrollBarMode(QTextBrowser::AlwaysOff);
contentbrowser->setVScrollBarMode(QTextBrowser::AlwaysOff);
contentbrowser->move(38,485);
contentbrowser->resize(942,210);
contentbrowser->setContentsPos(0,0);
}
}

I've modified Prodigem to allow anyone to create a limited account which will allow you to sign into Prodigem so that you can comment on a torrent and join in and create discussions. These accounts by default do not allow uploading of files or the creation of torrents. However, with an invitation from any full-access Prodigem user, your account can be enabled for full access as well (or, as before, if you don't have an account and you receive an invitation, this will still lead to a full-access account). This solution will bridge the gap to allow discussions to take place within Prodigem without having to open up everything to the uncertain nature of random internet uploads. Thus, to post torrents you still need someone to vouch for you.

Next step: revamping the comment system (now that everyone can use it).

The bayff.mp3 within this torrent is from last night's EFF event in celebration of innovation (in relation to what the Broadcast Flag will limit). The presentation is by Fred von Lohmann and includes a quiz on electronic rights issues (and Lord of the Rings trivia for the extra geeky). To round out the torrent, I've also included recent oral arguments from the MGM v. Grokster case where Fred argues the legality of P2P sharing.

Note to Panasonic: Your crummy SV-AV50 video camera continues to produce corrupted video that will only play on the camera. It's also quite terrible in low light. Buyer beware.

Reuters is carrying a story on today's broadcast flag hearings (via slashdot). The judge apparently told the FCC that they "crossed the line" and that "selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of".

I'm heading out this evening to the EFF event on Endangered Gizmos in response to the broadcast flag. Should be interesting with these latest developments. Hopefully I can grab some video.

You might notice that things are a bit sluggish today on my domains. It looks like I may be butting up against a memory usage issue-- may need to throw some more RAM in to keep things running smoothly. I'm also beginning to wonder if I might need to put up a donation link to help with the costs.

Whaddya think?

Reflecting on Bram Cohen's talk, I thought I'd take just a second to refresh some of my numbers on the bandwidth savings power of bit torrent. Between Prodigem and the old torrentocracy tracker there's been a lot of great public domain content posted and there is no further proof of that then through the willingness of random strangers on the internet to join in and donate their own bandwidth in order to spread and help distribute whatever they see fit. In fact, for the most popular of it all, there simply would have been no way for a single hosting provider to get this stuff out there via more traditional means without some serious $ expenditures. I'd really be interested to see others in the legal torrent hosting circles provide similar information (likely putting these to shame), but without further ado, here are my top 3:

1. Outfoxed (torrent). Robert Greenwald, the producer of the movie Outfoxed agreed to Creative Commons license the interviews from the movie and let me host the content. The interviews run just about 529MB and have been downloaded 2,465 times so far. This represents roughly 1.25 TeraBytes of traffic of which I only personally contributed around 5 GigaBytes (all within the first 2 days of launching the torrent). This ~$4 investment (for the 5GB) represents just 0.3% of the total amount of bandwidth consumed by this torrent. This even got me a mention in Wired magazine.

2. Tsunami Videos (torrent). Worldwide demand for videos of the tsunamis brought down even the largest traditional hosting providers. Prodigem user Chris Holland posted a torrent of some videos he collected (and certainly Prodigem was just a minor provider of tsunami videos via bit torrent), yet there still have been 3603 downloads of the 43MB. This represents about 151 GigaBytes of bandwidth of which Prodigem made up just 1.26 GigaBytes. This represents 0.8% of the total.

3. Uncovered: The War on Iraq (torrent). Again, Robert Greenwald licensed interviews from a movie of his under the Creative Commons. The 644MB of video have been downloaded 608 times. This represents roughly 382 GigaBytes of bandwidth. I only personally provided around 5 GigaBytes of this bandwidth which represents just 1.3% of the total.

Update: 3/7/2005, The torrent in this entry was just audio only, but Thomas Winningham has gotten permission from both Bram and Stanford ("Stanford holds copyright on the material but returns the copyright immediately to the speaker, that is, Bram. Get him to agree and go ahead.") to post their video as a torrent on Prodigem. Cool! Updated again since that video posted seems to only have the first 10 minutes. Anyway, the audio is below, or just check out my notes.

Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent yesterday at Stanford. I had planned to make video from it available, but the video I captured somehow got corrupted (boo Panasonic). I salvaged the audio from the video and have released that via a torrent under a creative commons license (with Bram's approval). The audio is a bit low. It's okay, though, as I didn't realize that Stanford would be making it's video available to the general public (though in crummy windows streaming format). Here are some notes:

- Academic setting ... so how to benchmark/measure bit torrent
- benchmarking is hard because it needs to be like the internet (buy a bad router)
- key problem among swarming software is how to get everyone involved to maximize upload, people don't realize

- Single seeder problem
- must be careful not to at first trade with people who are likely to disappear

- Bit Torrent extremely non-cooperative
- each peer in it for himself
- tit for tat
- editorial note: isn't this cooperative? Peter Kollock: tit for tat as the optimal cooperative strategy

- How to deal with people behind and not behind NAT

- Centralized tracker is needed to produce randomized graph so as to avoid
network segmentation
- gossip (peers telling peers about other peers with content) very easily segments the network such that pieces of the content get isolated into islands

- Choking Algorithm
- sophistication
- people like to pretend it doesn't exit
- lots of use of made up magic numbers
- eg. how long to wait for reciprication?
- motivation opaque
- methodology (the traditional approach) is Bram firing up a client and observing behavior
- lots of room for study

- TCP does not look like RPC calls (BitTorrent treats TCP like a black box)
- don't avoid making a state machine, because no matter what you'll end up with a state machine anyway
- why threads are a bad idea

- Magic numbers
- makes them up based on what works
- pulls them from his "magic ass"
- if you need a magic number feel free to ask him for one

- Estimated Time Left Algorithm
- never gotten any fan mail on how well it works
- lots of effort and thought put into making this work sanely
- any time you see a computer telling you time left it is lieing
- research needs to be done on better algorithms
- would gladly place your better algorithm into bit torrent
- problem at end about going down 2 seconds per every 1 second
- tradeoff between smoothness now vs. smoothness later

- Current Transfer Rate Algorithm
- its a mess
- very important for tit-for-tat to work

- Bad idea to be downloading too many torrents at one time (e.g. 5)

- Peers at first never randomly tried new connections
- added optimistic unchoke to solve this
- if new person recipricates then continue
- otherwise move on to the next person
- may unchoke 4 or 7 clients depending
- it's voodoo
- nobody has seriously studied this

- Piece Selection Algorithm
- trade off between finishing the piece you are currently downloading vs going after a more valuable piece
- priority is currently finishing a piece you started even if many others have it
- downloading from the beginning of the content for everyone is a maximally bad strategy

Q: Who has what pieces is not centrally known?
A: Way too much overhead. Trackers currently put up 1/10,000th of all bandwidth used in torrents, yet people still complain.

Q: What if peers tell each other which magic numbers to use at the moment?
A: Way too clever. Peers don't trust each other.

Q: As for not trusting, do you have a specific model in mind? Stock market?
A: Want something that behaves like a commodity. Though bandwidth does not behave like a commodity at all.

- Bit Torrent is very much a reliability application
- how to deal with failures in the network
- google as a corp does this similarly to save cost

- Anyone who claims their app can scale to 100 times what they've tested is smoking crack
- 2nd order effects become 1st order effects
- torrents can handle 10,000s of peers before tracker gets overloaded
- need serious engineering to get to 1,000,000

Q: Exeem?
A: Totally irrelevant.

Q: Legal issues?
A: None. Develops for engineering not for avoiding legal liability.

- Gossip Algorithms
- each peer tells peers works terribly
- better strategy is to look for the least connected person within a peers of peers group and try to connect to them to get their peer list
- how to handle new peers with little content complicates things greatly

Q: Documented all of these anecdotal observations?
A: No, really bad at doing that. Just wade into the code base though some stuff is tricky. Implementation is well encapsulated. Maybe set up a FAQ.

What are you doing this Wednesday at 4PM (pacific)? Here are my 3 choices:

4:15 - Bram Cohen
"Under the hood of BitTorrent"
Gates Computer Science Building - Room B03

4:00 - Lawrence Lessig plus panel
"Getting Creative: New Perspectives on Music Distribution and Copyright Law"
Law School - Room 190
Panel discussion with the manager of Jerry Garcia's estate, the director of Creative Commons, a named partner at a law firm, the founder of the Magnatune record label, and Prof. Lessig.

4:15 - Steven Weber
"The Success of Open Source"
Wallenberg Hall, Room 127
As part of Howard Rheingold's ongoing "Literacy of Cooperation" Humanities course.

On the eve of the end of Phish, the goal was just getting into Coventry. Constant rainstorms had turned the concert/camping area into a giant mudfield and traffic was hopelessly backed up. Along the way time became warped, weird mobs formed to guilt those who cut in traffic, cars were abandoned, people were turned away and friendly locals did what they could to help out. This 10 minute movie (my first) documents the trek in and the decisions to be made.

As hosted on Prodigem, the torrent is here.

As a part of Howard Rheingold's Towards a Literacy of Cooperation course, Jimmy Wales spoke this week on Wikipedia. I grabbed 40 minutes of video from it and more information is available on the torrent info page (or just grab the .torrent).

The Rheingold course itself has been a very interesting mix of speakers and discussion on cooperation-related topics. They should be making available edited versions of all the sessions some time after the course concludes (March) so everyone should look forward to that.

In a previous entry I discussed some of the tribulations of getting usable video off the Panasonic SV-AV50. While the 15fps video captured in "super fine" mode can be easily converted from Linux, the 30fps video from the "extra fine" mode is codec encumbered. I've finally figured out how to rescue it. First you must install the video codec for Windows Media Player that comes on the CD which comes with the camera (p_mpeg4.dll). Then you need to install AsfTools and separately also install Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Once those are installed (and you've rebooted), fire up AsfTools, select the ASF file that you want to free and click on "Re-Encode". This will convert it to a new asf using a different codec. To then convert it from new-asf to an avi, you can then select "Convert to avi", though I still recommend converting to avi using the method described in the previous blog entry as the output seems to be more universally playable.

Can anyone confirm this? I'm working here to convert some video that I shot of Jimmy Wales discussing wikipedia and was relegated to my Windows machine because of the file format. I attempted to use the Windows double-press Prnt-Scrn (its a button on your keyboard) trick to do an entire screen capture and then paste it into Windows Paint. Except, when I pasted it in Windows paint, I got the whole screen capture but where the paused video frame should be, it only shows a grey square. Has Microsoft gone out of its way to limit me from accessing my personally owned (soon to be creative commons) work? Below is a meta-screen capture of what Microsoft paint looks like on my machine. Of course, I'm just going to grab the frame from Linux now that I've got it converted, but this is a bit ridiculous.

UPDATE: mibus commented that this is just due to hardware acceleration. If you turn off hardware acceleration in the Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot, you can grab video. Thanks for promptly pointing this out. I should also note that with ksnapshot in Linux, it just works without tweaking anything.