I've been taking notes on yesterday's viral video posting from BoingBoing on Prodigem of the Berkeley Laptop Thief rant. It shot to the number one spot (past the tsunami downloads) within 6 hours for most complete downloads. Even at this moment, it sports greater than 400 seeders and has been seeing a steady average of 10-20 "leechers" at any given time. A leecher in BitTorrent parlance is just the name given to someone that hasn't completed the download of the content. People with completed downloads are called "seeders" (seeders who stick around to help seed the torrent are the people that make bit torrent work).

Though, I've never quite cared for the term leecher. As it turns out, on the day prior to the BoingBoinging, I completed some upgrades to Prodigem which provide insights into the upload/download status of torrenters at the point at which they complete their download. To that end, at this very moment, with 8171 complete downloads, "leechers" (the people who themselves haven't even finished getting the whole video) have just past 1 GB of donated aggregate bandwidth to the laptop rant cause.

Still, some may scoff at this number in comparison to the total amount of bandwidth consumed (4.9MB * 8171 downloads =~ 40 GB), but I'm still impressed by this 1/40th effort. Considering that at any given time you join the torrent, there are roughly 20 times more people with the entire content available, I would say it's a rather valiant showing for the lowly leecher. Moreover, over 35% of all leechers provided at least 1 Byte of upload before completing their download.

So, why give a name with such negative connotation to those who haven't completed their downloads? After all, we all start out this way. Such is how it is. Perhaps leeches (and maggots) just need a PR makeover.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:42 AM in prodigem | Comments (3)