So I’m downloading Eve Online (legally) from a bittorrent stream, which indicates that it’s 450.2 Megabytes. Well, I gott to 450.2 MB, and it kept downloading. It would indicated 4 or 5 seconds left, go down to 0 seconds, say complete!, then go back to 4 or 5 seconds. I let it do this until it got around 460 MB, and cancelled it to see if I could run it. It wouldn’t, so I started up the bittorrent stream again, and it’s downloaded another 12MB. I’ve never had this happen before (Granted I’m not a frequent BT user), and I’m wondering if it’s possible that the 450.2MB total file size is incorrect, and it’ll stop downloading soon, or if there is some bizzarre happening that is causing it to download the same chunk of data over and over again, adding it onto the end of the file? Anybody else had problems with this before?
Okay I’ve updated my client, to one that gives a better description of what’s going on. It appears that it was downloading a bad chunk of data, and it kept failing the hash test…so here I wait until it finds one that matches.
And it’s done downloading. Mods, please close this now.
This is not an accusation that you use Bit Torrent for anything other than legal reasons. However, the film industry is pushing the envelope claiming use of BT and other P2P systems were deliberately designed to circumvent copyright.
I believe there is at least one court case pushing this line right now but I cannot find it. At the same time (same case?) documents have been uncovered regarding Kazaa that Kazaa execs knew about, or even actually set up Kazaa to circumvent copyright and illegally distributing such material.
At the same time the MPAA is being accused of uploading deliberately altered MP3 files into P2P stream to effectively sabotage the entire process.
I say all this in you may have completed a legal BT transcaction, but your bad data may very well be coming from a deliberately sabotaged data stream.
Check sum missing?
Duckster may be right, but I do know that a lot of places are offering their stuff up for download through bittorrent because it saves on their bandwidth. If Eve online is one of these places, then I doubt that there would be an intentionally bad piece of data. It could be that somebody else tried to put a virus on it or something, but I doubt that the company behind Eve is doing it.
I had the same thing happen when downloading Fedora Core 3*.
I also am learning video editing. When I start creating my own example videos, I expect to post them on my website and make them available through BitTorrent.
[sub]*As part of my quest to find a Linux distribution that plays well with a previously-existing hardware RAID array formatted for NTFS. So far, the most compatible distro I’ve found (in terms of detecting accessories, etc) has been Knoppix 3.7, but that’s another thread… [/sub]
I’ve been wondering about Bit Torrent. Does paying for the service make any downloads you get off of it legal? Or is it just another P2P program that the software authors are charging for?
I was considering it a few days ago, but if I’m still illegally downloading copyrighted material, I don’t see any point in paying for it.
Bittorrent clients have protections against that, if a client upload x corrupt chunks to you, it goes on your ignore list. Problem solved.
It should also be noted that it is ridiculously easy to get the IPs of people seeding and sharing a torrent. And i do mean ridiculously easy. Much easier than getting Ips of people using kazaa or other filesharing software.
Paying for the service?
Does not compute.
Who’s charging for it?
Who do they pay? It’s not like you paying Napster 99cents for a song. You don’t have to pay anybody to use Bit torrent. (It’s totally free!)
It’s a valid format for distributing files. It’s nothing more than another way to distribute files. But for it to be legal, the owner of the rights must still grant permission to share the file. Many companies have used torrent to distribute their betas. I think Blizzard did it. But just like P2P, it can be abused.
Bottom line, if you are hoping to “buy” a client (they’re free) or someone is convincing you that they are a legal way to get the newest game or music CD, they are lying. Bit torrent is largely abused for piracy.
There many of those scam sites about, one imagines all you get is a client (as mentioned, freely available and plenty of 'em) and maybe a how-to.
Ripping your money up, flushing it down the toilet, then googling for a client would have the same result.
Another factor relating to “intentional” corruption of files shared on P2P networks is that some virii and trojan worms have been discovered in the wild that attempt to spread by means of embedding themselves in files shared by P2P apps.
While I believe Kazaa, not BT, was the target of the phenomenom I saw reported, this should be born in mind as a vector for file corruption.
I don’t think this would even be possible with BT unless the person wanting to spread the virus created the original seed. When you download, you download from SEVERAL people, people that have the complete file as well as from people that have incomplete files.
To be truthful, Bit torrent really doesn’t quite fit the P2P mould.
It did that to me once - I just kept on letting it go, and it eventually finished downloading and the file was fine. I guess it just read the file size wrong.
Two articles on problems - legal and otherwise - BitTorrent is having:
Sunspace wrote
Just so you know, the bittorrent protocol is built for the express purpose of having lots of downloaders and very few seeders. That’s the point of it, to make it so that people who share content don’t have the full bandwidth burdon.
So, if you are very gifted and many people simultaneously want to download your content, then bittorrent may be a wise distribution choice. But if only one at a time downloads, it’ll be slower with bittorrent.