It's a broadband life
I'm trying to order a hamburger, medium well, but the cook was involved in heated argument with the customer who was insisting that DSL is better and faster than cable for a home internet connection.
"Man, DSL rocks!"
"You are crazy. DSL ain't nothing. Cable's bandwidth rocks!"
"You are paying for nothing. You can't download nothing on cable!"
And so on.
A few years ago, these guys would have been talking about the weather or the game on tv. Now, they talk about their internet connections, using a technical language (well, a few technical words) that few people could understand even a few months back.
As I wait for my burger, which seems to be taking forever, I was able to reflect on how broadband access is changing the face of middle-class life, especially domestic life.
Before I tell the following story, let me say upfront I'm really against it when police bust down the doors of an web domain owner and confiscate its servers on grounds that it might be being used as a conduit for illegal downloads. The report of this gross abuse against thepiratebay.org is wholly egregious and a violation of human rights.
On the other hand, I get my life back. For three or four days, my home internet connection was running slow as blackstrap molasses. It seems that I found the culprit: a laptop managed by a certain young resident in my home that was set to download the complete Harry Potter movie set and a few Disney adventures.
You can set the software to start a new one the instant the old one finishes, so there's no telling how many movies were slotted for download. If I hadn't put a stop to it, my internet connection would have been clogged for the remainder of the decade.
For those of your not in the know, PirateBay specialized in BitTorrent downloads, the newest thing in web downloading that provides access to movies and videos. BitTorrents are said to account for 35% of internet traffic.
These downloads take an absurd amount of time. I used to complain about a 45 second download. For kids these days, a download of half a day, a day and a half, or even three days is completely normal. They run in the background and the user hardly notices them.
But everyone else does notice an extreme bandwidth shortage. I reminded the domestic culprit in question that there is a reason they are called "torrent" files, as in (Webster's) "a tumultuous outpouring," "a violent stream of a liquid (as water or lava)," "a channel of a mountain stream." It crushes all before it.
I could see the future and it looked very much like the dial-up days. Remember when we used to fight over who got to use the single phone line? Then we got smart and got two phone lines, made the phone companies crazy with insane phone number demands — boom times for the baby bells! — just before we cancelled not only the new phone line but the old one too, because we were all switching to high speed, cell phones, and VOIP.
With BitTorrent, I would again be stuck yelling upstairs: "Hey, can you pause your week-long torrent download, so I can check my email?"
So, now there are strict household rules on BitTorrent. They can only be done between the hours of 11pm and 5am, or at times when no one else in home. If there is any more clogging the connection going on, two warnings will be delivered. On the third time, there will be no more. Period.
Now, that's strict!
Of course all this could change in a matter of months, given the increased demand for band width. It doesn't matter how many people are arrested, in Sweden, Germany, or the United States, or how many domains are taken off line. There will always be another source and another user willing to take the risk.
The saga of BitTorrent use and abuse is nicely chronicled at Wikipedia, which is another venue that was disparaged as ridiculous when it came out but has since become essential to modern life. Can you imagine the Oxford English Dictionary trying to keep up with our vocabularies, which add new words by the day and hour?
After these endless battles over broadband downloads, it is great to see at least one company getting smart. Warner Brothers has decided that if you can't beat them, join them. It will be offering legal torrents of Star Wars: Revelations, and others are on the way.
We can see the future here. Just as illegal downloads of music paved the way for the spectacularly successful iTunes revolution, sites like PirateBay will deserve credit for alerting mainstream move producers to a new and licit way to make a profit.
Isn't it interesting how the "criminal class" is increasingly shining the line on the direction that praiseworthy web entrepreneurship will take in the future? This alone shows that there is something very wrong with copyright law that would lead so many innocents to be snared in net while doing something that otherwise seems not the slightest bit wrong.
Ah! At last my hamburger is cooked, and served, the old fashioned way.
Comments (10)
BitTorrent itself is entirely neutral. I'm using it right at this moment to download the latest Live Linux DVD of KNOPPIX, http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/
It's also extensively used for perfectly legal foreign TV shows that it would otherwise be impossible for people to see. Distribution of fan-subtitled anime has flourished, and the works are immediately dropped by US subtitling groups when the title becomes licensed in the US, for example.
That's why I find the attacks against "BitTorrent" so pathetic. Is anyone attacking screwdrivers and wrenches because they are the tools of choice of thieves? Well, yes, if you get caught with "thieves tools" in the wrong place and the wrong time, they are defacto evidence of criminal intent.
The thin edge of the wedge is in place, accepted for a long time for things like "thieves tools", "loitering", "structuring" and other non-crimes. As The Pirate Bay, MiniNova and thousands of others will tell you, they host no content at all. All they host are the torrent files, which are just pointers to the content that other people provide.
iTunes is a success because it doesn't overprice the songs. It is the stranglehold that Hollywood is trying to maintain that is driving the illegal trading. Who will pay $30 for something they don't value more than $5? Especially when it's available for no direct cost, only a small risk.
Why aren't paperback books endangered by photocopying? Because the $5 or so for a book is less than the effort/cost of copying.
Also, check which application your shorter cohabitator is using. It is extremely likely there is a "max download speed" setting available that will allow for sharing the link much more politely than with full-open fire-hose style.
But, more likely it was the *up*load traffic that was slowing everything for you down. So make sure to set the "max upload speed" too.
At least, that's been my experience.
Published: June 2, 2006 10:50 AM
Jeff, you might be interested in traffic shaping and QoS technologies, which were nerd topics a short while ago but are rapidly approaching the home market.
If you want to know more, feel free to drop me a line to my email address.
Published: June 2, 2006 11:26 AM
Traffic shaping is nice, but I think I have a simpler solution. I suggest you look into uTorrent. It is by far the best bittorent client on the net, and it has a very powerful program scheduler built in that is very easy to setup and use. There's no password protection for it, but we'll just assume you've got honest kids =)
Published: June 2, 2006 11:58 AM
Medium WELL? Medium RARE.
Published: June 2, 2006 2:11 PM
For three or four days, my home internet connection was running slow as blackstrap molasses.
No offense, but you must have a pretty crappy internet connection. Unless your kid's torrents were extremely well-seeded, which I doubt for the movies you listed. Or maybe I'm just jaded by my own connection, which I suppose is quite fast. Could you go run an online bandwidth meter (whichever one Google comes up with should be fine) and post the results? You've made me curious.
These downloads take an absurd amount of time. I used to complain about a 45 second download. For kids these days, a download of half a day, a day and a half, or even three days is completely normal.
Considering that a movie torrent generally consists of 2-4 GB of data being transferred completely peer-to-peer to dozens or hundreds of users at a time, that's pretty reasonable.
Published: June 2, 2006 2:46 PM
Roy, several people I know experienced the same slowdowns. It wasn't the connection, nor the seeding. It was the _uploading_ that was saturating the link.
It's not that the packets are not getting from the server to Mr. Tucker's desktop because of traffic, it's that the _requesting_ packets from Mr. Tucker's desktop aren't getting out to the servers.
Seriously. BitTorrent applications will suck up every "upload" bit per second available and then some if you let them. Limiting upload speed has solved the problem every time.
Published: June 3, 2006 8:17 PM
Ah yes. I had overlooked the fact that home connections often offer much faster download speeds than upload speeds. So it was that I was jaded by my connection.
Published: June 4, 2006 3:23 AM
An element of this isn't just about pirating or torrents or file sharing.
What kind of a 'free trade' capitalistic society supports intentionally disabled products (like blue tooth in many cell phones) in an attempt to force users to buy from their store (at 2x's the price)?
This seems more important to manufacturers than producing better phones (with or without extras) that can compete in the rest of the world. It's caused the U.S. to loose our technological edge that we may have had.
According to RIAA statements posted at EFF website, even the president is guilty of infringment for downloading tunes from their personal collection to their IPod without buying them seperatley, again. Just how many times is a person supposed to buy the same Beatles song anyway?
Wifi hasn't prospered in innovation or access under the control of telecom companies. It's fair to say the web won't either.
Published: October 13, 2006 12:02 AM
Limiting upload speeds can help, and usually does, but it's not the only culprit. I have a fairly sophisticated (Linux-based) traffic-shaping configuration which keeps BT at a lower priority than normal traffic. Normally it works fairly well -- I don't even notice BT running in the background when browsing the Web or checking e-mail. When running BT for an extended period, however, the ISP-provided DSL router can start choking on the number of simultaneous TCP connections, which leads to random failures and timeouts for just about every Internet protocol. Resetting the router provides a temporary fix, and limiting the BT application to 60-100 simultaneous connections may reduce the frequency of such failures. The only permanent solutions I know of are to increase the amount of RAM in the router and/or decrease the number of tracked connections (by reducing the router's timeouts, for example).
Published: October 13, 2006 1:15 PM
I just realized how loaded my last post was with technical jargon. The short version is this: if you're having trouble accessing the Web while BitTorrent is running, try resetting your DSL router. (Just unplug it and plug it back in.)
Published: October 13, 2006 1:48 PM