T08 GROUP 1

Project subject:
Bittorrent, otherwise known as Bittorrent. What is it? What are the benefits compared to traditional file sharing and the controversy surrounding the technology.

Advantages
Error Checking The creation of a .torrent breaks a given file up into many small arbitrary pieces. The client downloads these pieces and "rebuilds" the file out of them later. Each piece can be quickly checked against the MD5 hash due to the relatively small size of the piece compared to the file as a whole. The hash confirms the contents of a given piece and identifies if there is an error and will redownload the piece if it does not match the correct file.

!! This part is badly written, rewrite, cite and possibly break this content up into smaller pieces or delete entirely.!!

http://www.hackernotcracker.com/2007-02/cleverly-repair-large-corrupted-files-with-bittorrent-client-checksum-hash-scans.html

Applications
Software Patches

Bittorrent provides an easy way for software producers to cheaply and efficiently distribute updates to their software at a low cost of a bandwidth to the end user. Blizzard Entertainment integrated the technology to assist in distributing software updates for their title [www.worldofwarcraft.com World of Warcraft]. With up to 11 million subscribers, the logistical ramifications of providing free content updates are enormous. Larger content updates have been known to be as large as 340 - 500MB. With a subscriber base of 11 million, a free content patch as large as 500MB equates to over 5000 TB of data. Bittorrent provides an outlet to both distribute the update quickly by distributing the load over the entire subscriber base and gives incentive to the producer to create higher quality updates as a function of the lower cost [speculation, update with citation probably needed].

To Do
Determine what specific area of P2P we want to cover and narrow it down from such a broad subject.

Create relevant subject headings based on that decision

Use and add to the links provided below to generate content for the wiki

Add to the to do list with other things I have forgotten

List of topics to talk about Legal Issues Net Neutrality Legal Applications Explain nature of bittorrent, ie a torrent website doesn't actually contain "material" it contains a tracker and the material is held by the seeders I'd like to briefly explain TCP and UDP protocols and their application in regards to Bittorrent. IE if you download a file with internet explorer and it fails or becomes corrupted, what advantages if it were to happen while using bittorrent

Many issues related to bittorrents technical specifications can be found here http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/ it is not listed in the useful links. Don't forget to cite if you use it.  List of key terms we should define

Tracker Seed Swarm Share Rating/Ratio Distributed Copy Peer Torrent Reseed

Useful Links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5-wvCSy_y4 NDP MP Charlie Angus on DMCA

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-bell-canada-congestion-numbers-look-low-but-actually-arent.html Bell Canada Congestion Numbers

http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html Statistics Canada on the correlation between P2P downloads and sales

http://www.musiccreators.ca/wp/?p=264 Canadian Musicians Reject sueing fans

http://www.wowwiki.com/Blizzard_Downloader Example of how P2P can be legal and immensely beneficial

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php Blog of Dr. Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law

http://torrentfreak.com/stanford-university-embraces-bittorrent-081018/ Stanford Embracing Bittorrent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_3WnJ42kw Video on Net Neutrality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-8bokMWido&mode=related&search= What is Net Neutrality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mW1qccn8k Barack Obama on Net Neutrality

http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html Google on Net Neutrality

http://torrentfreak.com/mtv-uses-p2p-data-080314/ Bittorrent as a marketing tool

http://torrentfreak.com/michael-moore-on-slacker-uprisings-piracy-problem-081006/ Useful Quote - “I’ll say it for the hundredth time: If I buy a book and read it, and then give you the book to read, I have broken no laws. Why is that not true for all media?”

http://qntm.org/?bittorrent How Bittorrent works

http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2.02-03/ReadersGuide.html P2P Networks