
EC2 Micro Instance as a Remote Bittorrent Client - nirmal
http://mwmanning.com/2010/11/29/ec2-micro-instance-as-a-remote-bittorrent-client/
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javanix
The _only_ thing I would ever use this for would be legal files shared with
friends - I'm not sure how often Amazon ripples their IP addresses, but I'm
sure the RIAA/MPAA would have a field day with an IP address linked to a
billing account in the US.

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jarpadat
Use a prepaid credit card; use a payphone for the phone call confirmation.

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honopu
sounds like a lot of work to just get around buying content :)

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tomjen3
Most of the content that is worth pirating can't be brought at all. Many US tv
shows are two or more years behind outside the US.

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wccrawford
Ouch. What would that cost for the bandwidth?

I looked into using cloud instances for file sharing (legal files, of course)
and decided it would cost too much for what it was worth to me.

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jeremyjarvis
Yeah, with the free usage tier you get 30GB data transfer (15GB in + 15GB out)
included but that would soon run out.

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Retric
From what I see Data Transfer is $0.10 per GB in $0.15 out
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>

Assume you seed 50% more than you use 1GB (10c in) + (15c * 1.5 seeding) +
(15c download) = ~47.5 cents per GB ouch.

However, a blue ray rip is something like 8.5GB * 47.5 cents = 4.04$ which is
not that bad. Assuming you get the actual content that you want, don't end up
in jail etc, it’s still cheaper than HD PPV let alone buying the Disk.

Edit: I chose a BR rip as the lowest value content per GB, for most other uses
it seems fairly reasonable.

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trotsky
Agreed, it's hard to understand this making any financial sense. If you're
looking to do substantial seeding there are low cost unlimited bandwidth vps'
that specialize there. If you're simply looking for a delayed but fast torrent
download there are services that essentially transfer torrents to files on
their server for you to download. And if you simply want to download things
fast & on demand, there is always nntp.

Imagine if someone failed to set a max seeding amount and forgot about their
EC2 instance for a few days or weeks. It'd be easy to transfer hundreds or
thousands of gigabytes (1TB out = $150)

AWS is one of the most expensive ways to buy bandwidth out there. To do worse
you have to look at high end dedicated & managed colos and bad deals at big
CDNs.

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mwmanning
> If you're simply looking for a delayed but fast torrent download there are
> services that essentially transfer torrents to files on their server for you
> to download.

Do you have a links to any services like that? The fact that I couldn't find
any is why I decided to try this at all.

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trotsky
<http://www.furk.net/>

<http://www.peerharbor.com/>

I haven't used these services and can't vouch etc. etc.

(It's notable that two others I was thinking of, httptorrents.com and
imageshack.us have either gone out of business or have cancelled the service.
So predictably it's a pretty spotty market).

And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?

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mwmanning
Thanks.

> And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?

Of course :)

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mooism2
I'm surprised home routers don't have bittorrent clients built in. I expect
most people leave them on 24/7 as it is.

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jmcnevin
There's a number that do... and apparently you can install transmission as an
add-on to dd-wrt:

[http://www.dd-
wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Optware#Installing_torr...](http://www.dd-
wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Optware#Installing_torrent_client)

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spindritf
OpenWRT <http://openwrt.org/> also has a number of clients (and even a
tracker) ready to be installed in the repository:

    
    
      # opkg list | grep -i torrent
      btpd - 0.15-1 - BTPD is a bittorrent client consisting of a daemon and client commands,
       The daemon is capable of running several torrents simultaneously and only uses one tcp port. 
      cbtt - 20060727-1 - Bittorrent tracker
      cbtt-mysql - 20060727-1 - Bittorrent tracker (with mysql support)
      ctorrent - dnh3.3.2-5 - CTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in the C programming language,
      ctorrent-nossl - dnh3.3.2-5 - CTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in the C programming language,
      libtorrent - 0.12.6_r1130-3 - LibTorrent is a BitTorrent library written in C++ for *nix, with a focus
      rtorrent - 0.8.6_r1130-1 - rTorrent is a BitTorrent client for ncurses, using the libtorrent library.
      transmission-daemon - 1.92-1 - Transmission is a simple BitTorrent client.

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jcsalterego
That's cool.

I did the same thing for Minecraft SMP (passing 512M instead of 1024M for
memory usage).

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zmitri
This is cool, you could also use S3 to help you seed if you don't want to keep
your computer on all the time. S3 allows you to use torrents by adding
?torrent to the end of your urls. The data transfer is treated the same as
regular S3 data access.

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rmc
Using S3 torrents wouldn't help you seed, since you'd have to use the same
tracker (original) as everyone else.

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zmitri
Couldn't you just add the tracker url from the s3 torrent to the torrent file
you generate?

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rmc
Sure, but you then need to get everyone else downloading the (original)
torrent to download and use your new torrent. The new amazon torrent might
split the file into differently sized chunks compared to the original. In
short, you'd need to get all original downloads/uploaded to use your new
torrent.

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getsat
Your safest and cheapest bet is to get a seedbox in France.
<http://dediseedbox.com>

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listic
Interesting. I wonder how they make it so cheap, especially considering the
traffic.

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martey
But making all of their payments non-refundable and reserving the right to
terminate your account for any reason (including posting "defamatory" comments
online about them!).

See their Terms of Service at
[http://dediseedbox.com/clients/knowledgebase.php?action=disp...](http://dediseedbox.com/clients/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=8)

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icco
This is a cool idea, but if I used it with the amount of data I use at home, I
would be spending upwards of $500 a month.

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pibefision
recently discovered aria2c, it's an excellent client for bittorrents files,
would be run great on any EC2 instance.

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hippich
IMHO, Exactly this kind of abuse is something will lead to closing evaluation
period provider by amazon.

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mwmanning
How does this constitute abuse?

