
Pirate Bay's Weird New Business Plan - jmonegro
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb2009071_378545.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_internet
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ErrantX
It's very tough to actually believe this article has all the facts straight
when they suggest Seti@Home is a peer2peer network..... :o

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mkyc
It is. It's a common misconception that peer-to-peer is only about making the
handshake symmetrical. Equal contribution of resources is the important thing.
In the case of most peer-to-peer technologies, this contribution is in
bandwidth, storage space, and tiny routing computations. In the case of
seti@home, the contribution was cpu cycles.

[http://www.amazon.com/Peer-Peer-Harnessing-Disruptive-
Techno...](http://www.amazon.com/Peer-Peer-Harnessing-Disruptive-
Technologies/dp/059600110X) has a chapter on Seti@Home.

For those not already running it, please install folding@home on your desktop
computers. <http://folding.stanford.edu/>

~~~
ErrantX
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_2_peer>

Look at the 2 images on the right :) Seti@Home nodes connect _only_ to the
main server. They never see or hear anything about other nodes either. If the
servers died the network would die.

But I second the Folding@Home prompting - a great cause!

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tensor
Isn't this bordering on illegal? It sounds like they want to resell one ISP's
bandwidth to another. As I understand it ISPs are already upset about
bittorrent because it circumvents their commercial upload services by
hijacking consumer bandwidth.

It sounds like a terrible idea.

~~~
lallysingh
It's letting consumers resell their bandwidth on-demand to (I suppose) whoever
needs extra I/O right now.

Frankly, I love the idea of reselling bandwidth, it's reminiscent of selling
power back to the grid.

As for upload speeds/services, I think that's all going to go away pretty soon
-- the DSL/FIOS/Cable wars are heating up (at least here in NYC) and they're
starting to compete in upload bandwidth. AFAIK, cable-internet systems are
usually built with an asymmetric bias for downlink speeds, while the other two
aren't.

~~~
jws
ADSL is also built asymmetrically. You can do symmetric DSL but there is a
trade off and you get a lower download speed than ADSL.

I select my domestic links by upload bandwidth since the download is fast
enough.

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dmix
I'll stick to private trackers. They are like governments - they work better
when in smaller communities.

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eli
How exactly can you sell Comcast's bandwidth back to Comcast?

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tybris
Quite weird indeed, but I figure by ISPs he means hosting providers. Something
like earning money to offer legal content through BitTorrent would be quite
interesting.

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zandorg
They'll be up against BitTorrent Inc in a way - and those are the official
people!

