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Demonstrating A Legitimate Use Of File Sharing For Microsoft's Update?
from the non-infringing-or-infringing? dept
The BBC is reporting on Downhill Battle's move to offer the new Microsoft Windows XP update via BitTorrent as a way of showing how distributed file sharing applications can be used for legitimate, non-infringing purposes (though, the article hints that Microsoft isn't particularly thrilled about this). Of course, anyone who understands how BitTorrent works knows that there are already plenty of examples of non-infringing uses of BitTorrent. At this point, unfortunately, this demo may only serve to show how immature BitTorrent actually is. While the concept is great, the implementation still needs quite a bit of work.
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Hell yeah it's a good example
Actually I think this is a fantastic example of the promise of file sharing. On Monday morning when I read that SP2 was already released but that it would be enabled piecemeal over Windows Update, I turned to file sharing. I had the complete 280MB file in just under 2 hours ... at no cost to Microsoft. This is a brilliant realization of the promise of file sharing for lowering the cost of ditributing large files.
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I had better luck
It took me just under 20 minutes to download XPSP2 via BitTorrent on Charter cable modem, and roughly 10 minutes of that was spent collecting peers and such. Truly amazing.
My question, though, is what assurance do I have that the final file is, indeed, an unmolested copy of XPSP2? Seems like some sort of digital signature is needed to verify authenticity, or we could be in for a whole new round of trojans.
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Authenticity
Bittorrent uses hashing to verify the integrity of the file. As long as you receive a trustworthy torrent file, the final product is going to be the same as the original!
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