Some notes on bittorrent (updated)
Studying the bittorrent technology and my personal experiences with it make me want to 'teach' the world a couple of things: 1) Bittorrent trackers* should allow all available types of decentralised seeding, like DHT and Peer Exchange; Access to torrents should always be wide-open, not limited, not password-protected. If some tracker doesn't allow DHT, it's because someone's trying to make money (or become famous) over other people's work or other people's bandwidth. Closed down torrent-communities are bad that way; The hosted torrents tend to be short term, because there aren't enough users involved. Plus users have the danger of never knowing what goes on with their torrent registration data, logs could be handed over to people with bad intentions, it could even be used for blackmail. Trackers requiring registration are inherently bad for the development of bittorrent, trackers requiring a ratio are even worse (and merely creating that requirement because the swarms have too few peers). The motto for bittorrent should always be: The more the merrier. As long as you have enough users downloading, it will not matter one bit if they download more than they share. Sometimes members of a closed down community are required to reach a…