Interview With BitTorrent’s Bram Cohen

Roblimo, Slashdot

Here we go… direct questions and direct answers about BitTorrent, the latest big-time P2P file distribution system to hit the Internet. Bram Cohen made BitTorrent and maintains it, and perhaps, one day, just maybe, he’ll even make a living from it…

1) Bit-Torrent browsing… by CashCarSTAR

Has any effort/thought been put towards bit torrent page distribution?

Specifically, a way that one can use BT to mirror webpages. A way to get around the /. effect, and as well would work wonders the next emergency that comes out (see 9/11).

Bram:

Images in web pages are very small and require very low latency. BitTorrent is designed for much larger files, which download on the order of minutes or hours rather than seconds. BitTorrent uses the significant amount of time those downloads take to try out and compare different connections. This process has inherent latencies which make it unsuitable for images on web pages.

Certainly it would beis possible on paper to dramatically reduce the cost of hosting an ordinary web site using peer transfers, but the logistical problems of handling many small files at low latency have yet to be solved, and will probably require a protocol which looks significantly different from BitTorrent.

The Interview: here

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