the forums at degreez.net

Here's a rant I wrote when I was drunk and pissed off. I've looked at it sober and surprise, surprise, it still holds true. Comments welcome:

WTF?
Certain people (who shall forever remain anonymous) have reliably informed me that anything and everything you could ever possibly want is, and for many years has been, available on IRC. All kinds of servers like dcc, ftp, xdcc, M.I.L.F., whatever. Christ, it's not that goddam hard. You can get all the 'friggin porn you want from hacked websites, all the progs you want from ftp's, and all the music you want from f-serves. You can usually find it faster than you can find it on BT sites, especially if you want something that's unusual or older than 2 wks. Only downside is that it's a little harder than point and click, and you need to look a little to find places to download @300K/sec. Jeezus H. Chris!! Just face the learning curve and do it! Usually, if you leech a lot you gotta give back, but what's the prob with that? Anyway, if you don't wanna get off your ass and work a little, then don't whine when you can't download the latest album from 50 cent (which is about what he's worth, in my humble opinion). BT isn't going to last much longer as a reliable and safe method of file transfer, and one more time, IRC will take up the slack until some bright MF comes up with a new way to hand the world another point and click client and protocol

Very good point. but not everyone has bandwidth to share with hundreds/thousands of people at 300Kb/s. With BT, one person starts, the hundred ends it. Although IRC is a great source, and probably will stay around for a long time, BT still has the ability to share more efficiently.

I do not think you have a point, BT is here to stay.
It is the best protocol to distribute files, especialy large ones.
ftp may have a smaller overhead, but you do not share your bandwith while downloading and if the server does not support resume...
If you think it is faster to find and download stuff on irc you never actually tried. I did it pretty extenively years ago, it is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. BT and edonkey are much simpler just get a link from some website and the client will take care of the rest. Who cares if it takes longer to download the file itself(unlikely with BT), you yourself do not have to use as much time to actively get it.
That said BT is not perfect it can certainly be improved with some features(encryption, global search, interest groups, rss integration, ratingsystem, multihashing), but for basic file sharing(not leeching) there is nothing better.

Many of my friends here that are unfortunate enough to be on cable, have been sufferring the wrath of the Ellacoya filter for around the past couple of months now. All the p2p traffic including BitTorrent is harshly throttled down now. And I mean like down to the ground down. I'm just wondering if a work around this problem is close at hand yet?

try using non-standand ports. (btw im on cable and im downloading at 150kbps right now )

Anonymous BT à la
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_d ... n=azneti2p
might help.