After a state of the .COM, after the beginning of glory, a Bram Cohen young programmer eventually tired of failure.
"I am sure that I will finally want to work for such a project, it should be that people really want to use, really can be used and actually interesting," he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. 28-year-old Cohen opened the next wave of the next wave shared by the Internet file. If Napster opens the first generation of file shares, the service like Kazaa as the second generation of representatives, the system developed by Mr. Cohen, that is, the famous BitTorrent, has sufficient reasons as the third generation. Determine a accurate number is very difficult, but BitTorrent software seems to have been downloaded more than 10 million times.
As the early form of document sharing, under the pressure from the music industry, it seems that it has gradually faded, and new technologies like BitTorrent are getting unprecedentedly simple. A separate site such a SUPRNOVA.ORG, which can provide hundreds of TV programs, new movies, and copyright software programs. This caused especially the focus of the film industry.
Mr. Cohen created something, although it seems that everything doesn't matter. When he developed this system, he said that the prevalence copyright infringement is not what he wants.
On the contrary, a problem has caused his interest. This is a lot of Internet users often encounter, and friends who do legal online music sales have experienced the deepest issue: the file download process is unbearable.
"It is obvious that their problems are the lack of bandwidth," Mr. Cohen said in an interview in a Mexican restaurant adjacent to the Seattle. "I seem to be very clear, not there is no bandwidth, but it is not fully utilized. All uplink capacity is not taken by people."
This is the point of understanding BitTorrent. Under the old file sharing system, such as Napster and Kazaa, only a small number of users are shared by the world. Most users are simply downloaded, and the virtual space is used to snap (Leech).
BitTorrent uses the principle of "Bible" "Genhuan": How fast is you upload, just allow you to download how fast? BitTorrent cuts the file into a lot of small pieces, once a user downloaded a piece, immediately can upload this block to other users. Almost all people who share the same file are simultaneously uploaded and downloaded with some part of the same file (unless their download has been completed).
The actual significance is that the BitTorrent system makes a very large file that distributes a large number of users, and the bandwidth demand for file original "sowing people" is minimized. This is because everyone who wants this file is shared with others, not from a source source. A file sharing network called Edonkey is also a similar system.
For Cohen, BitTorrent is just a mental training rather than making money. Unlike many other file sharing programs, Bittorrent is not only free and open source, which means those people with sufficient technical knowledge can integrate Cohen's code into their own procedures.
When writing this software, "I temporarily rely on savings, then rely on credit card life, you know, use the credit card for Zero account fee to pay the previous card," Mr. Cohen said.
BitTorrent's first available version was released in October 2002, but this system also requires a lot of debugging. However, Mr. Cohen is very fortunate. At that time, he lived in the Bay area. His project has attracted the attention of free software entrepreneurs John Gilmore, and he is also one of the earliest employees of Sun Microsystems. Mr. Cohen completed this system, Mr. Gilmore helped him solve some of the living expenses.
"This matter is important to me, partly reason is that it provides very popular documents with limited bandwidth," Mr. Gilmore said in an interview. "It means that if you are a small software developer, you can provide a package, if this package can make millions of people need it, they can get it in an automated way." BitTorrent really started to take off. In the first half of 2003, it was used to distribute a new version of Linux, Japanese animated fans began to rely on it shared cartoon.
It is difficult to calculate the total use of BitTorrent, but the high-speed network association, the head of the Internet 2 backbone network infrastructure Steven C. Corbato said that he noted BitTorrent in May, "We start watching Bittorrent traffic on May 15, 2003. Growth, in October, it has taken more than 10% of the traffic, "he said.
On January 26th, according to Corbato's latest reliable information, the traffic generated by Bittorrent accounted for 9.3%, and this backbone was connected to more than 200 national research universities. There are also laboratory and state education networks. It can be formed that no other file sharing system has more than 1% of traffic records, although Corbato said that his network may be underestimated by other services.
In any case, just a few months ago, this success could not bring US dollars to Cohen.
"This past September, I have already, it seems that I have no money," he recalls, "I just barely, I have to repeat the old business of the credit card."
But Mr. Cohen does not know that BitTorrent can be taken to find a job. He suddenly heard from the general manager of Valve Software, Bellevue, Washington, I heard that Valve is developing a video game that will be very shocking according to the game expert - "Half-stop 2", it A online distribution network called Steam is also created. Because Cohen's expertise in this area, Valve gave him a job. He moved to Seattle in October and started to work.
"We are looking for those people who have done this most interesting thing during this period, and BRAM is too good to improve BitTorrent," said Mr. Newell. "This distributed release method embedded in BitTornt is extent that media companies need to create themselves."
From beginning to end, Mr. Cohen accepted donations from BitTorrent users on his website BitConjurer.org, but the amount was slightly. In October, Cohen's father asked him to have a little more. Now, Mr. Cohen said that he can receive less than $ 100 a day.
"With the income of work and donation, in a few months, my lifestyle has dramatically changed," Mr. Cohen said, "This is great."
According to the survey of the PEW Internet and American Life Project, as a clear result of the legal offensive of the music industry, the document sharing is retreat. In May last year, 29% of the US adult Internet users reported were shared in November and December, and this number has dropped to 14% in the investigation of November and December. Despite this, BitTorrent's loyalty - whether it is an animated fan, Linux user, a free car, or a movie pirate - looks still growing. This part benefits from Mr. Cohen.
"According to the impact of the result, I think BRAM will be almost the same," Steve Hormell said that he is a common founder of the Etree.org of music exchange website. This website appears before the file sharing, refer to the original Napster service . "It's just a point of transformation, and I can't see any of this community. You have to give it first. In 15 years, the entire Internet is like this, until the lawsuit followed." Movie industry I feel unhappy. "BitTorrent has no doubt that has already appeared on our radar screen," American Film Association Internet Executive Director Tom Temple said in an interview. One year ago, this association was perceived by this technology, and BitTorrent's prevalence prompted this organization. In November last year, they issued an infringement notice to BitTorrent website operators.
"We launched a survey for several BitTorrent links, in the near future, they may incur a civil or criminal proceedings." Mr. Temple said.
For the above statement, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent's users are not anonymous, and their digital Internet addresses (IP) are easy to pay attention to. "The website like Suprnova is still there, which makes me surprised, because this makes them easy to be prosecuted," he said. It is "very stupid because it is not anonymous, because it is not anonymous, because it is not anonymous because it is not anonymous, because it is not an anonymous because it is just anonymous with the entire structure."
That is, Cohen has nothing to do with this bad debt.
"I don't want to ion to stand in the sky, I don't want to do it, because the lesson is not my duty," he said. "I just look at this thing with some interest."
(Hongboyuan. Reprinted by the author agreed.)
