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| BitComet – A Bittorrent Client Stuck Behind a Language Barrier Posted: 18 Feb 2011 12:13 PM PST
In recent years BitComet has been adding many features that have taken it way beyond being a regular BitTorrent client. It now has a full featured HTTP/FTP download manager, a VIP downloading feature, and its own proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding. Despite the wide range of features that have been implemented, BitComet has remained largely undiscussed in the English speaking part of the Internet. One of the main reasons for this is that none of the 20-people strong development team speaks English. So today, after working with a team of translators, we aim to bridge this gap and unravel a few mysteries by presenting our discussions with BitComet founder RnySmile. “In the beginning I was using another BitTorrent client developed in Python,” RnySmile says, commenting on his motivation to start developing BitComet. “After running a torrent all night long I noticed my harddrive was running like crazy, grinding away as the torrent progressed and I wondered why the developers didn’t use a disc cache to prevent the constant need for repeated read/writes. This client also didn’t have the ability to download more than one torrent at a time.” “So, being a C++ programmer, I began development on a new client initially called “SimpleBT”, which was originally designed to simply run torrents and introduced a disc cache as well as the ability to download multiple torrents. This project eventually grew to be much more than a simple BitTorrent client so we eventually changed the name to BitComet,” he added. Today, BitComet has grown far beyond being a one man operation. The current BitComet development team consists of approximately 20 people, who are all from China. These developers are obviously skilled in what they do, but the inherent language barrier also has some downsides. During the early years there were quite a few controversies surrounding BitComet, which resulted in a bad reputation among many English speaking BitTorrent users. Although RnySmile acknowledges that some errors were made in the past, he believes that many of the reported issues were the result of a lack of communication. “The criticism and rumors about BitComet that circulated through the English-speaking torrent community were largely unknown to us, at least not to the extent they were known in the English communities,” he says. “Being that BitComet is a free software product we haven’t had the resources to operate a public relations department to service our international users, issue press releases and communicate with the media.” Although BitComet now has English volunteers who help out users in their native language, this type of support was mostly missing in the early years. In China, on the other hand, it was easier for the BitComet team to address and respond to concerns. “We have always operated a forum in China where we post updates and users can communicate with members of the development team,” RnySmile says. For many in the English speaking BitTorrent community, the lack of communication resulted in a bad reputation. It all started in 2005 when BitComet was banned from several private BitTorrent trackers for ignoring the "private flag" – a feature that keeps private torrents, private. Even though this issue was resolved relatively quickly, the image of BitComet was permanently damaged. In the years to come, more and more horror stories popped up, from spreading junk data, to disobeying BitTorrent rules. In 2007, BitTornado developer Shad0w even went as far as banning all BitComet users, because the client allegedly exploited super-seeds. Around the same time, however, Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years experience, researched most of the claims against BitComet. He concluded that the client was not best suited for initial seeding tasks but at the same time refuted all other claims. "BitComet is a worthy download client, providing some advantageous features not found in any other current BitTorrent client. Some of these features are confusing and are poorly implemented, but they are not detrimental to a BitTorrent swarm, nor do they take unfair advantage," Topolski wrote. "None of the typical accusations against BitComet, those that are provided as reasons for trackers or users to ‘Ban BitComet’ have held true. It is my professional opinion that the bans of BitComet are based on misunderstandings and falsehoods, and not on good data," he added. BitComet founder RnySmile agrees with this assessment, and in his full response (linked below) he addresses several of the rumors and misunderstandings in detail. Although the bad press was unpleasant, the BitComet team wanted to look ahead and create an universal download application that goes beyond BitTorrent. “One thing we wanted to do was make BitComet into more than just a BitTorrent client. We wanted our users to be able to use one program to do all their downloading, no matter what the source of the files was, or the protocol used to get them,’ RnySmile said. Among other things BitComet has introduced a feature called VIP-downloading which enabled user to download torrent that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. It’s basically a private connection to a hight speed seedbox which speeds up the downloading process. Another unique feature to BitComet is the proprietary file sharing protocol which the developers call long-term seeding (LT-seeding). With LT-seeding BitComet users can choose to keep on sharing files with other LT-seeders when their regular download is stopped. However, normal BitTorrent swarms will always have priority over LT-seeding. Finally, BitComet is also planning to introduce an anonymity feature in the near future, but this is still a work in progress. The above, and integrating many other features that have been implemented over the years, is BitComet’s greatest accomplishment according to RnySmile. “It was a long, hard, and ongoing task to get these new features to all work together and develop a stable product.” One thing’s for certain, BitComet is here to stay. Although it’s steering in a slightly different direction than most other clients, with some pretty unusual features, we feel that the BitComet team deserves more credit than it generally gets. — The full response from the BitComet team was too long to publish in its entirety but can be read here (pdf). We want to thank everyone who helped in getting this interview ready for publication, including RnySmile, The UnUsual Suspect, the BitComet development team, Lucy26, Kluelos, Cassie, GreyWizard and Vasy. |
| Nothing New Under The Copyright-Eclipsed Sun Posted: 18 Feb 2011 05:28 AM PST When the printing press arrived in 1453, scribe-craft was a profession in high demand. The Black Death had taken a large toll from the monasteries, who were not yet repopulated, so copying books was expensive.
“How will the monks get paid?”, they argued to justify this. Still, even the death penalty couldn’t stop the copying. Of course, it wasn’t about payment of monks. The Catholic Church couldn’t have cared less, really. It was about control over knowledge and culture. Once most of the populace had learned to read, the Church lost its grip permanently. England chose a different route. Seeing how even the death penalty hadn’t worked, Queen Mary I needed an ally within the printing industry. She awarded a printing monopoly to London’s printing guild, the London Company of Stationers, in return for being able to censor anything before publication. The monopoly was awarded on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright. This alliance between industry and government worked well to suppress dissent. Fast forward 138 years, and censorship wasn’t really all that modern anymore. The British Parliament let the copyright monopoly expire in 1695, and the Stationers lost a very lucrative monopoly. They begged to get it back for 15 years. Eventually, Parliament was persuaded. The printers and distributors complained that nothing would get printed or distributed without a monopoly. (Note how this is very, very different from nothing being created without a monopoly.) But they suggested that this monopoly originate with the author and be classified as property, so it could be sold to a printer. In doing this, the printers killed three birds with one stone. One, they met Parliament’s requirement that there would be no more central point which enabled censorship, so they would reconsider the monopoly. Two, the printers would still have a de facto monopoly as authors would be forced to sell the monopoly to printers. Three, classifying the monopoly artificially as “property” would write it into Common Law rather than case law, giving it much stronger legal status. The copyright monopoly was re-enacted in this form in 1709, and took effect on April 10, 1710, in the so-called Statute of Anne. The United States adopted a similar passage in its constitution later, but with much clearer justification — that the only legitimate beneficiary of the copyright monopoly is the public. Fast forwarding to the advent of libraries, the monopolist publishers — now strong in their almost religious belief that they had a right to dictate how people could read — tried to ban the lending of books. You couldn’t allow people to read without paying for their own copy, they argued. When politicians considered public libraries, the monopolist publishers went stratospheric. "You can't let anybody read any book for free! Not a single book will be sold ever again! Nobody will be able to live off their writing! No author will write a single book ever again if you pass this law!" Parliament in the 1800s was much wiser than today, however, and saw the copyright monopolists' tantrum for what it was. They decided that the public’s access to knowledge and culture had a greater value to society than a monopolist being paid every time a book was opened, and so, the first public library in the UK opened in 1850. And as we all know, not a single book has indeed been written since. Oh, wait. There are more books being written than ever in history. I mean, the argument is as bogus when used today as it was then. After the copyright monopoly internationalized in 1886, music became more and more interesting. The record industry was invited to Rome in 1933 by Confederazione Generale Fascista dell'Industria Italiana in order to try to corporatize the copyright monopoly a bit further. IFPI was formed in this Rome meeting. The ambition succeeded, with the advent of the Rome Convention in 1961, where the record industry was granted copyright-identical monopolies called “neighboring rights”. One notes here that the record industry’s monopoly is as recent as 1961. Not the image they paint. Currently, the United States is trying to bully every other country to respect the copyright monopoly’s stronger and stronger privileges. They issue a “Special 301 list” every year, which is supposed to be a blacklist of the world’s worst “offenders”. A majority of the world’s population is on the list. Spain and Canada made the list this year, too. A personal political goal for me is to put Sweden back on that list. To summarize, the battle over who controls knowledge and culture has raged for well over 500 years. The same justifications have been used all through those 500 years. But learning from history, we can see how the choke hold of the Catholic Church was defeated. We should repeat that course of action against the copyright monopoly today. Teach everybody to share. Make everybody experience what it’s like to have all of humanity’s knowledge and culture at their fingertips. It can’t be unexperienced, just like people 500 years ago couldn’t unlearn to read. – — – Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other Friday. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge. |
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