Saturday, November 30, 2002

I've been using BitTorrent for a couple of days now. This is promising stuff. The BT application is fired automatically from your browser when you click a link to a .torrent file. I like this approach, since users are used to having 'helper applications' launch from their browser. BT starts to download your requested file from multiple sources in the network. Simultaneously, your upload bandwidth starts sending the same file to others requesting that file on the network. The more popular a file becomes, the faster you will be able to pull it down to your own machine. Which brings me to another feature I like; Old content dies off, that's right, gone. Go find it on GNUtella somewhere I guess. Ofcourse this particular p2p network architecture isn't intended for archival purposes. It's a real-time, ad-hoc p2p networking tool. The only central database is a torrent tracker, which [presumably] only hosts url's and helps the peers find each other. This makes publication of torrent-stored files easy. It's just a hyerlink. Finding BT content is a bit challenging. Besides one or two tracker sites, it appears that there are #bittorrent irc channels, but I haven't been able to find them with ircle yet. The true beauty of this approach to p2p networking is that you create a 'network' of interest, making distribution of individual [large] multimedia files scalable. Would be cool to hand off a torrent url in an rss enclosure... [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 1:56:25 PM    comment []

BW Online | November 27, 2002 | Some Simple Solutions to Identity Theft. Credit agencies must be more vigilant. A first step: quickly and routinely alerting consumers that their credit histories have changed [ ... ] This criminal case has many security experts worried because it points up some glaring weaknesses in credit reporting. Your credit information -- in effect, your financial identity -- can easily be stolen by alert thieves with access to sensitive information. Yet, credit agencies don't share with individuals what's going on with their credit reports -- unless consumers ask. This anomaly will become a national economic issue as identity theft grows. [Privacy Digest] 6:57:50 AM    comment []