Bill Wishon's News and Views

Bittorrent Inc. announced today that it has begin to collaborate with the Google-funded Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to test ISP connections and home networking related issues that could impact a user’s connection speed. From Bittorrent’s blog:

“M-Lab is supporting important research into how our Internet is actually performing and informing the debate on how this shared resource should be managed.”

utorrent mountain view

At the core of this collaboration is a tool that was integrated into uTorrent ever since its 2.0 beta launch last summer: uTorrent users are now given the option to test their connection speed upon starting the application for the first time. The client then tests a user’s connection and suggests various connection settings based on this test.

However, BitTorrent isn’t relying on it’s own server for these speed test. Instead, it is using a service supplied by M-Lab that is also aggregating the anonymized test results to get a better sense of how fast the average DSL or cable connection is, what kind of problems users are facing as part of their home set-up and related issues. All of this data is available under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means it’s essentially part of the public domain, free to use by anyone for any purpose. Bittorrent’s blog post elaborates:

“Given µTorrent’s substantial user-base, we are hopeful that this data will stimulate new research into the state of the Internet and support the public debate with unbiased measurement data.”

Bittorrent plans to include related M-Lab tools in the future. One that could be particularly interesting is Glasnost – a tool developed to detect ISP interference with P2P file transfers.

Tags: google, m-lab, measurementlab, bittorrentinc, utorrent, isps

“Money can’t buy happiness, but neither can poverty.”

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’”

The New York Times has a great interactive map up that matches the popularity of various top rentals at Netflix against different area codes in 12 major metropolitan areas. And while some of the information seems obvious — The Curious Case of Benjami…

Avatar Plot Fail
Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

I love this idea. In fact, I think it should be franchised. What name would work on strip mall storefronts everywhere? Apetcalypse? Number of the Beasts? I dunno . . .

Are you a Christian or Catholic worried about what will happen to your
beloved pets…

In today’s New York Times, we read that Hollywood is working on a grand unified video DRM scheme intended to allow for video portability, such as, for example, when you visit a hotel room, you’d like to have your videos with you.

What’s sad, of course, is that you can have all of this today with very little fuss. I use iTiVo to extract videos from my TiVo, transcoding them to an iPhone-compatible format. I similarly use Fairmount to rip DVDs to my hard drive, making them easy to play later without worrying about the physical media getting damaged or lost. But if I want to download video, I have no easy mechanism to download non-DRM content. BitTorrent gives access to many things, including my favorite Top Gear, which I cannot get through any other channel, but many things I’d like aren’t available, and of course, there’s the whole legality issue.

I recently bought a copy of Disney/Pixar’s Up (Blu-ray), which includes a “Digital Copy” of some sort that’s rippable, but the other ones are rippable as well (even the Bluray), so I haven’t bothered to sort out how the “Digital Copy” works.

(UPDATE: the disc contains Windows and Mac executables which will ask the user for an “activation code” which is then sent to a Disney server which responds with some sort of decryption key. The resulting file is then installed in iTunes or Windows Media Player with their native DRM restrictions. The Disney server, of course, wants you to set up an account, and they’re working up some sort of YouTube-ish streaming experiences for movies where you’ve entered an activation code.)

So what exactly are the Hollywood types cooking up? There are no technical details in the article, but the broad idea seems to be that you authenticate as yourself from any device, anywhere, and then the central server will let you at “your” content. It’s unclear the extent to which they have an offline viewing story, such as you might want to do on your computer on an airplane. One would imagine they would download an encrypted file, perhaps customized for you, along with a dedicated video player that keeps the key material hidden away through easily broken, poorly conceived mechanisms.

It’s not like we haven’t been here before. I just wonder if we’ll have a repeat of the ill-fated SDMI challenge.