RunawayJim.org

There’s a current thread on the NYCheads email discussion list (which can be found at Google Groups, for those of you in the NYC area who want some decent music discussion, though it tends to revolve around NYC and jam bands and the like) regarding OptOnline’s and Comcast’s TOS prohibiting you to be a “server”. The issue that started was Comcast banning Bit Torrent because it makes your computer a server. Some feel that peer-to-peer software does not make your computer a server, though Comcast, and most ISP’s, would probably disagree with that. Though the discussion is still fairly young, and I’m sure more people will add their 2 cents to it, I added mine…

P2P represents a grey area in the client/server relationship. I’m going to start off with the normal P2P apps (the original Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, BearShare, etc). These types of applications work in a way very close to the normal client/server relationship. One user logs onto the P2P network, searches for a file name/song/artist/whatever, and is then presented with a list of computers logged onto the same network that are sharing said file (or files that come up in the search). The user searching then finds the file he wants and chooses to download it. In this type of relationship, the user’s computer is the client and the computer that is hosting the file is very clearly the server. What makes this slightly grey is that the host’s computer can also be acting as a client in downloading other files from other users on the network. However, that does not break the normal the client/server relationship because a client is initiating the download of a file.

Enter Bit Torrent… All ideas of the normal client/server relationship with regards to P2P have changed. The grey areas have become greyer and the lines between client and server have been severely blurred. When a computer connects to a torrent, it starts downloading bits and pieces of the file, not necessarily in any particular order, from all the other computers connected to that same torrent. However, it then goes and sends bits and pieces of that file to the other computers connected that don’t already have those bits and pieces. This is all tracked by well… a tracker, which is a server that notifies the computers connected to the torrent that the file exists and keeps track of which computers have which parts of the file and how much of the file they have. The lines get blurred with whether or not the computer is pushing out the file, or uploading it to the other computers, or if the other computers are downloading it. The initiation of the downloading/uploading is less clear than in the case of the standard P2P software, making it unclear whether or not your computer has become a server while connected to a torrent.

From the standpoint of the ISP, Comcast and OptOnline in this case, but certainly not limited to them as Cox also has rules against running servers (which I was able to do for the longest time and one day they just started blocking ports, yet don’t advertise that they block those ports), you are most definitely running a server no matter what kind of P2P software you are using, assuming you are sharing files, which Bit Torrent does by default. From the standpoint of the end user, you are not running a server because you are merely uploading those files (or bits of files) to others and not actually running the server. The idea being that with Bit Torrent, it’s a mutually agreed upon situation and the initiation happened at the same time. Regardless of which side you believe, Bit Torrent has blurred the lines of the client/server relationship and has certainly made things lots of fun for network administrators. The one great thing about Bit Torrent, and its biggest strength, is that it represents exactly what the internet was created for… sharing. If people didn’t share, the internet would not have been a success.

For more discussion like this and for some pretty good music discussion, check out NYCheads. I’m still a member, though I have moved away from the NYC area (not that I was every really in it, but I was much closer before).