Australians to block BitTorrent!?

[zmjjmz]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/22/146259

Uh, bad? Very bad?

[markp1989]

That sucks, im dont live in oz. but still, i love torrents , right now i can only download between 12am and 7am, and it anoys me, but to completly ban it is ridicilous.

[eragon100]

Well I am not in Down Under, but seriously, there isn't much free software / movies or whatever you can't get via direct download. Even if there is some, if the license allows redistribution, there is nothing preventing you from putting it on something like megaupload.

Bittorrent always gives me slow and unstable download speeds (and my ISP does *not* block it), it puts a tremendous load on the network for the ISP (and thus for other users), and you can only get a file if it's popular enough for there to be lots of seeds (and not to many peers).

Conclusion: for an end user, bittorrent often doesn't work (correctly.)
It never has, it doesn't, and it probably never will.

Small software projects who can't pay server can move to sourceforge, google code, berlios or whatever, all of which are free and function.

I really wouldn't care if bittorrent got banned here, legal stuff (and illegall stuff) can usually be downloaded directly anyway.

EDIT: According to the news article on news.com, they don't want to block P2P , they only want to filter out illegal content.

[Eisenwinter]

I'm completely against it, I think it hurts Internet users, and whoever proposed this law, is an idiot.

[SuperSonic4]

Yeah but direct downloads are far more unstable, a torrent will restart itself upon reconnection but a direct download will not and windows doesn't have wget -c by default

[eragon100]

Yeah but direct downloads are far more unstable, a torrent will restart itself upon reconnection but a direct download will not and windows doesn't have wget -c by default

That depends on your browser. It won't in IE, but it should restart in firefox and opera, right?

And it can definitely be restarted if you use a download manager.

And windows also doesn't have a torrent program by default.

[jken146]

There is *plenty* of legit stuff on the torrents. Bittorrent saves server bandwidth for many low-budget software projects and in many cases actually speeds up distribution.

[smartboyathome]

Small software projects who can't pay server can move to sourceforge, google code, berlios or whatever, all of which are free and function.

Not true. Many distros, all of which start out as seedlings, would not be able to fit on Google Code, Sourceforge, Berlios, etc. They would have to host it themselves or have a friend host it. If Bittorrent were to all of a sudden disappear, many distros would also, and many of the ones that didn't would be in financial trouble due to the shear amount of bandwidth used each month (and thus, the shear amount of money having to be spent).

[insane_alien]

i predict this will do almost nothing for preventing bittorrent traffic. there will always be a way around it.

the quote 'the internet detects censorship as damage and as such routes around it' (can't remember who said it, sorry) will apply here.

[Eisenwinter]

heh.. if I had the money, I'd totally set up a whole server, just for different Linux distros.

Like, each distro had it's own section, like a full website, just for it, and you could download it and find info on it and etc.