Will OSX Build In Torrenting?

Cjattwood writes "Mac OS rumors has an article describing a possible implementation of a Bittorrent client into Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", including a unique sharing reward system where the user can share bandwidth and get rewards, such as credit in the iTunes store."

BitTorrent still has a better incentive scheme

[Realistic_Dragon (655151)]

You upload a little and you get infinite download credit for whatever movie you want. Sometimes even before it's out in the stores!

Re:BitTorrent still has a better incentive scheme

[squiggleslash (241428)]

It's a great idea. It's a real shame, a real shame, that there's no way of, say, building this in to iTunes, the thing they're trying to speed up, a quasi-independent application that runs on a variety of different Mac OS X versions. I mean, I can understand how they need to build this in to the operating system, it's such a... low level protocol and everything, and it would add so much bloat, yeah, bloat to iTunes to build it in.

(Yes, I think the article is bullshit. There's absolutely no reason for Appl

wow...

[sxtxixtxcxh (757736)]

imagine getting credit for itunes music for torrenting itunes music... what fun.

Movie Store Distribution System

[richdun (672214)]

Credit for torrenting? Why would Apple give away iTunes music just for people to run torrents? Well, maybe because those torrents will serve up iTunes movies. Dedicated bandwidth has been the greatest obstacle to getting a full iTunes HD movie store (well, that and the movie companies' agreement, but if the tech is there and economical, the content will follow).

Re:Movie Store Distribution System

[rovingeyes (575063)]

"...but if the tech is there and economical, the content will follow..."

I wonder how AT&T and Verizon will try to extort money for this to happen. Are they gonna track ITunes bittorrent traffic and charge Apple for it? If they can demand money from Google, Amazon etc for their content, which is incedentally less amount of data (per request probably megs at max) than a HD movie (gigs of data per request), I don't see why these cartels wouldn't eye Apple as their next target.

Precursor for iT-Movie-S

[doormat (63648)]

I can see Apple doing this for movies since they're so large size-wise. I wouldn't mind using half of my upstream to earn credit at the store. Good way to defray the cost of my internet bill - and since I'm on a comercial account my ISP doesnt say anything about me using a lot of bandwidth.

Translation:

[Avillia (871800)]

Help us take our hosting cost and we'll help you negate that bill you pay for 30 tasty megabytes of fiber... Yesss...

Personally, this is the best implementation of the BitTorrent technology yet.

$eeding.

Interesting, but...

[Penguin Programmer (241752)]

This sounds like a great thing, since it would make BitTorrent more available for non-techie users and add another vote to the legitimacy of BT.

However, if there's a crediting system, does that mean that Apple is watching your BT usage? If I'm not mistaken, Apple has some interest as a content producer and may not like what they see BT being used for. Is this going to be yet another organization watching what people transfer and ratting them out to the RIAA/MPAA/CIA, or will they be Not Evil (tm) and keep their noses out of people's business?

Groan.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

TFA seems slashdotted already, but given the name of the site I can only take this with an extremely large grain of salt.

Beyond that, it's an interesting concept, but one that could seriously botch up torrenting as it is. Bittorrent works so well (with both legal and shady source material) because every user gets the combined benefit of getting what they want, and helping thers who want the same thing to get it. At the very most, a big ratio gets you get bragging rights on some tracker site. My inner folk-song-singing hippie cringes at what result throwing monetary things like iTunes credit into the mix would have.

Want to share updates

[TeamSPAM (166583)]

If we can share the software updates between macs, it would be a good thing. With 3 macs in my house, why should I have to download the updates 3 times? I should be able to get a copy from the mac on my local net that downloaded it first. I just hope they allow the torrent client to have a throttle on it.

Re:Want to share updates

[MachineShedFred (621896)]

You can already do this.

In Software Update, under the "update" menu, select either "Download Only" or "Install and Keep Package"

You will then find the packages at /Library/Receipts and can copy them to other Macs.

Cheers.

Re:Want to share updates

[TeamSPAM (166583)]

There are 2 problems with this suggestion:

1. This works when there is only 1 software update available. This solution gets ugly when there are multiple updates to install. Doing these updates via the command line end up requiring multiple reboots, where the software update panel will only require 1 reboot if needed. I may need to review doing updates from the command line so that I can do multiple installs.
2. I'm lazy. ;-)
   In the wonderful world of Apple's "it just works", I want the pref panel for software update to have a checkbox that says cache all updates and a textbox that indicates my local update cache.

P2P built into iTunes (the app) makes sense

[joeykiller (119489)]

I don't know if P2P built into the OS makes any sense, but certainly it makes sense to build it into iTunes (the application). Some people have claimed that Apple's margin on iTunes content is razor thin. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I certainly know that bandwidth -- when you want the best possible access to your customers, no matter where they are -- doesn't come cheap.

So adding P2P to iTunes could be one area where Apple could improve their margins. I guess the credit system would be a way to secure that people actually kept on sharing their files after they were downloaded/bought from iTunes (the store).

It's an interesting idea (if it's true).

Please.

[Steve Cowan (525271)]

Mac OS Rumors has a long history of being the most uninformed, random Mac rumor site in existence. Its predictions are rarely accurate, and when they are, they have generally been mentioned on another site first.

This is a fairly typical MOSR pipe dream.

Apple does not need my unreliable, low-speed bandwidth. They deliver 100+ MB software updates to thousands of users without blinking. Given that most of their iTMS downloads (music, movies, whatever) are from Windows users, they would see little gain by offering software update credits to Mac users. In fact, for their paltry savings on the cost of bandwidth, they would have an administrative nightmare to face.

I file this one under bullshit.

Re:Please.

[ZachPruckowski (918562)]

Totally concur. Here's another example of this guy smoking stuff:

From the MOSR front page: In the process of researching recent reports from sources regarding Apple's "Gamer's Dream" Macs now in the late stages of development, we uncovered information suggesting that Apple is testing an alternate version of the Gamer's MacBook which would employ an nVIDIA nForce chipset and dual GeForce 7800GTX Mobile GPU's. Memory bandwidth would be slightly less than that offered by the existing Intel chipset in today's MacBook Pro's, but graphics performance would be even higher than the ATi X1800/X1900 based dual-GPU laptop design we've spoken about previously.

Not only does he have no sources, he doesn't have much of a clue about economics or design either. So he's a faker and not a very good one.

Re:DRM?

[Luscious868 (679143)]

RTFA. Traffic would occur on non-standard ports and you wouldn't be able to share anything you wanted. You would donate your bandwidth to share content Apple approved like software updates. It makes perfect sense and I'd certianly donate my bandwith at home when I'm at work in exchange for iTunes credits.

Re:DRM?

[Distinguished Hero (618385)]

The rumor goes that they will give you credit for uploading their software updates to other people (thereby reducing their bandwith bills); they won't offer you anything for uploading anything else...

Re:DRM?

[MrNougat (927651)]

Perhaps they intend to make torrents a legitimate method of delivery of purchased iTunes songs. So, you purchase an iTunes song, seed it as an 'iTunes torrent.' Then you get some amount of credit for more iTunes songs. Someone else who buys the first song you bought downloads it as a torrent from you (and others).

It's a way for Apple to expand their ability to deliver content without having to drastically upgrade their own network infrastructure. You get a little iTunes store credit for being part of the delivery system.

Re:DRM?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)]

DRM? just curious, I can't imagine that they would let you offer the pirated music and movies and then get itunes credit for it...

I think you're confusing the term upload. They aren't talking about you uploading some data you have to get credit to download other data. They are talking about you authorizing Apple to use your machine as a node in a bit torrent network that distributes data of their choice. Thus you click "yes" and they use your spare upload bandwidth to more cheaply and quickly send software updates, podcasts, iTunes downloads, etc. to other computers. The data is all encrypted and chunked so it is not useful to you at all, even though it is on your hard drive. In excahnge, they give a free itunes song or something every month or year or something.

You win, because you weren't using all your hard drive and bandwidth anyway (and presumably it gives your data precedence). Apple wins because they no longer have to pay as much to distribute iTunes data and software updates. Theoretically, they could even expand this to third party software, cheaply distributing up to date version of any software companies want to give Apple a copy of. Hopefully it would be tied to a full service to keep all your programs updated.

The risks are legally, Apple might have copyright challenges to copying little chinks of encrypted music, even if it is unusable, and the security risk of people masquerading as valid nodes to disrupt the network or try to inject fake data (unlikely unless the implementation is very weak).

Re:Nahhh

[nuzak (959558)]

> I don't care how many good uses there are, Bit Torrent will always be labeled as a piracy tool.

The name, sure. Otherwise ... it's just a goddamn protocol. WoW uses it for updates, and it's catching on elsewhere. They just won't call it BitTorrent, and it might not even be perfectly compatible. Just call it an "exchange-interlocked pareto-efficiency protocol" or something.

Man, every time RFID or the BT protocol comes up, slashdot gets its collective panties in a wad.

Re:Nahhh

[Realistic_Dragon (655151)]

2. Legal downloads of Linux/BSD CD's.

Somehow I have never seen this as Job's first priority on the list of things to make easy in OS X.

Re:Nahhh

[Luscious868 (679143)]

Except Apple is the one that dictates what it is you'll be sharing. You're simply donating some disk space on your computer and bandwidth. The traffic will also occur on non-standard bit torrent ports so admins can tell the difference between the Apple feature and standard bit torrent traffic.

Re:Nahhh

[rhesuspieces00 (804354)]

People said the same thing about CD burners.

Re:When one runs out of feline names!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

I've seen the OS X roadmap - and just before they run out of names, they merge with Ubuntu for release 10.04 'plentiful pussy' (the most beautiful release) :-D

Re:Building things in the OS bad

[rizzo320 (911761)]

The difference:

I can delete Safari from any version of Mac OS X it runs on. Can you uninstall Internet Explorer from your current verion of Windows XP?

What I am leading to here is that Apple builds features into Mac OS X, and then creates modular applications that take advantage of them, or allows you to disable these features in the operating system. Plus, other applications built by third party developers can take advantage of the features (such as OmniWeb with WebKit) as well. No one who installs Mac OS X is forced to leave Safari, iChat AV, Mail, iCal, etc installed on their computer. They can delete them and then choose to install Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, and Sunbird, and there is no penalty to the user.

Again, try doing that to Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, or Microsoft Messenger, without a third party XP hacking tool. You can hide those applications to the user, but can never fully delete them.

If Apple builds torrenting into 10.5, I'm sure there won't be anything that prevents you from running the normal bittorent clients that are already available for your standard pirating needs.

And that, my friend, is the difference between good and evil :-)