A program that was inspired by an episode of the Simpsons and targets the downloading of all things bootlegged has aroused obscene threats toward the program's creator, a professor from the University of Tulsa.
"People who were upset about this threatened to dump a truckload of shit in his front yard," said one of his colleges.
The target is John Hale, professor and director of the Center for Information Security at the University of Tulsa. The unnamed program he built, which was awarded a patent last year, creates a flood of decoy files on the Internet so that those who wish to download a pirated copy of music or video file, for example, can't find the legitimate version.
Hale says that the inspiration for the program came from episode 123 of the Simpsons, where Mr. Burns collects a group of dogs to skin for fur coats. He decides to keep one of the dogs, however, and teaches him a special trick. When they're all bunched together, Mr. Burns figures he can distinguish his special dog by getting him to perform the trick, but Bart and Lisa outsmart him by teaching it to all the dogs.
Hale's program, works in a similar fashion. If you want to stop people from downloading Britney Spears, the program will search for files that fall under that description. From its findings, it will analyze what aspects of the files are characteristic to the group. Virtually anything - from a host's user name, the file size, name of the file - can be identified as a reoccurring feature. The program then creates bogus files that blend in with the rest of the legitimate files that are out there.
"You don't need to fool the computers," Hale says, explaining that the program fools the people who are searching and downloading pirated files.
Among Hale's targets is the current frontrunner for downloading files, BitTorrent.
Ahead of the pack
In July 2004, CacheLogic, a network-management company based in England, reported that BitTorrent had become the most popular peer-to-peer downloading client, beating the longtime No.1 program, KaZaA Media Desktop.
In the same report, the company showed that the new program use contributed to 90 percent of global P2P traffic.
According to the report, BitTorrent has dominated file-swapping because people are starting to realize that they can get more than just mp3s off the Internet - there are also TV episodes, movies and software. Another factor that helped boost BitTorrent's share of the P2P traffic is the size of files that are traded.
"An MP3 may be three to five megabytes, while a BitTorrent often sees files in excess of 500 megabytes being shared across the peer-to-peer network," according to the report.
The difference between KaZaA and BitTorrent is in the efficiency of the downloading process. On KaZaA, when users search for an MP3, they download it directly from one or several people on the network who have that file. In the best case scenario, both the provider and the recipient will have the maximum speed, and Ciara's "One, Two Step" will download in a matter of minutes.
With KaZaA, a file can only be transferred as fast as the slowest provider can go. That makes the power of the T3 line that runs through UT dorms useless unless the host has a similar high speed connection.
The inefficiency is magnified when users try to download files that are larger or harder to find. It may take hours to download an episode of "ER" or a song from an obscure band.
For example, the University's Resnet service, which provides Internet access to its dorms, allows four, eight or 12 gigabytes of bandwidth per week, depending on the type of service. If you live in the dorm, and you're the only one on KaZaA with the latest episode of Alias an hour after it shows on TV, you'll likely exceed your Resnet bandwidth allotment for the week in a couple of hours.
Lightening the load
BitTorrent, on the other hand, was designed to send big files, says Rick Osborne, who worked on the code for BitTorrent in 2003.
"Unlike traditional downloading from a server, where one computer sends out a file to everyone, with BitTorrent, everyone is sending out the file to everyone else, one little piece at a time," explains Osborne.
The concept revolves around a "tracker," which holds specifications of your file, but more importantly keeps track of everyone who has downloaded it in the past. With that information, the BitTorrent program can download a huge file in little chunks - a bit from here, another piece from a different computer, a separate part somewhere else - until it has the complete picture. This way, everyone shares the heavy bandwidth burden required to download something that would take several days to download on KaZaA.
"The key to scaleable and robust distribution is cooperation," BitTorrent's Web site states, "Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply."
When Bram Cohen released the program almost three years ago, he wasn't thinking about using his invention to supply illegal movie clips and TV episodes. It was meant to distribute free software, Osborne says. Cohen is said to never have downloaded anything illegally, if only to keep the integrity of his programming in tact. Because of the way BitTorrent is built, it is relatively easy to trace pirates through the tracker, and if the tracker itself was shut down, everyone loses future downloading access to it.
"BitTorrent was designed to fill a niche market, and a lot of its current use by media and software pirates is actually outside of the normal operating parameters," says John Hoffman, who is involved in creating BitTorrent programs. "I do think they've been giving BitTorrent a bad name, and that its use has been curtailed somewhat in the legitimate communities because of it."
Hoffman is the administrator and lead coder for BitTornado, one of many newer versions of BitTorrent. BitTorrent is open source meaning anyone can download the original code, manipulate it and use it in any way he or she wants, just like Linux. Only Cohen can determine if the modifications, which often smooth kinks, patch bugs or add new features, will be included in the original version of BitTorrent.
Should Cohen decide any new ideas don't adhere to the core purpose of BitTorrent, either through over-complication or piracy promotion, he has the option of creating his own version and means of distribution.
A plethora of different versions have sprung up out of the original BitTorrent idea. Hoffman's BitTornado for example, gives users a way to control their upload rate and view more specifications about the file's "health." Another addition is a status light, which shows how the client is functioning for each user. For instance, a yellow light might alert users that a firewall is impeding their download.
Other sites, such as TorrentSpy.com, take the BitTorrent code a step further and allow users to search for files. This added feature was not included in the original code and makes piracy easy. However, the online "pirates" take the programming and run with it.
"The way I see it, when I download music, movies, games [or] applications, they don't loose any money at all. Why? Because I never intended to buy their products in the first place," writes one enthusiast on TorrentSpy's forum.
BitTorrent's future
The original BitTorrent code is hard to legally pin down as a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because piracy was never its purpose. Still, in an effort to impede the open bootlegging that BitTorrent has allowed, Hale's program could swarm the Internet with false "trackers."
BitTorrent's community, as with most open source programming, is designed around the simple idea that it can change and evolve with the input of everyone who uses it.
For that reason, while some panicked fans of bootlegging continue to threaten Hale, most BitTorrent users feel safe that nothing can really kill the momentum they've created.
Hale's program won't stop BitTorrent, says Osborne. "It only works in one corner of the universe. ... It's one little chink in the armor."
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