Dan_Shues
06-18-2005, 12:12 PM
From Red Herring.com:
In a strange twist, researchers at software giant Microsoft have ideas about how to improve BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, even though BitTorrent is often used for sharing copyrighted music, movies, and TV shows without the copyright holder’s permission.
Microsoft's proposed content distribution scheme, known as Avalanche, enhances BitTorrent's file-swarming technique of grabbing bits of files from scattered servers and then piecing them together by using a technique called "network coding."
A new research paper explains the scheme but makes no mention of whether the technology is legal or illegal or of any digital rights management (DRM) protection at all.
However, the proposal could have wide-ranging implications for Microsoft’s longtime plans to become more of a content distributor.
"Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold," said a summary of the paper on Microsoft's research site. "Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination."
"Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has," the researchers continued. "When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file."
The paper was produced by Christos Gkantsidis of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Pablo Rodriguez of Microsoft's Cambridge, U.K., office, working with Phil Chou and Kamal Jain in Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. The researchers hope to use Avalanche to help distribute software applications and patches as well as TV-on-demand.
The researchers believe that file-swarming systems like BitTorrent are prone to slowdowns when the number of computers receiving a given file increase. It then becomes more difficult to schedule delivery of pieces of the file to the different nodes.
The researchers criticize techniques that try to piece together files by finding the "locally rarest" pieces because they can overlook the "globally rarest" pieces and still result in slower downloads and interrupted file transfers.
Despite the promise of the technology, Microsoft shares were down a penny Friday to $25.03.
"If this works it should be interesting," said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst of Basex, an IT research firm focusing on knowledge sharing and collaboration, and author of the forthcoming book, Managing the Knowledge Workforce. "This is still academic research at this point, but this has the chance to change how much content we distribute and the size of the content we distribute because it will relieve the traditional bottlenecks in the distribution chain."
Microsoft would likely still want to implement DRM on the files it distributes if the company does go ahead and produce the technology, if only to keep its own software from being illegally distributed via its own methods.
In a strange twist, researchers at software giant Microsoft have ideas about how to improve BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, even though BitTorrent is often used for sharing copyrighted music, movies, and TV shows without the copyright holder’s permission.
Microsoft's proposed content distribution scheme, known as Avalanche, enhances BitTorrent's file-swarming technique of grabbing bits of files from scattered servers and then piecing them together by using a technique called "network coding."
A new research paper explains the scheme but makes no mention of whether the technology is legal or illegal or of any digital rights management (DRM) protection at all.
However, the proposal could have wide-ranging implications for Microsoft’s longtime plans to become more of a content distributor.
"Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold," said a summary of the paper on Microsoft's research site. "Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination."
"Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has," the researchers continued. "When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file."
The paper was produced by Christos Gkantsidis of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Pablo Rodriguez of Microsoft's Cambridge, U.K., office, working with Phil Chou and Kamal Jain in Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. The researchers hope to use Avalanche to help distribute software applications and patches as well as TV-on-demand.
The researchers believe that file-swarming systems like BitTorrent are prone to slowdowns when the number of computers receiving a given file increase. It then becomes more difficult to schedule delivery of pieces of the file to the different nodes.
The researchers criticize techniques that try to piece together files by finding the "locally rarest" pieces because they can overlook the "globally rarest" pieces and still result in slower downloads and interrupted file transfers.
Despite the promise of the technology, Microsoft shares were down a penny Friday to $25.03.
"If this works it should be interesting," said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst of Basex, an IT research firm focusing on knowledge sharing and collaboration, and author of the forthcoming book, Managing the Knowledge Workforce. "This is still academic research at this point, but this has the chance to change how much content we distribute and the size of the content we distribute because it will relieve the traditional bottlenecks in the distribution chain."
Microsoft would likely still want to implement DRM on the files it distributes if the company does go ahead and produce the technology, if only to keep its own software from being illegally distributed via its own methods.