03
Jul
Forcing Bittorrent leechers to pay their tolls
Leechers are the bane of the Bittorrent world: they concentrate upon taking the shares from others, and immediately drop off the torrent the moment they get the complete copy of the file without re-sharing their copy of the file with others.
The negative effect of this popular trend has caused many torrents to sport poor downloads, as the few morally upright people who leave their torrents open to re-share the download have to send to more peers who clamour for the file.
Perhaps now, a new technique accidentally discovered while downloading from an incomplete torrent would force leechers to share more, whether they like it or not.
I wanted to download a popular programme via Bittorrent, and had just started the download when my Bittorrent programme reported that nobody in the entire torrent has a complete copy of the file. Apparently, the Availability rating of 0.999 meant that most computers sharing in the torrent had only 99% of the file. The absence of any seeds (computers which can share the full copy of the file) made it obvious that nobody was able to finish downloading the file.
It was then that I had a pleasant surprise: the torrent was dumping at an extremely high rate. I was reaching speeds of 300 kB/s effortlessly, and it required nothing more than just sitting there watching the bits download themselves — almost magically automatic. I remember that I don’t usually hit even the mid 100s, and the speed boost was a huge surprise to me.
Apparently, the high speeds were courtesy of computers that had 99% of the file which were aimlessly sharing the file while waiting for a seed to appear to share the missing piece that would complete the download. Apparently, the leechers had left the torrent on to try to complete the download, and the side effect was that the newcomers to the torrent were able to achieve high download speeds.
Eventually, my computer similarly hit the 99% ceiling, and kept seeding the available pieces of the file while waiting for the one magic seed that would complete the file. It felt good to know that leechers were for once sharing the torrent, even though it was through no willingness upon their part.
Around early this morning, a seed appeared suddenly, and as if by magic, the number of seeders jumped exponentially, hitting 1055 in the first hour of the seed coming online.
Come to think of it, if torrent sharers could formulate a certain algorithmn that would force leechers to be unable to complete the torrent unless their share-ratios hit a certain amount, it would have a major impact upon leechers who do not share their files after downloading their copies.
Better still, it would do their karmas some good.