John Borwick’s blog

I now “get” BitTorrent. I had to check it out when someone at the IETF sent out a BitTorrent utilization graph which shows the awesome speeds possible.

Its success is mainly due to its politics, not technology. The longer you stay on (dependent on the tracker), the better your download speeds can become. Implementations do not take you to a “default” server; you have to go find a torrent link, meaning that BitTorrent can’t be held at fault for any copyright violations.

I’d like to read a technical specification to figure out who tells the BitTorrent tracker that you’ve got credit. Could I set up two BitTorrent machines that connect to the same tracker, and have one machine give credits to the other machine?

It feels odd to look at the ping man page.

Only these Russians and I have apparently seen the below:

$ ping -c 1 -s 56 www.google.com

PING www.google.akadns.net (64.233.171.104): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 64.233.171.104: icmpseq=0 ttl=243 time=62.874 ms

— www.google.akadns.net ping statistics

—1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max = 62.874/62.874/62.874 ms

$ ping -c 1 -s 57 www.google.com

PING www.google.akadns.net (64.233.171.104): 57 data bytes

64 bytes from 64.233.171.104: icmpseq=0 ttl=243 time=63.659 ms

wrong data byte #56 should be 0x38 but was 0x0

         41 9c 25 ae 0 8 60 28 8 9 a b c d e f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f

         20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 30 

--- www.google.akadns.net ping statistics

---1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max = 63.659/63.659/63.659 ms

When I have a packet size larger than 56, something in the packet gets corrupted. Could it be my Linksys router? OS X? Bellsouth? It’s a mystery.