• Home
  • How Can We Help You?
  • What We Do
    • Solutions
    • Services
    • Strategies
  • What We Are Thinking
    • Latest Posts
    • White Papers
  • Who We Are
    • Contact
    • Careers
    • Customers
    • Internet Policies
Conviction by the Media
Jul 03
rhp No Response Permalink

Conviction by the Media

Once your credibility has been called into question in the media … you are done for. And that’s that.

Consider Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a moment. He may be out and about again, but the events of the past few weeks have spelled the end of his political career.  Guilty or not, he has been convicted in the media and there is no way back, even if he is innocent.

So what do these politics have to do with technology …

Let’s turn the clock back to sometime in 2001, when Bram Cohen devised a data transfer protocol based on a highly distributed architecture. Put simply it’s the underlying technology of the most pervasive peer-to-peer file-sharing networks in the world.

Can a protocol be bad for that matter?

So, as you can guess, it is one of the driving forces of the piracy of software and media across the internet. So it’s really bad, isn’t it? Really? Can a protocol be bad for that matter? It’s been misused and subsequently garnered a really bad reputation. The net effect: It’s the biggest evil that the media industry has faced and it’s obviously been trialled found guilty in the eyes of the media companies, and naturally the public. Last week, I spoke to my engineering team about the feasibility of using BitTorrent to deliver changes and updates to our products, but the general consensus was that enterprises are going to be uncomfortable.

What the media and enterprises in general seem to be missing is that the BitTorrent protocol is actually amazingly robust. This is probably what makes it so successfull at transporting terabytes of illegal wares on a daily basis. So, Sony, Apple and Microsoft … out here in Africa we are getting better at using this thing called the internet, but we are still having teething problems especially when you consider that the access medium is not always wired (we use variations of 3G, and its EXPENSIVE). What that means is that disconnects and service interruptions are relatively common, and a real pain when you are downloading a 500MB+ update for whatever reason, because you have to do it three times over before you finally get some success.

Rather than fighting torrent usage, large software companies should welcome it into a legitimate paradigm and embed it into their update delivery mechanisms.This will not only save them on server infrastructure and bandwidth. Also, small business utilisation of shared software updates would be simplified without complex caching mechanisms.

Let me break that down a little, if these large software companies used some torrent mechanism, and your colleague sitting across the room from you downloaded an update, then you tried to fetch the same update, you would get it from him, while it is available rather than from the primary update servers.

Second chances are hard to come by. Let’s hope there is one for BitTorrent; it is its tenth birthday after all. As for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, well that’s an entirely different story.

About the author

rhp rhp More posts by this author
BitTorrent, Protocols
Tweet
Permalink rhp
Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.

Click here to cancel reply.

POST COMMENT

 

Tags

Android Apple IOS BitTorrent CRM Analysis CRM Strategy Customer Relationship Management Engineering Philosophy Mobile Devices Moore's Law Protocols RIM SugarCRM Symbian Ubiquitous Computing

Recent Posts

  • Conviction by the Media
    Conviction by the Media July 3, 2011 Once your credibility has been called into question in the m...
  • The Hardware Solution to Computing
    The Hardware Solution to Computing March 2, 2011 Moore's law firmly stuffed up the world. At least the comput...
  • Android Growth Smashes the Competition
    Android Growth Smashes the Competition February 22, 2011 There’s absolutely no doubt that smartphones are on the rise...

Get in touch

We are headquarted in Johannesburg, South Africa: +27.11.462.5565 info@tauspace.com 3 blackwood rd . bryanston . 2191 . south africa

About

TAUSPACE is a niche technology outfit based in South Africa, with a strong focus on commercial solution delivery engineered on open technologies and the benefit it brings to emerging markets.

With verticals in consulting, solution development and managed services, TAUSPACE is geared to tackling customer challenges from innovation to operations, providing solutions with high impact that meet and exceed customer expectations.

Follow us

Follow Us on linkedinFollow Us on
  • Home
  • How Can We Help You?
  • What We Do
  • What We Are Thinking
  • Who We Are
©TAUSPACE 2013. All Rights Reserved