Listics

Stanislav Shalunov, Director of Engineeering for BitTorrent, Inc. presented a paper at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Infrastructure Workshop in Boston today (PDF) calling for IETF support in resolving user performance and ISP congestion problems by standardizing a mechanism improving cache discovery for Peer to Peer (P2P) applications. That’s a mouthful.

People using BitTorrent can experience response time delays of from 2 to 4 seconds while uploading files because of buffers filling up in their communications equipment. This makes impractical the use of other applications such as games and real time communications (applications requiring sub-second response times) while files are being uploaded.

The paper suggests that vendors (ISPs) support P2P applications by improving caching, cache discovery (peer selection), and congestion control. It concludes,

Our μTorrent client, with 35M active installs, is one of the most popular and probably the most popular is the U.S. We’re looking forward to implementing standard ways of making it work better for the users and the ISPs and we believe that the vendors of other popular BitTorrent clients would follow because this would improve the experience of the users of their clients.

(Shalunov twitters fun things like, “Bob became evil because he sat next to my raincoat in a restaurant: he subverted TCP fairness by opening two Firefox tabs at once,” and “When I have a spare decade, I’ll write the Sucklopedia, which will document the ways in which everything, alphabetically, sucks.” You can follow him here.)

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Shalunov, Sucklopedia, P2P

Back in the day, before twitter, before blogging, before Google and before Gopher, even before the very Innernecks themselves, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu thought deep thoughts about government and the human condition. A republic, he thought, would be founded on virtue, despotism on fear. It was Montesquieu’s philosophy that “government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another.”

Montesquieu was an independently wealthy aristocrat, able to bring his thoughts to print and to propagate memes in the local coffee houses with the best of them. It is not known whether or not he wore a beret.