Peer Assisted Networking / P2P in apps
 

After an earlier discussion about Blizzard's use of a P2P scheme to download (/upload) their software I thought I was done being irked with companies wanting to steal my bandwidth from me.... Imagine my surprise then when I came across this little gem (it will open up a webpage with access to Adobe Flash global settings).........

Adobe - Flash Player : Settings Manager - Peer Assisted Networking Settings panel


Now in fairness to Adobe, it looks like the default is to "ask before use", but damn.... if the functionality is there, how hard would it be for somebody to code in a hack to get around it???

Am I the only person out there who's outraged at the idea of being asked (mostly without my informed knowledge) to participate in a P2P scheme in order to save the company a few bucks in bandwidth? If the blizzard example is any indication, it looks like these schemes often saturate the upload channel which then greatly degrades the download channel.

Are there any other apps (outside of the obvious P2P clients) that are doing something similar? How about companies that use the same kind of scheme to distribute their content?

Heh... and before anybody else chimes in and takes the discussion off topic... as much as it pains me to say it.... based on this +1 to the Ipad for not supporting Flash. :)

That's the only comment on the subject I'm gonna allow. ;)

I think the average user out there is not aware of the additional bandwidth/performance cost of P2P, and you don't really need to hack the code for people to opt in, a simple "Would you like to enable Peer Assisted Networking to improve download performance?" pop-up will have majority of users clicking "Yes".

It's not the only feature that's open to abuse, Flash's Local Shared Objects have long been used to resurrect deleted cookies.

As to game companies using P2P for distribution, guess it's a minor inconvenience compared to copy protection...

I would support P2P in games much more if it was smarter. Maybe the utp that utorrent made if it works properly, but regardless something so it doesnt all go to upload and leaves some room for download.
Things like SC2 are huge and thats exactly where torrents shine, for smaller things I would have to disagree with its use.

Ummmm... this one's a bit fishy as well (global storage settings)......

WTH is up with that??? If I haven't visited a particular website, why would it be storing any information on my PC at all?

But that's the whole point... apparently the blizzard P2P scheme doesn't work well as it saturates the upload channel. Given how large the files are, and the slow DL speeds people typically get, it's not a big stretch to wonder if actual bandwidth used is double or more of the actual file. If you're downloading a 4g game, and have a 60G bandwidth cap... doubling that up is a good portion of your available "free" bandwidth, and if you go over could concievably cost upwards of $10.

Smaller files wouldn't be as much of a problem as you wouldn't be DL'ing long enough for the upload to amount to much.

Like it or not, P2P is really the future of large-scale data transfer over the internet. It is much faster and much more efficient than direct downloading when implemented properly, and saves on a lot of infrastructure. The problem is really that ISPs haven't caught up to P2P usage and instead are charging for bandwidth usage. That's the real problem; not so much the fact that companies are starting to use P2P.

Its not that P2P like torrents are a bad protocol.

The issue is that people are not aware of the bandwidth it can use and considering that peoples private networks are generally like P2P aware or the people themselves are not.. they don't know how to setup stuff to help prevent the bandwidth issues that comes with these protocols.

That's almost like saying that blueray is the way of the future, so software companies should start using that format disk to distribute their product regardless of actual adoption by consumers....

As it stands, non user requested P2P eats up user resources, and possibly money. Until such time as we either come up with a special "commercial business P2P traffic" tag (which won't be blocked by ISPs as P2P, nor count against bandwidth use) or unlimited bandwidth becomes the norm (won't happen unless governments nationalize the lines into homes) I'd like business to keep their grubby little hands off of my bandwidth. Especially if they aren't being especially clear about the users' option to opt out.

If Nvidia and ATI can deliver the volume of drivers they do, at the speeds they manage to deliver them at, other business' can certainly do so as well.

My point is that the real problem is ISPs who are charging extortionate prices for bandwidth. Yes, P2P eating up your bandwidth sucks, but we're not going to get rid of that and chances are we'll start seeing even more of it as time goes on.