[janett999]

Bram Cohen

p2pnet.net News Interview:- Ratiatum.com editor Guillaume Champeau and p2pnet editor Jon Newton have been helping each other out for some time now (look for Email from France).

Champeau had a 'what's happening' chat for Ratiatum and p2pnet with BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Ratiatum.com: Although everyone seems to agree that BitTorrent is the most efficient P2P protocol ever created, you've already begun to work on its successor, BitTorrent 2. What are the weaknesses of BT that you expect to address with this new protocol?

Cohen: Fairly technical things. Mostly, the amount of bandwidth used by the trackers can be dramatically reduced.

Ratiatum.com: What do you think of alternative BT clients such as Azureus, BitComet, or ABC?

Cohen: ABC is basically mainline with a fancy UI slapped on it. I don't know much about BitComet. Azureus is a completely different codebase, and doesn't have as good a core, but has a fancier interface than mainline.

The next release of mainline is going to have a lot of the advanced features people want, by the way.

Ratiatum.com: Before BitTorrent became what it is, you worked on Mojo Nation, a p2p network with very smart concepts to encourage file sharing. Unfortunately it quickly vanished. Is it something you would like to revive?

Cohen: No. Mojo Nation had a huge number of technical problems.

Ratiatum.com: According to your own words, "Mojo Nation incorporated many interesting cryptographic techniques". Do you plan on adding cryptotography mechanisms to protect privacy with BT 2?

BC: There might be some minimal encryption, but there hasn't been any call for it, and the kind of threat model which could possibly be defended against is kind of lame.

Ratiatum.com: You have been hired by Valve Software (Half-Life's creators). What can you tell us about this collaboration?

Cohen: I was working on steam, which is improving.

Ratiatum.com: Have other companies approached you to create their own content distribution system?

Cohen: A few have asked vaguely, but in general I just tell people that they can use BitTorrent.

Ratiatum.com: BitTorrent is exclusively used to distribute files, but p2p architectures are now used in many other domains, such as VoIP or network gaming. Do you have any project involving these kinds of data distribution?

Cohen: No.

Ratiatum.com: How do you see the development of p2p in the future, both under technical and policy points of view?

Cohen: It's always hard to predict what's coming up next. My main guess is that content creators will increasingly start using BitTorrent to distribute their own work directly.

Ratiatum.com: Finally, will you demonstrate your juggling skills at CodeCon 4.0? :-) (CodeCon is "a technical conference for peer to peer hackers and cypherpunks" organised by Bram Cohen)

Cohen: If asked, I did juggle during the opening comments at an earlier one.

(Sunday 26th September 2004)


http://p2pnet.net/story/2548