final release - p2p or mirrors

[Chris Kloiber]

On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 05:33, Jim Cornette wrote:

> I was thinking in reference to someone posting about a high 
> fragmentation level on a bittorrent acquired iso. I was also thinking 
> that bittorrent used bits and pieces of files available. I never thought 
> about tcp/ip delivering packets. I assumed that the files on mirrors 
> would be streamed consecutively. (keeps stream of data first to last on 
> file being downloaded.)

This can be overcome in most BT clients by pre-allocating the space for
the download at the beginning.

> Having a pool of computers grabbing some info from one user and some 
> more bits from another source, then another source seems a little too 
> open for foul play.

Not a problem, each piece is hashed and checked. Anyone feeding you more
than a few bad chunks (accidents do happen) gets banned (and you accept
no more from them). Only possibility I can see for foul play is if the
original seed was a trojan. And that can be checked for with public
md5sums, which already exist. (Ie: Downloading things from suprnova.org
is potentially hazardous, especially to Windows systems.)

-- 
Chris Kloiber