Catching an information wave

By Lee Han Shih
April 15, 2005

The tsunami that rocked the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, 2004, killing close to 300,000 from Asia to Africa, was not the biggest disaster in history. But it has attracted more donations than any other disaster, natural or man-made. This is partly due to an allegedly illegal piece of software called BitTorrent.

It is a matter of record that US President George Bush initially placed relief work for the disaster on very low priority. He only changed his stance after mounting public pressure made it politically expedient for him to show strong support for the tsunami victims.

Major American television networks-CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, etc.-have been given the credit for forcing Bush’s hand by broadcasting scenes of the disaster to the public. But it is less well known that a large number of Americans actually had their first glimpse of the tsunami on the Internet.

News on the 'Net
A few days after the fateful event, a person who called himself ’Camiseta’ created a compilation of home video recordings of the disaster and uploaded it on the ’Net.

In the densely interconnected environment of the wired world, word soon got around, and within hours demand for the file become so large that it should have overwhelmed any service provider hosting the recording.

Except that no provider was overwhelmed. Camiseta’s huge file-at 21 megabytes, hundreds of times larger than a typical Web page-circulated the Internet effortlessly, riding on BitTorrent. Meanwhile, other bloggers, who uploaded large video files of the tsunami using the traditional ways, experienced the usual logjam. One who went by the name of PunditGuy was even hit with a US$1,000 bill from his service provider for handling all the traffic.

Like the infamous Napster, BitTorrent is peer-to-peer software that allows computer users to request file from other users. But it comes with two twists. In Napster you have to wait for another user to download the entire file before you can request it from him. And the download fails if he logs off or quits the application before the entire file is transferred.

The BitTorrent difference
BitTorrent, on the other hand, breaks a file into small chunks (50 for the tsunami video) and labels them separately. If you want a file, you can request from as many as 50 different sources. If one or more parties quit mid-stream, your downloading is not affected.

Twist number two is an ingenious principle that scans all information chunks available for download, and selects the scarcest to be the first to go. This avoids the build up of an excessive supply of the initial pieces and insufficient supply of later pieces in a file. This is why in BitTorrent-unlike Napster-the more popular a file, the easier it is to download.

BitTorrent, invented by Bram Cohen, has been around for a while. But it has mostly been used for distributing pirated movies. This explains its dubious legal status and why it is cold-shouldered by large corporations. The tsunami video shows beyond doubt that it has other capabilities: it is arguably the most efficient way to disseminate information, and it also helps to even up allocation of bandwidth. It would be a waste if its potential were not exploited more fully.

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