Your bi-annual current affairs post
I haven't looked too hard at the online meejah hoopla over the Megaupload business, but my instant reaction was 'Oh fuck it's Kimble again' followed by 'They really were taking the piss, weren't they
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The last time I looked, it transpired that you could buy mongo-fuck-off boxes of disk that were torrent proxy/accelerators for ISPs.
Not sure what you're talking of here -- ISPs can jiggle around with where torrents get stuff from but I don't think it's much used in the wild -- going through standardisation stuff right now. ALTO/P4P -- the idea is the ISP says "don't get your torrent from that client there, get it from this one here, he's dead fast" and you do so, and hence ISP saves money from international transit costs and client gets faster traffic. However, ISPs do not (AFAIK) do this yet.
I'm not sure what other fiddling ISPs actually do with torrent traffic aside from throttling and nasty stuff with RSTs.
You sure you're not thinking of CDN architectures? Big old boxes that colocate with the ISP so big-content dude can get your stuff to you fast with low transit bills?
The last time I looked, it transpired that you could buy mongo-fuck-off boxes of disk that were torrent proxy/accelerators for ISPs.
The clickhost guys don't do that, they just buy big big warehouses of computers somewhere and do some magic stuff with DNS to load balance.
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In the other window I am reading up about what's new with QoS. I've not paid attention to that since 1998. I am assuming that the likes of Virgin traffic-shape like bastards.
CDNs are a bit different, since you've to optimise yr site a little to reference the C that's being Ded by the N. (Yes I know there are various magic Nginx proxy/cache tricks too)
Tangentially, there was a quite head-warping article referenced in BLDGBLOG.. Ha! Here we are: http://www.information-age.com/channels/comms-and-networking/company-analysis/1660458/mining-dark-fibre.thtml (Making HFT go more better by finding redundant fibre runs and exploiting the speed of light. Yes I am going to use this in a story.)
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There are many many cool things proposed to help bittorrent... locality is the usual suggestion -- bittorrent does not destroy internet if traffic remains within ISP network and you connect next door rather than to new zealand. Best research I ever saw was some guys who hacked the DHT controlling the swarm to block some requests and send in others and ended up optimising it by stealth. Some users worked out something weird was going on "hey, how come all my peers are local not from miles away" but they weren't properly spotted until it was cached.
Glasnost are the people to check re bittorrent shaping. It seems virgin do, yes!
http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/results/#detection
Ah... the office across are big into QoS and QoE -- QoE meaning "what can we ditch that the user doesn't notice" -- vital for streaming stuff.
The whole cable-laying side of things is seriously crazy... though not so much these days I guess. In the more "boom" years about 2001 we got to chat to a guy who worked for some big optic cabling company who cabled up half the world (and I think went bust) they ended up with weird assets like a small fleet of cable laying craft. (I seem to remember they tried to help with the Kursk -- somehow I have it in my head that they owned submarines but that can't be right).
Ah... Global Crossing... that's it. Seems they somehow survived and got bought out.
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