Am I missing something or is this the exact opposite of what torrenting is supposed to do? Torrents are decentralized so that there is no single bottleneck and no single point of attack. Re-centralizing torrents re-creates the problem torrents were supposed to solve...?
Does anyone know if fetch.io or put.io caches requests across accounts? It seems like a pretty obvious optimization, but neither services advertises this ability.<p>Find appropriate torrent, it already exists on the server, start streaming immediately. With enough users it would be like a shady version of Netflix. At least until the MPAA catches on and floods them with DMCA requests.
I read through the terms, privacy policy, and dmca information because this site will obviously be used for piracy and where there's piracy there's lawsuits. It was kind of long so here's a tl;dr for anyone wondering about them.<p>The terms prohibit using the service for any illegal purposes including copyright infringement. They then waive any liability for damages but also state that doing this is prohibited in some jurisdictions so this might not apply. Then finally under Indemnification they state that a user agrees to be monetarily responsible for any liabilities, claims, and expenses, including attorneys fees, that arise from misuse of the service.<p>The privacy policy states that personal information will only be shared with the consent of the user or if required by law.<p>The dmca page states that they will comply with requests but asks for them to be snail mailed to Hong Kong.<p>I wonder if there are any jurisdiction issues with them being located in Hong Kong. Maybe this was a carefully chosen location for legal reasons; does anybody know anything about this? My other initial thought after reading this is that they're going to have a hard time tracking down the users responsible for submitting torrents in some cases. I can submit a torrent for a movie while at a coffee shop using a fake email address, post the link online somewhere, and then go home and watch it. Then the only crime that I've provably committed is downloading copyrighted material which is less of an offense then uploading. If the site were to get sued for uploading while downloading the torrent then they have nobody to pass that blame on to.
Also, when lots of people will start to use it, it will be possible for them to <i>cache</i> files.. so you don't even have to wait for them to download the torrent.
It would be interesting to see what the IP of their BT client looks like. Maybe it would be possible to distribute the client across lots of machine and hide the fact that it was fetch.io. It would make it extremely difficult to actually prove that any infringement had occurred. Alternatively they could expose the IP of the end user in the headers and just claim to be a safe harbour.
This does seem like a dangerous proposition if you dont want authorities to track your downloading habits from a single point of "privacy" failure<p>P.S. I posted a direct link(didnt care to bring traffic to lifehacker) yesterday, but it never got any traction<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565861" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565861</a>
How would this compare to Newsgroups? Pretty much anything worthwhile that is on BitTorrent can be found on Newsgroup servers and leeched (or in case of videos streamed) at your connection’s maximum download speed. The only advantage I can think of is when ISPs block access to Newsgroups ~ am I missing something?
There's some numbers at the top that I -assume- are storage and transfer limits... But they aren't labeled, so I can't be sure.<p>I'm also a little worried about the lack of privacy policy or TOS.
Doesn't seem very practical for torrents, but it looks like it works great for downloading rapidshare files - especially the annoying ones, divided into 20 x 100mb files.
While downloading, do they also upload to other clients? That is, do they only take from the Torrent network or are they giving back some bandwidth to the network?