BitTorrent

[mkmurray]

How about

• 20th Century Fox
• MGM
• MTV
• Paramount
• Warner Bros.
• PBS

Well, it appears I stand corrected. Thanks.

[cannona-p40]

I think this argument could be made about just about any technology.

Internet chat (in all its various forms) is notorious for horrible uses, yet we use it on mormon.org to connect the missionaries to investigators.

Sattellite television is used to deliver all sorts of negative items, yet we use it for general conference.

I don't think we should let the image of a technology stop us from using it if it is the best option.

Just my $0.02.

Aaron

[Mikerowaved]

My opinion is a bit different. I believe if CHQ decided to distribute updated material via torrent, then it wont be long before individual units that have broadband access will want to have BT (or some other torrent client) installed on their unit's PC. This (IMO) is now playing with fire. Besides the issue of the immediate availability of questionable content (to put it mildly) that may or may not be able to be filtered, a slight misconfiguration of BT could expose every file on the PC.

Again IMO, I feel it's best left the way it is. Personally, I don't think DL'ing the entire ZIP every once in a while is all that bad, but maybe that's just me.

[The_Earl]

My opinion is a bit different. I believe if CHQ decided to distribute updated material via torrent, then it wont be long before individual units that have broadband access will want to have BT (or some other torrent client) installed on their unit's PC. This (IMO) is now playing with fire. Besides the issue of the immediate availability of questionable content (to put it mildly) that may or may not be able to be filtered, a slight misconfiguration of BT could expose every file on the PC.

Again IMO, I feel it's best left the way it is. Personally, I don't think DL'ing the entire ZIP every once in a while is all that bad, but maybe that's just me.

I agree with your thoughts on the BT branded client.

The Torrent protocol is open, and a church customized client / tracker could limit exposure to other content, and mitigate concerns about configuration.

[JamesAnderson]

BitTorrent technology first appeared when podcasting first exploded on the scene in 2005. It's still smaller than doing podcasting and other audio/video technology like mp3 and m4u, but it's there.

The controversy over it has gotten such that there have been issues with Comcast over downloading files that use it, which the FCC is addressing, and that has ignited a firestorm as it is. That aside, we will not see major usages of the technology on the scale that mp3 and other audio/video distribution formats will still have, but then again things are changing so rapidly as you mentioned with some of the majors, I could end up being wrong.

[cannona-p40]

My opinion is a bit different. I believe if CHQ decided to distribute updated material via torrent, then it wont be long before individual units that have broadband access will want to have BT (or some other torrent client) installed on their unit's PC. This (IMO) is now playing with fire. Besides the issue of the immediate availability of questionable content (to put it mildly) that may or may not be able to be filtered, a slight misconfiguration of BT could expose every file on the PC.

I can think of no possible way for me to misconfigure my torrent client in such a way for me to give access to every file on my computer. The best I could do would be to generate a huge torrent of everything on my computer, find an open tracker to host it at, upload the .torrent file somewhere where people can find it, and then seed the torrent file. That would be virtually impossible to do accidentaly.

Perhaps you are confusing BitTorrent with another p2p protocol?

Also, we wouldn't have to give access to a traditional BT client. See this article for an example of how one organization has dealt with just such a concern by installing a modified BT client:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... rrent.html

Aaron.