Windows 8 News

What is the relationship with Microsoft and the peer to peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent? Could they use this to their advantage with Windows 8?

Their past actions have shown they will use their legal staff to stop piracy. It is well documented many torrent sites receive “cease and desist” letters from Microsoft. Windows 8 could use a more advanced protocol such as bit torrent for much performance increases on downloads! The debate of Windows 8 having BitTorrent itself does not offer a search facility to find files by name, therefore links to these torrents need to be centralized on a Windows 8 Server or hosted my Microsoft directly. This could be an advantage or disadvantage to the freedom of Windows 8 users.

In my opinion, Microsoft should work with new protocols for Windows 8! Microsoft likely has no concerns about bandwidth but they could use the public relations of Windows 8 having cool new technology for downloading legal software! Torrents just share the software, make this software check in with the primary server like a MMORPG would. You enter your username/password, access your semi-local and semi-hosted interface.

Windows 8 including this sounds like a fantasy but Guess what, they do all this! Microsoft has shown some willingness to explore using a Bittorrent hybrid. Many articles from 2005-2006 state researchers at Microsoft’s Cambridge in English were looking into developing a torrent like protocol code-named Avalanche; the technology is similar to existing peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file swapping systems such as BitTorrent. A Microsoft research paper on the technology both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: The proposed avalanche coding system is said to be 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper.

I can’t find any sources on what happened with Microsoft’s Avalanche. I think research like this leads to innovation. Replacing torrents with a Microsoft sponsored can protect software providers as Microsoft claims its system prevents users from redistributing copyright material, because Avalanche will only forward files that have been signed by the publisher.

Check out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/avalanche/default.aspx