This article was posted to The Farm, but I thought I’d post it here too, since it’s of interest to non-programmers.
[ via BoingBoing
] Windows XP SP2 is a huge update: a whopping 266MB. Demand for it and
its fixes, among which are some feature sthat improve Windows XP’s
security, is so great that until August 25th, Microsoft is limiting
downloads to 2.5 million per day.
The site SP2Torrent.com attempted to address
this problem by making the SP2 installer available as a BitTorrent
torrent. (BitTorrent is Bram
Cohen’s
P2P multi-source downloading utility that spreads the work of serving
among downloaders. It’s win-win for distrubutors and users:
distributors have lowered bandwidth costs and users get their files
faster.) Microsoft, upon hearing about this, sent two DMCA takedown
notices to the hosts of SP2Torrent.com, one of whom was merely linking
to a torrent file on another server. Microsoft also updated their SP2
download page with this notice:
Take a look at that email address and URL. That’s right: users helping
users (and indirectly, Microsoft) in ways that do not harm Microsoft
are pirates.
Microsoft could argue that it’s possible for someone to make a version
of SP2 that contained malicious code, but it would also be simple for
them to build a small official application that could verify a file
sent by BitTorrent so that people could tell whether they were getting
the real fix.
Luckily, I already got my SP2 via BitTorrent. Thanks, M$. Thanks for
nothing.
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This criticism is trendy, but I think it is misguided. The dominant theme in this update is security. Why would they want to distribute a security update through channels they have no reason to trust, when they are quite capable of distributing in their usual way? Imagine what the liability issues would look like if they "Negligently" allowed a third party over whom they exert no quality control distribute SP2 with the result that thousands of corporations had to rebuild hundreds of thousands of PCs?
Note that I am not saying that this would have been the likely outcome, but it was a possible outcome, and why on earth would they take the chance?
Btw, the size you mention is for the network install, which contains all possible versions of SP2. The automatic update for any particular machine will be less than half that size as I understand it.
Frank.
Sure, there are risks. But they:
a) Didn't have to use the DMCA
b) Didn't have to call them pirates
c) Could've hosted the .torrent themselves. BitTorrent distributes files in chunks (often around 256k-1meg), each of which is hash-checked on completion. With Microsoft operating the tracker, it would be very easy to ensure that the distributed version was perfectly genuine.
Instead, they come off looking like jerks.
PICxpert, you took the words right out of my mouth!