Internet Archive unleashes 1PB of data through BitTorrent

from computerworld.com: The Internet Archive, a non-profit project established to act as an online library of that preserves digital information, has to date offered up nearly a petabyte of content via the BitTorrent file-sharing site.

In a blog post, The Internet Archive said it is offering 1.5 million torrents including live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, more than 1.2 million books, and "all new uploads from patrons who are into community collections." 

The Internet Archive said it will continue to grow the content it serves up from the controversial peer-to-peer file sharing site. The California-based non-profit organization set up the site to store Internet images, video, audio and webpages for posterity. 

BitTorrent has been at the center of copyright infringement lawsuits. The example, the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the more popular search engines for BitTorrent content, were found guilty of crimes against copyright laws.

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"I supported the original creation of BitTorrent because I believe in building technology to make it easy for communities to share what they have. The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn't just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time," said John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in the nonprofit's blog post. "BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive."

BitTorrent is the fastest way to download items from the archive because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already, the site stated.

"The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections."

The site is also offering BitTorrent download statistics. For example, the 1959 B movie classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space" is among the 25 most popular downloads with 69 instances.

The Internet Archive has dozens of web pages dedicated to varying content. For example, the archive's Wayback Machine shows what websites looked like in the past, such as what Google looked like in the year 2000.

The online archive also chronicles 3,000 hours of 9/11 TV coverage. The coverage includes more than 20 channels of international TV News over seven days, and select analysis by scholars. The footage begins shortly before the first reports.

internet splits in two

"The Internet Splits in Two" by Dan Lyons sees the recent Net Neutrality Ruling by FCC leading to a bifurcation of fast internet for the rich and slow crappy internet for the poor and the amounts of information available. Lyons views the ruling as tantamount to having a Bloomberg terminal to do stock trading versus attempting to play day trader from a personal computer. The FCC ruling leaves wireless alone, but eventually, disparities will be even greater for the ascending platform. The writer likes Columbia professor Tim Wu's book, "The Master Switch: The Rise & Fall of Information Empires", who sees a progression in all past technologies such as telegraph, telephone, radio and movies. Lyons agrees we're at the end of phase one a relatively free and innovative period. It remains to be seen what happens from here, "but I’m pretty sure those of us who have been around for Phase One of the Internet are going to look back on these last 15 years as the good old days," says Lyons.