Wired reports on a new Arbor Networks study that finds a dramatic decline in P2P as a percentage of network traffic over the past two years.
Peer-to-Peer Traffic Declining Dramatically
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The study is flawed..
Most people who use bit-torrent don’t use the protocol’s port range because it’s so heavily filtered and easily identified. Most users wouldn’t even realize it; utorrent, for instance, randomly picks a port by default when it’s installed.
It’s true though that most people have changed to streaming sources since it’s just so easy.
Or have people become more creative?
I think its also worth mentioning that things have changed from just a couple years ago, sites like Youtube and it’s various clones are heavily used now, sites like Hulu which are commercially backed (and yet still not watchable in Canada *shakes fist*), and the fact that Bit Torrent itself is in a decline as people are moving to sites like RapidShare where theres no chance of getting those ridiculous RIAA letters.
I don’t think its so much that peer to peer traffic has declined, so much as other forms of traffic have become more prolific, surpassing Bit Torrent.
And of course, non-standard bit torrent ports. Few clients still use the good old 6881-… range anymore, I’d kind of expect a scientific study to be aware of that fact.
PeerBlock
There is software that, apparently, blocks the IPs of companies and entities known to have an anti-P2P stance, or track P2P users. Some people think they are useful, others believe these are useless. Either way, that might also further skew P2P tracking.
One-click file hosting is the trend!
Because of incessant throttling by ISPs and extortion by anti-piracy gangs people have moved to file hosting sites. Not only downloads are faster, there is no need to keep up the bloody upload ratio and expose your IP address to too many third parties.
Great as long as CRIA/RIAA/MPAA believe it
I don’t think this is true, as others have stated smarter BitTorrent users know how to hide there activities as much as they can. In the end though, the major ISPs can tell what’s really going on with their deep packet inspection.
“In its place? Streaming video from sites like Hulu.com and YouTube, for one. And for downloads, sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload offer simple download hosting for files of all kinds, with premium and ad-supported accounts.”
This is something that has been predicted for a long time now.
Anyone notice…
that they used DPI to come up with the figure of 18%? Of course, will Abor’s Atlas net monitoring tool classify things like PPTP as a P2P connection?