Comment by Aurornis
7 hours ago
Several companies tried this for distributing software.
It was very controversial. Users were angry that software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software. Made a lot of people angry.
7 hours ago
Several companies tried this for distributing software.
It was very controversial. Users were angry that software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software. Made a lot of people angry.
>software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software
If I understand the description correctly, microsoft still does this!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-...
Steam still does this! For your local network only and not using the torrent protocol.
If only Blizzard servers were seeders, and clients were only leechers, that'd have not been a problem.
This is less efficient (in bandwidth, complexity, and monetary cost) than an HTTPS based CDN.
There’s web seeding
Typical example to show that people who want to be angry will be angry, even for pointless things.
As someone who was annoyed by it at the time, I don't think it's a good example of that.
This was in an era of much more limited upstream bandwidth. The p2p nature was obscured from non-technical users in some implementations. So on and so on. I'm sure there are plenty of writeups from that era detailing why it was a bad idea.
These companies already used capable CDNs to distribute patches. It was a way for them to shift their CDN bill onto their paying customers.
I think it's like residential proxies. People get upset about "it's using my thing!" even though it has literally no effect on them.
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