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Comment by grkhetan | Hacker News Reader

Well, from the guidelines - it violates this guideline:

22.4 Apps that enable illegal file sharing will be rejected

Also in general, bittorrent is maily used to download copyrighted content illegally. I mean comeon, all bittorrent users know it and use it for that.

Secondly, I really dont think iphone is good for bittorrent also -- i mean you would continuously loose battery and bandwidth. Also its background multi-tasking does not allow more than 10 minutes of downloading so it will not work properly in the first place. Thats why, this app was merely monitoring and managing download queues happening on a server. So its better in terms of implementation but still voilates copyright guidelines and illegal files sharing guidelines.

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I've used BitTorrent for legal files a lot. An example would be Ubuntu CD images, or patches for games.

"Secondly, I really dont think iphone is good for bittorrent also -- i mean you would continuously loose battery and bandwidth"

The easiest way to remedy that would be to ban all apps. Then no apps would use any battery anymore.

Also in general, bittorrent is maily used to download copyrighted content illegally. I mean comeon, all bittorrent users know it and use it for that.

It's a pity though. BitTorrent is advanced technology that should be used more widely and beyond file-sharing, for example by music and video artists and software vendors.

There are significant deployments of BT among software vendors. You probably already know about them, but in case you don't, off the top of my head, Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches for WoW and most Linux distributions use torrents to distribute ISOs. Both perfectly legal, legitimate, and great uses of BitTorrent.

I wish that BitTorrent usage was more prolific among legit large downloads too, it would really help with corruption, etc. BitTorrent is really the simplest way to fix a large file that mostly downloaded correctly but has a few corrupt chunks; the torrent client resolves that problem automatically for already-downloaded files and fixes it on-the-fly on downloads it handles.

It is really annoying to download a 350MB service pack from Microsoft at 300kb/s and then have to download the whole thing again because "the file was corrupt". I don't know if MS just has shoddy servers or what but I've had that happen multiple times. Large torrent swarms, which Microsoft could easily populate itself but may not even need to, usually max out a client's connection and then the corruption thing would never happen.

I should try to sell consulting services on torrents to MS at some point I guess.

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