Bram Cohen: I wrote BitTorrent sitting in the living room, unemployed, in underpants

“The temple was supposed to be eternal. Like the depth itself. So, do not depend on any server. Programs creating the Temple freely wander around the network, their fragments are duplicated, recombined, independently organized for work. For the Temple to disappear, all the machines on the network must be destroyed. ”
- Fake Mirrors , 1999, 2 years before the BitTorrent Protocol appeared


Today Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol , turned 41 years old .

Interesting Facts:

• Cohen began programming at age 10.
• Cohen admits that he is unable to work on a fixed schedule, by the hour, in a company that has strict requirements for a dress code, and categorically cannot perform meaningless and uninteresting work.
• He worked at Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow and worked at Valve.
• For testing BitTorrent, Bram collected a considerable bundle of porn, which they handed out to and fro.
• Conference organizer CodeCon.
• There is a wife and three children.
• The largest file on the distribution is the archive of the geocities.com site, which is 641 GB in size.
• Over the first two years, there were more than 20 million customer downloads, now from 100 to 250 million BitTorrent users.
• In 2008, in the distribution of executable files, 18% were infected.
• In 2009, from 43% to 70% of Internet traffic belonged to Peer-to-peer networks.
• In 2009, more than 14.5% of BitTorrent downloads contained zero-day malware, and therefore BitTorrent was a distribution mechanism for 47% of zero-day malware.
• BitTorrent technology is used by Facebook, Twitter, Internet Archive, Blizzard, World of Tanks, Eve Online, the UK government, research ( BOINC ), many open source and free software projects.

Bittorrent

On July 2, 2001, a message from Bram Cohen appeared on Yahoo's notice board. The message was short: “My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here.

” “I had a lot of network programming experience at MojoNation. I wanted to combine my knowledge of what could work and what was interesting, but it was not done correctly enough and had to be completely redone from scratch. There was no “Wow!” - ideas, there was a combination of prosaic ideas gathered together and carefully prepared, eventually resulting in something powerful. ”

Computer hatred and programming

“I do not configure computers, I believe that they just have to work. This is my approach to them. I want to spend zero time on setup, configuration, and so on. In this sense, I do not like them. I love programming. I do quite annoying business, programming in Python, I do not create anything on my computer, I use only a text editor and a virtual control system. This is the only thing I touch. I refuse everything that involves the slightest use of the built-in API, I try to avoid the real mechanics of working with data to the maximum, doing exceptionally clean programming. "

" Computers are real evil, I hope that in the future they will become more convenient and better, and I in turn, I will do my best for this. ”



“I played cars, designers and more, but at about the same time that I learned to read, I also learned how to program. These two of my skills have always been at approximately the same level all my life. As I was able to read, so I programmed. ”

“ They expect me to take some firm position on content issues, they expect that there is some kind of position that I advocate, but it is not. My goal is to transfer the bits from point A to point B. ”

“ In truth, almost all the knowledge that you acquire in college, you can learn from books, from situations surrounding you. In the modern world, you can find any book you need, read any information on Wikipedia, or just find a way to learn something yourself. ”

“I created BitTorrent myself, with my own hands, on my old computer, without the support of a business empire that I would manage. And I believe that this is how I should continue to work and live in general. ”

Puzzles

Cohen has been fond of puzzles, origami and juggling 5 balls since childhood.


www.shapeways.com/shops/bram_cohen

Read more

Bram's Website - bramcohen.com

• Dark matter internet
• I2P - Invisible Internet Project
• The Men Who Stole the World (article translation)
• It's our fault ... come to terms with it
• What does the world torrent traffic consist of?
• OneSwarm - a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network
• Facebook started using BitTorrent
• Interview with the creator of the BitTorrent protocol
• BitTorrent is 12 years old
• The Pirate Bay History
• Decentralization: What services are already there?
• Hyperboria: How it works
• Piracy is the engine of progress. Uncontrolled Copy Research
• The creator of BitTorrent is going to destroy television in its current form
• YouTube on torrents
• Puzzle torrents. About Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol
• Bram Cohen's Revolution
• Quotes in English

Finally, two quotes from Cohen:

• print (sum (x for x in range (1, 1000 + 1) if x% 3 == 0 or x% 5 == 0))
• “There is no society that is designed so correctly that people are not required to be good.”
  

The publication is supported by Edison , a company that develops geolocation games with orcs and demons and CRM systems to coordinate the work of branches .