Download responsibly

Amazon, Esri, Grab, Hyundai, Meta, Microsoft, Precisely, Tripadvisor and TomTom, along with 10s of other businesses got together and offer OSM data in Parquet on S3 free of charge. You can query it surgically and run analytics on it needing only MBs of bandwidth on what is a multi-TB dataset at this point. https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-dec-2024-update.html

If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...

I can imagine a few things :

1. BitTorrent has a bad rep. Most people still associate it with just illegal download.

2. It requires slightly more complex firewall rules, and asking the network admin to put them in place might raise some eyebrow for reason 1. On very restrictive network, they might not want to allow them at all due to the fact that it opens the door for, well, BitTorrent.

3. A BitTorrent client is more complicated than an HTTP client, and not installed on most company computer / ci pipeline (for lack of need, and again reason 1.). A lot of people just want to `curl` and be done with it.

4. A lot of people think they are required to seed, and for some reason that scare the hell of them.

Overall, I think it is mostly 1 and the fact that you can just simply `curl` stuff and have everything working. I do sadden me that people do not understand how good of a file transfer protocol BT is and how it is underused. I do remember some video game client using BT for updates under the hood, and peertube use webtorrent, but BT is sadly not very popular.

From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available (potentially causing congestion of transit ports affecting everyone) and no reliable way of forecasting where the traffic will come from making capacity planning a nightmare.

Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down.

Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it.

The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices.

For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine".

The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing.

BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.

I remember seeing the concept of "torrents with dynamic content" a few years ago, but apparently never became a thing[1]. I kind of wish it did, but I don't know if there are critical problems (i.e. security?).

[1]: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

I assume it’s simply the lack of the inbuilt “universal client” that http enjoys, or that devs tend to have with ssh/scp. Not that such a client (even an automated/scripted CLI client) would be so difficult to setup, but then trackers are also necessary, and then the tooling for maintaining it all. Intuitively, none of this sounds impossible, or even necessarily that difficult apart from a few tricky spots.

I think it’s more a matter of how large the demand is for frequent downloads of very large files/sets, which leads to a questions of reliability and seeding volume, all versus the effort involved to develop the tooling and integrate it with various RCS and file syncing services.

Would something like Git LFS help here? I’m at the limit of my understanding for this.

> Like container registries?

https://github.com/uber/kraken exists, using a modified BT protocol, but unless you are distributing quite large images to a very large number of nodes, a centralized registry is probably faster, simpler and cheaper

> Like container registries? Package repos, etc.

I had the same thoughts for some time now. It would be really nice to distribute software and containers this way. A lot of people have the same data locally and we could just share it.

I'd consider CI one of the worst massive wastes of computing resources invented, although I don't see how map data would be subject to the same sort of abusive downloading as libraries or other code.

I suspect web apps that "query" the GPKG files. Parquet can be queried surgically, I'm not sure if there is a way to do the same with GPKG.

Can we identify requests from CI servers reliably?

My solution to this is to only download if the file doesn't exist. An additional bonus is that the script now runs much faster because it doesn't need to do any expensive networking/downloads.

10,000 times a day is on average 8 times a second. No way someone has 8 fixes per second, this is more like someone wanted to download a new copy every day, or every hour but they messed up milliseconds config or something. Or it's simply malicious user.

edit: bad math, it's 1 download every 8 seconds

When I do scripts like that I modify it to skip the download step and keep the old file around so I can test the rest without anything time-consuming.

If the data changes, how would a torrent client pick it up and download changes?

This. Maybe they could actually make some infra money out of this. Make token-based free tier download, pay if you break it.

See: "Also, when we block an IP range for abuse, innocent third parties can be affected."

Although they refer to IP ranges, the same principle applies on a smaller scale to a single IP address: (1) dynamic IP addresses get reallocated, and (2) entire buildings (universities, libraries, hotels, etc.) might share a single IP address.

Aside from accidentally affecting innocent users, you also open up the possibility of a DOS attack: the attacker just has to abuse the service from an IP address that he wants to deny access to.

It could be slightly more sophisticated than that. Instead of outright blocking an entire IP range, set quotas for individual clients and throttle downloads exponentially. Add latency, cap the bandwidth, etc. Whoever is downloading 10,000 copies of the same file in 24 hours will notice when their 10th attempt slows down to a crawl.

I’m looking forward to visiting all of the fictional places it comes up with!

AI models are trained relatively rarely, so it's unlikely this would be very noticeable among all the regular traffic. Just the occasional download-everything every few months.

Map slop? That's new!