Peer-to-peer is rather interesting to work with. Disruptive technologies always fascinate me, especially when it’s closely related to work so I can spend oodles of time on it. It’s also interesting to see the developments in the area – even if I don’t always agree with the sentiments of the researchers (for instance, I quite agree with “http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/analysis-of-bittorrent-utp-congestion-avoidance/” George Ou on BitTorrent – for now).
Even so, there are good apples and bad apples. BitTorrent got an undeservingly bad name from people confusing content with transport. Even if I don’t think that they got it right with their be-nice-to-the-network idea, they tried. All in all, a sane actor.
Pando, on the other hand, is an actor that seems quite sane – working in the P4P working group, seemingly trying to make a living out of a very kosher sort of P2P. The protocol isn’t too bloody bad either – the only problem is that parts of the client lodge themselveswhere it’s quite invisible on a Windows system. That, and the usual foray of “Would you want to make xyz.com your default website? Search page? Dog grooming service?”.
Some quick testing shows PMB.exe – Pando Media Booster – disregards the Pando client setting telling it not to start on Windows startup. Different binary from the Pando client, you say? Sure. Explain that to the average user. The net effect is that the software is happily chugging along at 1.5 Mbps without any sort of user notification. No tray icons, or windows – nothing.
Speaking in terms of ISP per-subscriber data usage (on average per user), Pando will skew it to the tunes of one Pando user not knowing she runs PMB to 50 – give or take – purely average users. That, in my book, is the dark side of P2P. Users running BitTorrent, Spotify, Voddler, etc. make a conscious decision to run it. Users running PMB don’t and really have no simple way of knowing why World of Warcraft lag went up or why pages are loading slowly.