A couple days back, Microsoft announced Avalanche, a made-in-Redmond alternative to the wild-and-wooly BitTorrent, the protocol that now takes the lion's share of Internet traffic. Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator, has posted an in-depth debunking of the assumptions made by the Avalanche paper.
The central idea here is basically 'Let's apply error correcting codes to BitTorrent'. This isn't a new idea, everybody comes up with it. In fact I saw fit to mention that it's a dubious idea before. (Some people will point out that 'error correcting codes' isn't the right term for the latest and greatest of this sort of technology, to which I say 'whatever'.) The main reason that this is a popular idea is that recent work in error correcting techology is very cool. While it is very cool, and very applicable to sending information across lossy channels, the case for using it in BitTorrent is unconvincing.
