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Download Torrents With Your PC Turned Off

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sun Aug 20, 2006 06:24 PM
from the building-your-hardware-with-steroids dept.
Networking Hardware
Mr.Tweak writes to tell us that they have a review posted of a new wireless router from ASUS. What sets this router apart from others is that in addition to being a wireless router/gateway is that it also functions as a thin client system with a pre-installed 160 GB IDE drive (no SATA support sorry) and three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals. If you happen to use one of those USB ports for another drive the router will also support RAID 0 and 1, quite a bit more than the average router.
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  • news? (Score:5, Funny)

    by macadamia_harold (947445) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:26PM (#15945708) Homepage
    This isn't anything new. According to the RIAA, you can download music without even owning a computer.

    • Re:news? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Uruviel (772554) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:15PM (#15945843) Homepage
      Let's not shoot ourself in the foot now. There are perfectly legitimate uses for torrents. Like downloading your favorite Linux distro. Which you could then install on your machine when finished with a wake-on-lan call from that very same router. See the possibilities are endless and all you think of is music.

      • Re:news? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Mister Whirly (964219) on Sunday August 20 2006, @08:08PM (#15945997) Homepage
        Yeah, I'm relatively sure that 99% of torrent download ARE legitimate things like linux distros... Because terrabytes of distros are released EVERY DAY and that's what the majority of users are downloading...

        I'm not denying that there aren't legitimate uses for torrents, but don't try to blow smoke up anyone's ass about what the majority are currently using it for.. I'm sure a few people will chime in and list their legitimate uses, but how many are going to chime in and admit they are violating (bullshit) copyright laws??

          • Those that aren't are usually software that I want to try and then don't use because they are inferior to freely available alternatives.

            Is that your variation of the "Test this for a while and if you like it, buy it!" .NFO files that are distributed with pirate software. That "justification" (as much as it ever was one) went out the door a long time ago. Most software comes with a trial version now. Stuff that doesn't tends to be more specialised, but you're equally likely to be able to call someone and th

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by aussie_a (778472)
              a) The RIAA doesn't pass laws. They may buy lawmakers, but that's not the same thing.

              Difference is neglible (and not worth mentioning) when discussing something on the internet on a forum that commonly discusses the buying of lawmakers.

              c) Everything after the word "America" in your sentence makes absolutely no sense and is just ranting against Bush for some reason.

              You might not be aware but here in Australia we recently got a whole bunch of American laws passed because Bush wanted us to have them. Bush is a

                • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                  by werewolf1031 (869837)

                  your government is -- forgive my terminology -- stupid enough to fabricate a belief that we'll attack Austrailia for not doing what we say.

                  You seem to be under the impression that the only source of power and coersion the U.S. has over other governments is military force. Please read up on economics when you have the chance, even a layman's understanding of economic workings will suffice. The bottom line is this: "If you want to do business with us, then you'll pass laws that protect OUR economic interests

                  • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                    by walt-sjc (145127)
                    I would think that it would be VERY VERY difficult for the US government to do much to Australia economically. The government doesn't do importing / exporting - that's private business. One possibility would be to slap unreasonable tarrifs on things, but the WTO would step in in that case.

                    You give way too much credit to Bush's ability to shape AUS law. Time to look internally at the true source of your problems.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                    by jherekc (460597)
                    The torrents Blizzard uses for updates to World of Warcraft are standard torrents. If you open up their updater executable you can find the torrent file and load it into a standard BitTorrent client.

  • In case your wondering... (Score:4, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:27PM (#15945714) Homepage Journal
    Yes, it does run linux.

  • Natural extension (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bromskloss (750445) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:27PM (#15945715)
    Wow, now let's put into it _all_ functionality we expect from a computer! ;-)

    • Re:Natural extension (Score:4, Interesting)

      by evilviper (135110) on Sunday August 20 2006, @10:05PM (#15946314) Journal
      Wow, now let's put into it _all_ functionality we expect from a computer! ;-)

      If they can do it in a tiny package, very inexpensively, fanless, and all with a fraction the power of a notebook computer, I say more power to them.

  • Where is TheTorrent? (Score:5, Informative)

    by junglee_iitk (651040) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:33PM (#15945724)
    What's with not using the word torrent in the whole summary?

    Here is the part of the article:
    "Applications lets you enable/disable the router's inbuilt applications - Download Master, Download Daemon, Download Share, Photo Album and Media Server, as well as do some basic configuration like specifying the port range and default seeding time for the BitTorrent client, and the default web server port. You can also configure the settings for an attached USB webcam, enabling to run via a web interface, and even turning it into a security camera controlled by the router, which can enable motion detection and email alerts. And finally, locally-attached USB printers can be configured and shared out - ready for connection from UPnP-enabled clients."

    And here is the link :)
    http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/939/5/page_5_syst em_features_configuration/index.html [tweaktown.com]

  • Power consumption? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slapyslapslap (995769) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:33PM (#15945726) Homepage
    I have to assume that power consumption is going to go up to power this thing. If I was turning off my PC to save power, I don't think I'd want this thing.

  • Smoothwall anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vrejakti (729758) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:37PM (#15945736) Homepage Journal
    What's so new about this? http://smoothwall.org/ [smoothwall.org], http://ipcop.org/ [ipcop.org] and http://m0n0.ch/wall/ [m0n0.ch] could easily be custimized to perform a similar function. Easy as installing a bittorrent application, and using SSH.

    By the way, these 3 options happen to be free and upgradable.

    • Re:Smoothwall anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NetRAVEN5000 (905777) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:01PM (#15945806) Homepage
      How do you install any of those on a ROUTER?

      The beauty of this ROUTER is that you don't need to leave a PC on for your downloads anymore. Or, at least you can leave your PC's cycles to do something else, be it gaming, Folding@Home, or whatever else.

      Not only that, but now you don't need to run your fileserver AND your Web server, since it's got a built-in fileserver and Web server. It also has a print server if you've got PCs dedicated for that.

      Your router needs to be on anyways, so. . .

  • But it needs...... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ericdano (113424) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:41PM (#15945758) Homepage
    It needs more than the ability to run Bittorrent. You need something like Peer Guardian running to filter out all those "bad" IP Addresses.

    It's more of a NAS meets Wireless router. Which is cool, but....yeah....so?
  • Just saw this last week. In retail grocery we pump a lot of data back and forth between head office, store back office, and the lanes. Anything -- and I mean anything that keeps us from having to lay another cable or put another piece of bulky hardware under the sales counter is a bonus. I could see these things used in the C racks at the front to stage price changes, etc. and being retail the fact that they are utterly dirt cheap will have a broad appeal.

    This one's a winner, I think.

  • Is it vocab or grammar nazi? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArcherB (796902) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:45PM (#15945772) Journal
    from TFA:
    There's a rapidly-expanding section of the home electronics market which revolves around "devices". The reason for the parentheses is that it's difficult to know how to label these gadgets, because they don't fit easily into any pre-defined categories.


    Isn't a parentheses one of these ( )?
    And aren't these " " called quotation marks?

    Sorry, but it's hard to take an article seriously when the author doesn't know the difference.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by g0at (135364)
      Isn't a parentheses one of these ( )?

      And aren't these " " called quotation marks?

      Pretty close... one of those curved things is a parenthesis. Two of them are parentheses. Your thinking is in the right place though.

      -b

  • This morning I saw that HIV was cured (Score:5, Funny)

    by pHatidic (163975) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:06PM (#15945821) Homepage
    And I thought wow, this is by far the best news of the day. Then I saw that there is a new drug just like morphine, only non-addictive. And then I thought, wow, I thought AIDs being cured was a big deal, but that's nothing compared to this. And now I see that I can download porno movies without even turning on my computer. God I love /.

    • And now I see that I can download porno movies without even turning on my computer.

      unfortunately, not. You have to turn on your computer in order to tell the router to download your porno. Then you can turn it off while you wait for the porn. Then your sister uses it to download the second season of Buffy and notices all the stuff you've downloaded.

      Meanwhile I've always just used TorrentFlux [torrentflux.com] installed on my linux server, works fine for me. (still doesn't hide my downloads from other users, however)

  • Thin Client (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeathElk (883654) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:07PM (#15945828) Homepage
    Why does a thin client need 160GB?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Ruie (30480)
      Why does a thin client need 160GB?

      To cache data from 160TB server. What kind of question is that ?

  • ASUS Builds Full-Blown PC Without Video Card... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ivan256 (17499) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:14PM (#15945842)
    ...Video at 11:00.

  • Security Ramifications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duplo1 (719988) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:22PM (#15945866)
    I find it crazy that people are running more and more applications directly on their Internet router. The more applications and services there are running, the more likely a serious security flaw will be found in the device. Do they really think this through? This is just going to be another attack vector for script kiddies to own peoples' networks. Several months after they release this, another vendor will be releasing a seperate firewall/router to protect this device.

  • This device needs a killer app: Skype (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork (142693) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:28PM (#15945877)
    Seriously, I'm sure the processor in that router is strong enough to handle Skype. Just put a radio transmitter on it and bundle two wireless handsets , and you get what lots of people wish for: Skype without a running computer! (Maybe it should also plug into a regular phone socket so you can use your old phones.)

    Here's why it makes sense to do this on a router:

    For one thing, everyone's router is always on, so there is nothing extra in the house sucking power. Maybe more relevant: The router, when Skype is being used, can be set to automatically throttle back the up/down bandwith that it's passing to connected computers (or using for its own bittorrent). This helps prevent degradation of Skype quality. And third, this would be totally simple - just plug in the router, tell it your Skype login/pass, and all your contacts are imported (Skype itself stores those things).

    The effect with SkypeIn would essentially be: Vonage without the fees (or for $30/year for SkypeIn)... no, better, because Vonage sounds like crap when I'm using unthrotteled bittorrent. This would justify the price of the hardware, and if the manufacturer could keep the costs low, it would also be very good for Skype/eBay and its userbase. Maybe Ebay could subsidize the costs a bit, and offer free SkypeIn for a year, since anyone who buys this will also probably buy SkypeOut minutes eventually.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StikyPad (445176)
      Gigabit would be nice too. Why push the envelope with everything except speed, especially since people will need to transfer those torrents off the router once they're done?

  • I already do this with... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870) on Sunday August 20 2006, @08:19PM (#15946030) Journal
    ...my NSLU2 [nslu2-linux.org].

  • Missing something (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kahrytan (913147) on Sunday August 20 2006, @09:27PM (#15946217) Homepage
    This type of router would be much more functional if it had a proxy server capabilities with builtin virus scanner.

      Though, Asus is starting something Linksys, Dlink and Netgear will probably jump on.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by hacker (14635)

      My Linksys WRT54G [wikipedia.org] (not GS) is a transparent Squid [squid-cache.org] proxy already. I don't see why this ASUS machine can't do the same.

      It points to a secondary FreeBSD [freebsd.org] machine for that, because I have a 5GiB cache on the Squid [squid-cache.org] side. Everything is anonymized through Privoxy [privoxy.org] + Tor [eff.org], with no configuration changes on the client side.

      Users don't even know (or care) that their traffic is being proxied or anonymized at all.

      For user data stored on the FreeBSD machine, I also use [gnu-designs.com] rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org] to do backups of another disk slice tha

  • Use Kurobox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kylehase (982334) on Monday August 21 2006, @12:26AM (#15946704)
    I use the Kurobox [kurobox.com] for this. The kurobox is basically a modified version of the Buffalo link station but it is designed to be reloaded with a custom linux. Some pre-configured images are available and include tons of apps for torrent, dyndns, LAMP, e-donkey, samba and all kinds of other stuff. It has a USB port which you could use for another hard drive or USB NIC to turn it into a firewall or router although I'm sure most slashdot readers already have pretty good routers. I think linksys made a hackable NAS too but I haven't tried that one.

  • Not so happy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by citro (940077) on Monday August 21 2006, @01:38AM (#15946876)
    I bought Asus WL500G Premium (wl500gp), a lighter version of the router from TFA. The hype is similar - Download with the PC turned off. The main difference is that wl500gp does not have a storage unit included and the user must attach one if wants to enjoy computerless leeching.

    Bottomline:
    - nice router - I live in an apartment, and I have all around coverage: 18MBps WLAN connection through a couple of walls, 1 - 1 1/2 feet thick each;
    - buggy firmware - (e.g. the only way to set the date and time on router is to use the included and non-functional NTP client, no way to set or check the number of simultaneous NAT connections, no way to modify radio power)
    - the Download Master does not work (the torrents fail to start)
    - lame online support

    I hope that the alternative firmware OSS projects (such as http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php [dd-wrt.com] or http://www.wl500g.info/ [wl500g.info] or http://www.openwrt.org/ [openwrt.org] will provide a stable alternative.

  • Linksys WRTSL54GL .... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by b0s0z0ku (752509) on Monday August 21 2006, @06:44AM (#15947562)
    Cost $120 6 mo. ago and had most of the same functionality, apart from the internal drive. An external drive can be hooked up via USB 2.0 however. And, yes, it runs Linux - in fact, it's meant to be hackable.

    So move along here - nothing new to see, really...

    -b.

    • Re:Why not just use a computer? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TommydCat (791543) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:36PM (#15945733) Homepage
      In this page-and-a-half-spread-out-to-69-pages review, I didn't actually see the price listed, though it was listed as one of the cons. What is the price of this device?

      I personally am not stirred by this as I have a set of linux servers set up to do the same functionality with much more speed and efficiency, but I can see this as a neat black-box turn-key solution for someone who can't deal with that level of complexity but can deal with a straight-forward UI.

      What I'd like to see in a review like this is what throughput can the SAMBA server give among multiple clients, how many connections the bit-torrent client can handle before melting, what types of printers it can serve (Jetdirect, USB, real Centronics, etc)... you know, useful information I can use to make an informed decision.

      Oh well...

      • Re:Why not just use a computer? (Score:5, Informative)

        by livewire98801 (916940) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:43PM (#15945768)
        $260 on newegg
        linky [newegg.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nine-times (778537)

        I personally am not stirred by this as I have a set of linux servers set up to do the same functionality with much more speed and efficiency, but I can see this as a neat black-box turn-key solution for someone who can't deal with that level of complexity but can deal with a straight-forward UI.

        Well I'm kind of jazzed about the idea, even if not the implementation. The reason is this: I don't have the money or space for a set of Linux servers. I've been expecting for some time that someone would start

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by djrogers (153854)

          * a web server
          * E-mail (SMTP, IMAP) server
          * DNS server
          * a file server (SMB, AFP) for internal (with a big hard drive)
          * ssh access
          * complete headless setup and configuration
          * very small (Mac mini sized or smaller)
          * maybe a print server
          * wireless access point
          * maybe VPN from the outside, or site-to-site tunnels
          * some means to back the whole thing up (easily)

          2 suggestions spring to mind - a KuroBox [kurobox.com] for about $150, or if you'd like it with a drive already installed, a Buffalo Linkstati [newegg.com]

          • True enough, and that is quite a shame. However, I hate the idea that I need to store things on someone else's server (and therefore lose control of it) in order to have access to it over the internet. Along with everything else, a good, easy to set up, home server might start showing people why ISPs closing off ports is a bad thing. As it is, I think ISPs get away with it because most of their customers have no idea it's happening, and wouldn't know how to set up their own web server if they had port 80

    • Re:Why not just use a computer? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ForestGrump (644805) on Sunday August 20 2006, @06:42PM (#15945763) Homepage Journal
      Because I'm afraid of having my data compromised.

      I use the router to interface with the interweb for what I need.

      Firstly, I script what I want the router to send/get. then I disconnect my computer, connect the wAN side of the router to the interweb. When the script is done, I disconnect the WAN side of the router, connect my computer to the router and copy off the router HDD. Sure it's a pain in the butt, but what am I to do? live without the interweb?

      Grump.

      -------
      This message uploaded to you by ASUS WL-700gE router using Interweb interface 3.02

      -----

      • Re:Why not just use a computer? (Score:5, Funny)

        by xQx (5744) on Sunday August 20 2006, @07:05PM (#15945815)
        All your script are belong to us.

        It does take a painfully long time to hack your computer tho, I'm like:

        CD \windows
        dir
        [wait for you to disconnect from the web, plug the modem into the PC, run 0wned script, plug back into the net]
        cd system32
        dir
        [again...]

        Well, that's where I'm up to anyway...

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by abb3w (696381)
          Use "CD %SYSTEMDRIVE%" and "CD %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32" instead. Otherwise you may run into problems on systems using (say) D:\WINXP as the system drive & folder. On my system, C:\WINNT and C:\WINDOWS are decoys.
        • bandwidth? not really. I mean, you're buying a 3 meg connection, but reality is that it sits idle most of the time. If you script your send/fetch web stuff, even dialup is no problem (unless you're doing something stupid like downloading videos.) As for latency, it's a matter of how fast I can get the script to send/receive what I need. Once that's done, it's almost instantenous between the router and the dot matrix printer (monitors cause cancer and LCDs don't have enough contrast).

          And scripting langua

    • Why not just use a geek? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "It seems like a full computer would be better than this in just about every aspect--price, power consumption, etc."

      Heat! Time! Remember not everyone's a geek, and shouldn't have to be to get some of the offered features.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by grolschie (610666)

      If you were downloading a file from bit torrent that contained a virus or spyware that affected the OS that shipped with the router, would that mean that not only your router, but every computer connected to that router would become infected?

      Unlikely. If the router was running Windows XP and actually opened or ran the infected files that it downloads, then perhaps a virus might spread to other Windows XP clients on your network by exploiting some vulnerability. This would require firewalls to be turned

    • This is linux malware. Please switch user to root and install it.

      To be serious - there are rootkits out there that script kiddies use, but they need a way in first. If the router is not running much and has the admin tools all restricted to only work through the internal ethernet interface then there really are not very many ways in. I've seen a linux box that got rooted - after it had been sitting unpatched for a couple of years somebody decided it was a good idea to give all email users an executable

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