Eric Klinker

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Eric Klinker is an American technology executive and is best known as the former CEO of BitTorrent. Along with Bram Cohen and three other venture capitalists, he is also on the board of governors of BitTorrent. He was instrumental in formulating BitTorrent's position on network neutrality, testifying before the FCC [1] as well as other worldwide telecom regulators. [2]

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As CEO, he is credited with guiding BitTorrent through the 2008 financial crisis and growing the user base to over 170m users. [3] In 2012, BitTorrent expanded its mission under Klinker and broadened the product portfolio, introducing additional distributed applications like BitTorrent Sync, BitTorrent Bundles, Bleep, [4] and BitTorrent Live, [5] a linear broadcasting P2P protocol also invented by Bram Cohen. In 2014, BitTorrent announced Project Maelstrom, [6] a distributed web browser designed to power a new way for web content to be published, accessed and consumed.

In April 2016, Klinker left BitTorrent to co-found Resilio Inc. [7] with a focus on applying BitTorrent technology to enterprise and IoT markets.

Early life

Raised in Ramsey, Illinois, he is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the Naval Postgraduate School. [8]

Career

Before joining BitTorrent, he worked at a number of other companies which included @Home Network, netVmg and Internap Network Services. [9]

Related Research Articles

BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bram Cohen</span> American programmer and author of the BitTorrent protocol

Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon and organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, was the co-author of Codeville and creator of the Chia cryptocurrency which implements the proof of space-time consensus algorithm.

This article lists communication protocols that are designed for file transfer over a telecommunications network.

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BitTorrent is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client developed by Bram Cohen and Rainberry, Inc. used for uploading and downloading files via the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent was the first client written for the protocol. It is often nicknamed Mainline by developers denoting its official origins. Since version 6.0 the BitTorrent client has been a rebranded version of μTorrent. As a result, it is no longer open source. It is currently available for Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. There are currently two versions of the software, "BitTorrent Classic" which inherits the historical version numbering, and "BitTorrent Web", which uses its own version numbering.

A BitTorrent tracker is a special type of server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol.

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Protocol encryption (PE), message stream encryption (MSE) or protocol header encrypt (PHE) are related features of some peer-to-peer file-sharing clients, including BitTorrent clients. They attempt to enhance privacy and confidentiality. In addition, they attempt to make traffic harder to identify by third parties including internet service providers (ISPs). However, encryption will not protect one from DMCA notices from sharing not legal content, as one is still uploading material and the monitoring firms can merely connect to the swarm.

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Rainberry, Inc., formerly known as BitTorrent, Inc., is an American company that is responsible for the ongoing development of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, as well as the ongoing development of μTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline, two clients for that protocol. Files transferred using the BitTorrent protocol constitute a significant slice of all Internet traffic. At its peak, 170 million people used the protocol every month, according to the company's website. The company was founded on September 22, 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin. In 2018, the company was acquired by cryptocurrency startup TRON, and Bram Cohen left the company.

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Micro Transport Protocol or μTP is an open UDP-based variant of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol intended to mitigate poor latency and other congestion control problems found in conventional BitTorrent over TCP, while providing reliable, ordered delivery.

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Resilio Sync by Resilio, Inc. is a proprietary peer-to-peer file synchronization tool available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Amazon Kindle Fire and BSD. It can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet via a modified version of the BitTorrent protocol.

References

  1. FCC. "FCC ANNOUNCES AGENDA AND WITNESSES FOR PUBLIC EN BANC HEARING IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS ON BROADBAND NETWORK MANAGEMENT PRACTICES" (PDF). FCC. Retrieved 20 February 2008.
  2. Klinker, Eric. "Telecom Public Notice CRTC 2008-19 – Reply Comments" (PDF). Retrieved 28 July 2009.
  3. "BitTorrent talks Thom Yorke: 'Major labels have given up on selling music'". TheGuardian.com . 26 September 2014.
  4. "BitTorrent's Chat Client Unveiled: BitTorrent Bleep Now in Invite Only Pre-Alpha".
  5. "Coming Soon: Smartphone Streaming, Powered by BitTorrent Live".
  6. "Project Maelstrom: The Internet We Build Next".
  7. "Why I Started Resilio". 16 June 2016.
  8. ece.illinois.edu/alumni/awards
  9. ece.illinois.edu/alumni/awards