Halloween’s Most Popular Costume? Pirates!

Halloween is approaching, and boy do we have a treat for you. It appears that not only are pirates the most used costume during Halloween, but they are also the most heavy users of Internet traffic with BitTorrent. Coincidence? I think not! Halloween is a time of mischief and scary things. In the eyes of Hollywood, pirates are the same: they steal their product and, allegedly, threaten their industry. See the connection? Sandvine, a Canadian management company, recently revealed information that points to expanding P2P traffic; leading the P2P race is BitTorrent. The company reported that more than half of upstream traffic in North America is P2P-related, which is impressive, if not terribly shocking. What is shocking is that Gnutella (the Grim Reaper costume of Halloween) controls 11.18% of 53.3% total P2P upstream traffic. One could assume, however, that the other chunk is primarily BitTorrent (the Cowboy costume of Halloween). This leads us to the fact that pirates are one of the most popular costume of Halloween. How ironic is it that the most used costume of Halloween will also have a indirect connection to the most heavily utilized type of traffic data on the Web? I actually think it is funny. Anything other than Hannah Montana works for me. A Happy Halloween it will be!