Slashdot Mirror

http://www.slyck.com/programs.php?cat=2

Just go through and search for Mac

Or, if you want them seperated by network, pick your network

Almost all the major P2P networks have Mac clients available.

http://www.slyck.com/programs.php?cat=2

Just go through and search for Mac

Or, if you want them seperated by network, pick your network

Almost all the major P2P networks have Mac clients available.

Although Cydoor had cleaned up its act considerably since its earlier days, the stigmatism associated with the adware product doomed eXeem before it was ever released.

I found this part of Slyck's writeup at http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1033 interesting. Now, I've never heard of Cydoor so I'm not sure which context of the word stigmatism Slyck was trying to go for:

stigmatism Pronunciation Key (stgm-tzm)
n.

1. The condition of being affected by stigmata.
2. The state of a refracting or reflecting system in which light rays from a single point are accurately focused at another point.
3. Normal eyesight.

Sloncek's story is disputed by Slyck here.

slyck of course being the most prominent file sharing news source on the web.

Here's a link to the actual survey. It's not too informative, but it shows the cyclic nature of the p2p userbase mentioned in the article.

There's not much grey area, at least in the US, especially when you consider that many P2P clients will share out, at the very least, the files you downloaded unless you specifically take measures to prevent it, possibly including manually removing each download, which can be more of a PITA than just ripping it yourself. (How's that for a runon sentence?) I would never recommend that anyone use P2P for sharing copyrighted information without permission from the copyright holder, even if it's to obtain a copy of something you already own. The only grey area is whether or not you'll get caught.

If in doubt.. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1024

What is the DHT Layer? I would consider myself as being torrent savvy, but I have no clue what this means.

A little bit of research later...

DHT stands for Distributed Hash Table ... DHT is a networking protocol that enhances the scalability and efficiency of decentralized networks by creating a virtual index rather than broadcasting search queries. Decentralized networks that utilized DHT technology are able to search and locate files significantly faster than networks that do not use it.
source (non-authoritative): http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=772

DHT is a layer added on top of the BitTorrent network to assist in Azureus' performance. BitTorrent is a distinct networking protocol, of which is specified by creator Bram Cohen. Anything existing outside of those specifications is not BitTorrent.
source (non-authoritative): http://www.unitethecows.com/forums/showthread.php? t=10991
(So DHT is not part of the bittorrent specification; At least, it wasn't in May 2005, but who knows now...)

So basically, my understanding now is that the DHT Layer is what allows for the decentralization of torrents. Thus, by not respecting the "private" flag, the clients can leech all day without it affecting their ratio. Slap me if I am wrong or missing something, but aren't most (re:99.999%) of these "communities" that care about leechers, ratios, and keeping their torrents to themselves going to be trading/torrenting copyrighted content/material? Call me crazy, but I just have this hunch that this isn't exactly the latest Knoppix torrent. And then you can call me crazy again, but I must ask why we care what these "communities" ban or don't ban?

But then again, this is slashdot where anything that approaches conservative or rational gets modded down by the mob.

The FastTrack network(Kazaas network) is very much alive. In fact, it's the third largest or so. There are of course other clients you can use to access the network, so it's possible no one is actually using the official Kazaa client, but I doubt that's the case :)

Network: Number of concurrent users at any given time.

eDonkey2K: 3,234,072
Gnutella: 2,200,424
FastTrack: 1,702,499
Overnet: 485,065
MP2P: 251,137
Filetopia: 4,351

No bittorrent because there's just no way to measure how many people use it. The numbers aren't really official and are taken from http://www.slyck.com/stats.php

You should look into SmartPAR, and the PAR file concept in general. You're generating FEC blocks for archives before dispatching them to [transmission | storage], so if one block is unreadable, you can recover it.

Slyck seems to have a good explanation of how this works. They're geared towards filesharing, but the concepts are useful for backups too.

You'll need a lot of temp space. If you're filling 4.7-gig DVDs and doing 1 parity disk for each 5 data disks, you're talking about archiving a ~20-gig batch of photos and needing ~25 gig of temporary storage to build the files before burning.

By enforcing DRM you necessarily lock out benefits like sampling etc.

I'll say it slower for you:

Creative.

Commons.

I don't see anywhere where LimeWire will be enforcing digital restrictions management as it is commonly understood. All I've seen is "enforcing licensing", which could just involve associating a license generated by a file's author to the file's hash. This Slyck article seems to agree. Of course, the license creation app could be misused to indicate a false license, but then the user would be guilty of fraud, clearly shifting the blame onto the (ab)user of the software.

First, that has nothing to do with what I said. What I said was that there is no law that requires to you provide a license to share your works. And there isn't. If you can find a law that says you must include a license with all copyrighted works, please provide a link to it.

Second, I'm at a loss to understand your statement. Copyright does indeed exactly allow you to pick and choose what people can do with your copyrighted works, with the exception of Fair Use.

The danger in the Limewire approach is that it plays into, rather than fixes, the problems with existing copyright law. We are very quickly coming to a point where everything people say, do, write, draw, suggestion, or even mumble is automatically protected and requires a license to repeat, use, improve, add to, and so forth. This is the wrong direction. The law should require that things are automatically not protected unless some positive action by the creator is undertaken to protect them. In fact, my post here is, in all likelihood, protected in some way. Are you saying I should attach a license to it for you to read it? Is that a reasonable direction for society to head? That's the slippery slope we're on.

Oh, and by the way, the Limewire approach doesn't say anything about a particular license, it's just to require a license. So people can put on whatever restrictive license they want.

For those who're interested: reaction from the mininova admins here: http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=207569 #207569

...I hope Slashdot does a story on the shutdown of WinMX in response to RIAA threats. Maybe I'll submit it and see if they'll run it.

I found this comment very interesting. It is the only evidence I've seen of the other side of the story being posted on slyck.com.

eremini
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Sat Sep 17, 2005 3:29 am
Post subject:
Post Body: eremini here. I am gonna post exactly what happened, since there's no need to hide it now. As some of you know cerberius has always been the one that did technicall things on methlabs, set up the servers, updated server software, etc... So it only naturaly the servers were registered to him. Now about a week ago, Furi and Phrosty decided to kick cerb out, right now they are going around forums truying to say that they wanna be professional, but how do profesionals fire peope? They talk to them, explain the reasons, etc. Did they do that? No. Did they try to do that? No. Just one day all of a sudden, they changed the methlabs.org server root password, wiped all the data off it and hijacked a google adsence account, which was registered to cerb's social security number. Now about the domain. Yes, cerb did transfer the domain to him, a couple of months before that (Miles might call this keep all your balls in one sack), but he did not hijack anything, he transfered it with complience to all ICANN rules, which state that the preveious owner gets send an email, to which he gets to reply 60 days (!) if you want to reject the transfer, that didn't happen. So its transfered fair and square. Now about stealing money. What money? The google adsence money (which cerb got back with google being ready to press charges against hijackers for fraud) is still there, no money transfered. Same with paypal, the money, like always, will be used to pay hosting costs and other fees concerning methlabs. There thats the end of the store. Now you decide who to trust, but please don't trust them, just because they put their real names in some attemp to "be profesional"

According to a poster in this thread, EZTV was being attacked by parties unknown (possibly MediaSentry) who were soaking up bandwidth and trying to inject corrupt file segments. I also saw a comment on the emule board from someone who tossed some random non-infringing files into a shared folder and immediately started getting upload requests. That leads me to believe that they're just trying to soak up as much bandwidth as they can, with legit downloads being collateral damage.

After poking around the comments on the other site, I came across this one from eremini, one of the PG devs. I've included it verbatim below. This is the most believeable version of the story I've heard.

(Background: cerberius, a.k.a. William Erwin, is the one who they claim "hijacked" methlabs.org. Cerberius, eremini, fox, and Gambit2011 were claimed to be on one side, with the rest of the devs, and the "owner", on the other. Gambit2011 posted to take himself off that list.)

(reference URL: http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14191& postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25 )

Actual Post:
eremini here. I am gonna post exactly what happened, since there's no need to hide it now. As some of you know cerberius has always been the one that did technicall things on methlabs, set up the servers, updated server software, etc... So it only naturaly the servers were registered to him. Now about a week ago, Furi and Phrosty decided to kick cerb out, right now they are going around forums truying to say that they wanna be professional, but how do profesionals fire peope? They talk to them, explain the reasons, etc. Did they do that? No. Did they try to do that? No. Just one day all of a sudden, they changed the methlabs.org server root password, wiped all the data off it and hijacked a google adsence account, which was registered to cerb's social security number. Now about the domain. Yes, cerb did transfer the domain to him, a couple of months before that (Miles might call this keep all your balls in one sack), but he did not hijack anything, he transfered it with complience to all ICANN rules, which state that the preveious owner gets send an email, to which he gets to reply 60 days (!) if you want to reject the transfer, that didn't happen. So its transfered fair and square. Now about stealing money. What money? The google adsence money (which cerb got back with google being ready to press charges against hijackers for fraud) is still there, no money transfered. Same with paypal, the money, like always, will be used to pay hosting costs and other fees concerning methlabs. There thats the end of the store. Now you decide who to trust, but please don't trust them, just because they put their real names in some attemp to "be profesional"

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=913

Methlabs Update

September 16th, 2005 by Administrator

"Dear Methlabs and P2P Community,

Recently, we had several former staff members revolt against the entire P2P community as a whole. They tried to sabatoge Methlabs and attempted to wipe the Methlabs server of all its data.

Unfortunately, they gained access to site backups. In doing so, your passwords may have been compromised, although they are MD5 encrypted. We would like to you login to the Methlabs forums (http://methlabs.org/forums/) and change your password. We sincerely apologize for this issue. As of right now, the Methlabs site is back online, although forum posts from the past month have been lost.

Since all the data was stolen by former staff members, YOU MAY RECIEVE FAKE EMAILS that look like they are from Methlabs. If they do not come from the Methlabs.org domain and from our email servers, DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

We assure you that Methlabs development will continue, and ALL OFFICIAL PROGRAMS MUST be downloaded directly from Methlabs.org . Assume that all other sites contain spyware or malicious code which may not be directly trusted.

To update everyone on the current situation, there has been some news going around the Internet of a revolt which happened in Methlabs. This is hearsay. The current real news is that PeerGuardian development and Blocklist development is on schedule, and Blocklist should be out of Beta within the next week or so.

Please spread the word that Methlabs.org is ALIVE and DO NOT believe or TRUST any emails that do not come directly from Methlabs.org and our mail servers. These emails are from disgruntled staff members trying to hurt the P2P community as a whole.

We apoligize for the current situation. Please visit http://methlabs.org/ for OFFICIAL updates, and help us spread the word!

- The Methlabs Team"

Yes, the RIAA sues more. Nothing's really going to change in terms of how much is being pirated, but when the entertainment industries are doing the talking, facts only get in the way of what they're saying.

This is essentially just the RIAA making an example out of people. You'd be more likely to die from external injuries* than be sued.

*Yes, the article is 4,000 people old by now, but I doubt the stastics have changed significantly.

The sum of users of all p2p networks it tracks is about 8 million. Some of those use more than one network, so the actual number of unique persons using any of those is probably smaller. On the other hand some are not constant users so they show up for a day or two, then show again in a month. So, let's assume optimistically it's 10 million. Now, there is the BitTorrent which is not tracked by Slyck - let's put that optimistically at 10 million. Even if we add another 10 million for all other forms of file sharing not covered otherwise and end up with 30 millions of P2P users it is still just 3% of the total estimated number of Internet users.

This means that file sharers are a tiny minority and therefore file sharing can be successfully stigmatized and kept at bay as a marginal, shameful activity. I believe it's those numbers that make ??AA think they can win. And I can say I'm not sure they won't once I did this estimating.

They even provide historical trend data on usage of the various P2P networks: http://slyck.com/stats.php

They even provide historical trend data on usage of the various P2P networks: http://slyck.com/stats.php

emule

and a good link site you trust.

eg:

example

But users need to find their own link sites, not one linked to above.

According to the article on slyck

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=844

The " law enforcement " were breaking the law in order to catch others , they were running servers for people to download files from and upload files to.

This is what the article said if it is true,

" The FBI had been posing for a considerable amount of time as server operators, inviting people to upload and download material. Once a solid relationship had been established between the FBI and top warez sites, the trap had been set. It was only a matter of time until the FBI had collected enough evidence to make an arrest. While the FBI has only announced the arrest of one individual, it is expected that more information will be released today implicating additional people.

According to Restless.ugtech.net, who broke this news event, the FBI ran a server name "Chud" and "Lad". They were administered by an undercover agent named "Griffen." The warrant, which was released yesterday, named "killaz, marvel/cartel, cin, sidar, dact, korax, bourbon, and burner." When more information is released today, more specific information on these individuals will be available.
"

So they allowed people to break the law ( with their help ) and helped to distribute files , then changed up once they were satisfied.

How is that legal , for them ?

The interesting thing is that it appears that the protection of the betamax case has been removed when it comes to P2P. Some people think that this will open the floodgates of lawsuits regardless of whether something is advertised to having infringing value or not.

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12277

He's full of it. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=298 He's making a fortune off of spyware and couldn't give a rats ass. I know I wouldn't if I had $70+ million coming into my swiss bank account.

according to slyk, p2p users are over 10 million, which is more than 5 times the number of people using iTunes. And p2p use is growing, not shrinking.

Whoops. Apparently, it's not true about the pirate bay, if you look, apparently it was a hoax (the raid that is) to explain an outage caused by a server upgrade

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=811

Apparently, what's on there now means (babelfished and smoothed out by me)

"Now maybe you are wondering why we did it? We only did it to make you aware on that The Pirate Bay soon is debuting a new version soon."

Slyck says it's a hoax. Enjoy.

Its a hoax according to Slyck and their IRC channel.

According to Slyck.com, the Pirate Bay closure is a hoax.

Cheer up; there's still one Puck left in the world.

Actually, that is a hoax... it should be back up soon. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=811

No they didn't

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=811

They don't keep logs of the IP addresses, so I guess you're out of luck. More info here.

And the update seems to say that it's not a hack.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=802

You may want to follow the link in the first line of the story which leads to the follow up.

Actually, your link is accurate, as long as you realize that it's ICE doing the "DNS hacking".

This site is saying it's a DNS attack and a hoax.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801

anyone confirm this?

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801

Here's the article that talks about the hack: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801

Today is a strange day to do it, considering that EliteTorrents just got shut down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Inital breaking story where the webpage appeared to be hacked: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801
FBI Release: http://www.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel05/bittorre nt052505.htm
ICE release: http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/arti cles/starwars052505.htm
MPAA Release: http://mpaa.org/MPAAPress/2005/2005_05_25b.doc

Right. That's why you pay a surchange on every piece of blank media you buy.

And your quote regarding the "legality" of copying whatever you want on a P2P network doesn't quite seem to represent the case in question.

Nice try though.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=786

I don't think BitTorrent sites qualify as "dissidents" exactly.
bemis

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=781 Slyck.com great place to check out p2p news.

no
you idiot,
what is actually happening is your being ignorant.

it happens to me as well.

dont just spot discount things as people being stupid. Shaw.ca does this to me. I can download a file from any big website (Microsoft, adobe, macromedia, etc) at 7 MEG DOWN. thats 700 kps in firefox. I can download at 7 meg from my workplaces FTP server at a colo. a 10 meg file takes about 10 seconds to download. I run BT 24/7. I have never seen it climb more than 20kps . most of the time it hovers around 4 kps.

I have a linux router. I run my own DNS (before that it would randomly drop me like grand parent). I can play any game with no lag, no packetloss download huge files but BT maxes out at 4-20 kps.

But perhaps you would liek some evidence, OK so i shall point you in These Various Directions.

From the last link:
"Instead of spending the big bucks to upgrade capacity, the company allegedly green-lighted the use of an Ellacoya switch to limit Bit Torrent traffic at various hubs on the Shaw network. While the idea started in the Cordova area of Vancouver, the source claims, it has now been applied to the entire Shaw network in order to regain some of their "lost" bandwidth."

Here is the press release from ellacoya

Ill probably get modded down for being agressive, but so many people discount people as having no knowledge instead of actually listening to them.

Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen
April 4, 2005
Thomas Mennecke


Depending on your point of view, Jon Lech Johansen is either your hero or adversary. To the copyright industry, Jon Lech Johansen has been a detriment to their policy of control since the advent of DeCSS (Decrypt Content Scrambling System.) To those who cherish freedom, he has been a pillar of hope in an age when DRM (Digital Rights Management) threatens to overtake mainstream media.
Jon Lech Johansen became well known for his role in the development of DeCSS. Jon spent 3 long years in the Norwegian courts proving his innocence. The American movie industry pressured the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit to press charges against Jon Lech Johansen in 2000 for allegedly bypassing the CSS copy protection on DVDs.

After two trials, the courts finally ruled in Jon's favor. However, there is much more to Jon Lech Johansen than DeCSS. In this interview, Slyck hopes to bring to light the many facets of Mr. Johansen, and the numerous projects he is involved with.

Describe your role in the development of DeCSS. Was is a group effort or were you the mastermind behind it?

DeCSS was written by 3 people: a German developer, a Dutch developer and myself. The reverse engineering was done by the German.

From time to time I see people repeat the claim that DeCSS was only made possible because a DVD player manufacturer forgot to "protect" their DVD player. This is a myth that is perpetuated by people who don't understand how computers work. Code obfuscation only slows down reverse engineering, it doesn't block it.

What was the motivation behind creating DeCSS?

The motivation was being able to play DVDs the way we want to. I don't like being forced to use a specific operating system or a specific player to watch movies (or listen to music.) Nor do I like being forced to watch commercials. When your DVD player tells you "This operation is not allowed" when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.

Did you ever expect the level of legal entanglements; and for it to become as popular as it is today?

No and no.

How difficult was it do break the CSS encryption? What did it take to break the encryption?

Technically DeCSS didn't break CSS. Breaking a crypto algorithm requires revealing and/or exploiting a method that's faster than brute force. DeCSS simply implemented CSS the same way as a normal DVD player.

CSS was however broken by Frank Andrew Stevenson: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/ index.html. Many DVD decryption tools today exploit the weaknesses in CSS that he revealed.

Another myth is that DeCSS is illegal because it uses a "stolen" key. A CSS key is 5 bytes. How anyone can think that it's possible to "steal" 5 bytes is beyond me. 5 bytes do not have any protection under copyright law because it's not an original work. It's probably possible for 5 bytes to be protected under trade secret law, but CSS hasn't been a trade secret since DeCSS was released and mirrored all over the net. Is someone who names their child "Frank" (5 bytes) stealing Frank's name? It's absurd.

Was there at any point during the DeCSS trials when you felt you were in serious trouble, or were you confident throughout that you would emerge victorious?

I was confident throughout.

What was the expression(s) on the face of the movie industry when you were finally acquitted?

The MPAA's (or rather, the MPA, which is the international arm of the MPAA) Norwegian lawyer was present for most of the first trial. I don't remember if he was present when the judgment was handed down, but if he was, he was probably wearing his standard grumpy look.

For the acquitt

"Note to the RIAA/MPAA: profit from P2P, instead of trying to fight it."

Great idea, but I think they're a bit ahead of you:

Mashboxx and Pay P2P

Grokster, Sony, BMG to do legit P2P service?

Bertelsmann to offer P2P download platform

And while not strictly P2P:

Universal Music Debuts Digital-Only Label

Sometime around November 2004 Shaw started to packet shape bittorrent in Vancouver. I'm not familiar with the technical specifics, but I can tell you that my bittorrent uploads dropped to under 5K/sec (and as such my downloads died as well).

This only affects motorola modems. Since then I have switched to a terayon modem and I can again upload at 40-50K/sec (although I think a lot of people did this as my connection sometimes gets very slow during peak times).

I've heard that they have since introduced packet shaping in the rest of the Country but I'm not 100% certain of this.

Here are a couple sources: Shaw Throttling Bit Torrent? and Shaw ISP Customers Experience BitTorrent Slowdown

Or to indie artists in general.

We listen to indie artists: Bitmunk

Especially indie artists that want to spread their stuff via P2P under their terms (artists get to set prices, distribution formats, countries, descriptions, and licenses). We even have Creative Commons licensing options that the artists may use.

I just want to make this clear - I'm not astro-turfing - I'm the CEO of Digital Bazaar, the company that created the Bitmunk P2P music network - so don't take my word for it, check it out and come to your own conclusions.

In short, we're a non-DRM, P2P network that pays the artist up to 84% of the sale price regardless of who downloads/uploads their stuff on the network, the artist gets paid. All songs on the network are high quality 192kbps-320kbps VBR MP3s (which will play in any MP3 player). Additionally, you may then turn around and sell the artists work on the network and add your own small fee (which you can then use to buy more music on the network - or withdraw to your bank account).

The network launched this past Monday:

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=709

We've been covered by Slashdot before:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/13/183324 5&tid=95&tid=98

Ever heard of a court gag order? But I found this anyways at http://www.slyck.com/

LokiTorrent Consent Judgment Online
February 25, 2005
Thomas Mennecke

The LokitTorrent shut down has stirred up a tremendous amount of speculation regarding the events surrounding this closure. Initially, the LokiTorrent website posted a notice that it was being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.) Instead of folding like most other BitTorrent sites, it decided to fight back.

Over the course of December and January, LokiTorrent raised over $40,000. However, this amount of money would not be nearly enough to fight off the MPAA juggernaut, and LokiTorrent owner Ed Webber found his $40,000 evaporated on lawyer fees.

Because of the gag order imposed on Ed Webber, he was unable to defend himself from wild criticism that ensued. Some stated he simply ran off with the money, while others condemned him for giving up the server logs. Others suggested the entire event was completely manufactured.

Putting any speculation the LokiTorrent closure was somehow false, the settlement document is now available on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records.) PACER is a service that allows public access to court documents.

The Consent Judgment and Permanent Injunction include 13 points that Ed Webber must agree to. A Consent Judgment refers to a settlement that did no hear any arguments before a court or Judge. Basically, the two sides agreed to the settlement and the Judge signed the document. The points for the settlement include:

Defendant shall pay damages to Plaintiffs in the amount of One Million Dollars ($1,000,000).

Defendant shall promptly turn to Plaintiffs copies of all data, logs and information on all computer servers that were used in connection with the Webber BitTorrent System...

The document was initially reported by joegratz.net. Thanks to AussieMatt for bringing this story to our attention.

There isn't much improvement to this client that will carry over to other clients. That is, this is not the second version of the BitTorrent protocol, as explained here. Bram has been pretty mum on the second version of the protocol, although the official developer forum has had some heated debates over how some of these features should be incorporated and what their parameters should be (note that, although at times heated, purely constructive ;).

So if already content with Azureus or BitComet or whatever, nothing to see here... Move along folks.

- shadowmatter

I think the report most frequently cited is CacheLogic's one (news article). They give a figure of 53% of P2P traffic, and their graphs show BitTorrent overwhelming many other forms of traffic, compared to the wider internet. I can't find the actual "one third" figure, but I did see 35% in a couple of places while looking for this.