Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Community Running For Cover?
govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"
Well, on the plus side, the summer movie season is almost over.
Mike
Maybe they're moving to IRC
I'ts being used as another warez distribution method plain and simple.
The redhat iso is about 0.00000000001% of all bittorrent traffic.
Btw, pr0n is copyrighted too, just like any other piece of entertainment.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Well if the DOS didn't take bytemonsoon down, the slashdotting certainly would have.
Nobody post any links to any other torrent sites!!! I know that bittorrent is better with more people, but the trackers just can't handle the slashdot effect. We finally get the good sites back up and I don't want to fucking lose them again. If you don't already know of the sites and you are too dumb to search for them, then you don't need to know about them.
WHAT?!? Are you saying a corporation doesn't want it's flagship product to be used as a medium for exchanging copyrighted materials! How absurd!
Why would need an offshore hosting solution? Bittorrent files are just index/key files right? Same as eMule, eDonkey, etc. No central host required. Here one day, gone the next, so what?
Is it really a good idea to link to the site that's having bandwidth issues?
Actually, ByteMonsoon has already been re-born -- albeit under a new name.
I'd post the link but the last thing that poor site needs is to get Slashdotted. If you know your way around the BT community, you should be able to find it.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
On the legal transaction side, bittorrent will remain alive and well for a long time, I think.
As for the illegal transaction side, as long as the demand remains (and it's enormous), people will create sites for torrents. It'll take more then DDoS attacks and cease and desist letters to stop pirates. One one good site goes down, another will spring up.
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought they never use. -- Soren Kierkegaard
index/key/tracker files
The tracker is a url of a server to contact. Take down that server, and the bittorrent files that contact it are no longer valid.
If only they combined the decentralization tracking of other p2p protocols with BitTorrent's distributed and simultaneous upload and download, we'd have a winner.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I don't think so. Bittorrent is just going to go back to be what it was really designed as: a great way to distribute legal files. The Torrentse's and the Bytemonsoon's where just taking advantage of a hole in the media companies radar. I'm surprized they lasted as long as they did.
Quack, quack.
I took a look at Torrentse.cx the other day when someone linked to it in a /. comment. The whole thing was pretty much full of illegally-traded software, movies, music, the whole 9 yards.
Bittorrent is a great application for those situations when large downloads like the Red Hat ISOs are hard to get through the normal servers. Piracy is piracy, and it should be shut down. End of story.
Who would run a DoS or a DDoS attack on a bittorrent site? It seems like the people who administer such attacks would go against Microsoft, or Amazon, or eBay. Not only something they ethically disagree with but something that would be a challenge. It makes me kind of sad, just like the whole attacks of EFNet and all the other IRC big boys makes me feel.
A tracker server is required. When that goes down, no more downloading.
Does anyone know who hit them with the cease and desist? (Be nice if their site said who it was. They can't sue you for just saying their name.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't care who thinks we - Artists - shouldn't be able to create our own networks for exchange of music, but if the RIAA starts making things bad in the US for independent artists to make their works available freely and easily - on equal terms with the industry - then I will swim out and duct-tape^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinstall boxen on the pillars of Sea Haven myself.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Havenco is a bit pricy for some one who doesnt charge for there services . I meen were are you going to find $750 USD/MO ? :-)
Also thats capped at 128kbs , which I doubt would be a enough for bit torrent , so boost that up to $2,000 USD and you have people using gnutella
Torrentse.cx died because the lawyers CC'd the co-loc provider and THEY pulled the plug, before torrentse even had a chance to respond. In other words, presumption of guilt.
Doesn't shock me though - they were getting such a cheap rate that it looked like one of those cut-throat co-loc operations anyway and they aren't much into protection of customers.
Just another bit of the mentality of the DMCA: assume guilt, ask questions later.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Don't know how much sense that made, but p2p is too big to stop now, even with a million bazillion lawsuits.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
well, if someone wanted to have a stable bittorrent site that didn't have to bow to legal pressures to stop. torrentse.cx really shut down because the colocation facility pulled the plug after the cease & desist - the cease & desist was just for one musical artist (BT), and the admin removed the albums from it right away(as per the request - they stated once that was done they wouldn't be seeking any legal action), but the colocation facility obviously didn't wanna get in the middle of anything. so this is just going to keep happening
Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?
hmm... This doesn't sound too much like an advertisement, does it?
Funny how so many slashdot articles are commercials in disguise...
what happened to bytemonsoon. They just set up their DNS to keep returning 127.0.0.1 on any query. Bytemonsoon is in Austria. I wonder whether they started the DOS because they can't get to them through cease'n'decist?
I've used BitTorrent once or twice myself, and found it to be a good system. That's only once or twice, because there just isn't that much legally distributable material that can reach the required "critical mass" for BitTorrent to be effective and necessary.
Nevertheless, the fact that there are proven legitimate uses of the code should be enough to prevent the code from disappearing. That, and all the copies that are already downloaded.
The real question is whether people will feel safe to post BitTorrent links even when they are distributing something that is 100% legit.
BitTorrent has one major advantage/disadvantage relative to Freenet. You can control what material you are involved in the re-distribution of to match whatever your defintion of "fair use" is. With Freenet you distribute everything or you distribute nothing because you don't know what anything is.
Personally, I prefer the BitTorrent approach. It would be a shame if the RIAA dogs force everyone to the "know nothing" approach.
According to my server Slashdot is the most sophisticated Denial Of Service attack ever written... Distributed no doubt!
Using private bittorrent trackers with bittorrent announcements (links) only available in IRC channels. It'll combine the advantages of bittorrent with the little bit of privacy that IRC can add. Having these huge websites with thousands of bittorrent links just makes them too easy and too big of a target.
More artists are going to have to offer their creative works themselves. I decided to put all of my former band's work as well as stuff I'm working on now up for free (the site is 8x7.org if anyone cares), and I have actually started getting interest from other bands I know that want to contribute their music for free. The truth is that the chances that you are going to see any real profit off of a recording is slim to none, so why not just let people listen to it for free? Most musicians make money off of live gigs and merchandising, so why not cut out the middleman (the recording industry) entirely?
The same thing goes for other content. Look at Homestar Runner. They offer the content for free, and make money off of the merchandise - its a great formula. Just this week they introduced a set of figurines, and in the first day brought in over $15,000!
Sound waves should be free!
I know I didn't RTFA, but...
BitTorrent is one of those apps that proves that P2P does have legitimate uses... and everyone I know who uses it, doesn't use it for distributing/obtaining warez...
The *AA can't have that, or their argument that "P2P has no other use than to distribute pirated media" becomes moot when it is clearly shown that THERE ARE legitimate uses for P2P software...
5468652047616D65
Don't pirate and you won't be liable for C&D claims.
:-)
Also while bittorrent is certainy very cool I almost never use it. I can still download Linux Kernels at 100KB/sec
round-robin DNS is cool.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
^^^^^
One of the most disgraceful reoslutions the UN ever passed and the reason it has so little credibility in the west.
What do you expect from a body that has 50 muslim states, and doesn't allow the sole Jewish country (Israel) to sit on the Security Council; the only nation to receive such treatment, btw.
Fuck the UN. All they're good for is making racist statements, making the world laugh by appointing nations such as Libya and Cuba to oversee human rights, and committing New York City parking violations.
They're a fucking farce.
OMG OMG LUNIX OMG
Remember that not all people are as generous as your group is, and they want to make profit off of their creativity and music.
have you seen their prices ? free speech comes at a high price
A better question would be: "Will the continued use of bittorrent by warez kiddies destroy its reputation as a good way to get legitimate files?"
http://saveie6.com/
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength on the Internet, we shall defend our BitTorrent application, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!
-Winston Slashdot
no thanks
Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Now, don't get me wrong - I love it. Some sites post the coolest stuff, including stuff you'd never find (or would take years to dl) on any of the popular p2p networks. Though, that being said, have you seen some of these sites? It's the most blatant piracy ever! These guys are just begging to be shut down. It's kinda like the way it was when Napster first got popular and everyone was like "woah! free stuff for the taking!" This is the same thing; once again the ability to steal stuff has been taken to a new level and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world notices... I just hope someone comes up with a better way to let ppl know about torrents besides posting them on easily shut down web sites.
adsfaadf
goat != torrent An explanation of this common misidentification of websites is available here.
OMG OMG LUNIX OMG
No, that was Goatse.cx.
-uso.
If I had the money, I'd start Sashdot.org [sic].
Would there a way to filter out the illegal stuff, and still keep the system up? That way, those who have legit uses for it (Linux ISO's, etc.) can still use it.
Yeah, there's going to be people who rename stuff to pass it as legit stuff, but it's going to be mixed in with the legit stuff and harder for most people to find, unless the know someone who has the file (or torrent).
Oh, go home with your crap. It is big business and lowly attorneys like you that are running America into the ground. You attorneys sue for anything as long as there is a possibility to make some money. When are all you dirty attorneys, corrupted politicians and corrupted big business going to learn that when you take away our freedom of speech, fair use, price fix and a list of other offences far too long for ./ that you will have to deal with our repercussion? If that means constantly breaking DRM/anti-copy mechanisms or P2P, then so be it. We the People have be drugged through the mud for too many years so that attorneys, big business and dirty politicians can all get fat checks. Well, now you are getting a wake up call. If you really care about the best interest for your client, then tell them to practice fair business, put the consumer first, stop price fixing and lobbying congress to strip away our fair use and first amendment right.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
There must be some sites that host BT trackers on freenet. I installed it earlier today and have been looking around. I hope to god it gets faster the longer it runs though. It's hella slow and half the sites/nodes/links/keys/whatever either timeout or can't be found.
Am I just looking in the wrong places on freenet or is freenet's lack of speed the problem w.r.t. bittorrent trackers?
I'm sure the last thing the site needed whilst it was in its death throes was a good slashdotting... ;)
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
http://www.zenith-net.co.uk/
Identical format, and looks like just as many releases just as fast
http://www.zenith-net.co.uk/
I wonder why BitTorrent is being targetted so specifically.
Sites like ShareReactor.com have been up for years now, serving edonkey links to the community.
Bytemonsoon seems to have only been around for a few months, at the most, and already it is being shut down.
I notice that the link to Torrentse.cx redirects to http://www.redcoat.net/pics/tubgirl.jpg, which is as cheerful a pic as goatse.cx. Am I the only person to follow links?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I did and an appalling picture is there, don't know how the hell I got redirected there, but I am offended beyond belief.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
-Thomas Paine
am i the only one sick of getting game demos from fileplanet? i dont think i should have to pay for an account so i can download a game demo and the free accounts are horrible and slow. no other site has such a wealth of demos available for download. if the game companies seeded their games for a couple of days and everyone else did the rest we'd all have the product a lot sooner.
First I wanna say, seriously: DAMN.
Then I'd like to add: They opened a sea-world about an hour away recently. If it follows in sea-lands footsteps...it's going to be quite the party over there!
...has anyone noticed that the Torrentse.cx linked has changed, a *bit*? I think the editors *might* want to remove that...just a thought...
it was a pretty transparent disguse, if any at all.
many of slashdot'd articles are obviously promotional
Back in the day, Slashdot linked to them (when they were still up) crushing their server... so, the admins used mod_rewrite to send any Slashdot referred folks to a different site (with a similar url).
I really like the idea of Sealand, but, for crying out loud, if your entire country has a PO Box to get its mail, you are just begging for trouble.
(And if/when Sealand rusts out an sinks, is it still a sovereign country? Why can't I just declare chunks of open ocean sovereign.)
P.S. Don't think I didn't have to use a dictionary to spell "sovereign". Is that a French word or what?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
what the hell do you mean by "BitTorrent is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack." This makes no sense whatsoever. Do you even know what a DoS attack is?
The Brits can take it back with a section of Royal Marines anytime they want.
They're just not motivated to, yet.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
ohhhhh, now you're making me worried about the site i host! ;)
http://episodes-first.dnsalias.com
Editors should remove the link to torrentse.cx, it goes to the tubgirl picture. yuck.
So let me get this straight
BitTorrent is software to enable file sharing over the internet, especially from RedHat Linux computers.
So it has elements in common with Kazza and Napster and Morpheus.
And it has elements in common with FTP sites and Web Pages/Web Server implementations.
And conceptually it can work a bit like mirror web sites, to spread the load of file transfers over the net.
And people can share what ever they like, except if they share copyright stuff the copyright lawyers will probably come after them, and everyone else who uses BitTorrent.
And like any computer system, too much traffic to a single computer can cripple it. So you still have to find a less busy or more powerful site to get the best file transfer?
And the selling point/difference about BitTorrent is that the software tries to balance uploads with downloads ie it tries to prevent download hogs who share nothing of their own?
Argh my age is showing. I remember when we used sneakernet exclusively. And you had to plug a set of old headphones into the tape player to stop it squealing during data transfer.
Personally I prefer the web server system or FTP sites to get my files. Perhaps I am a net "toddler" ie "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too", and I'll download your stuff and keep my stuff to myself (a download hog?).
What do these other things have as an advantage?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Do you have a source for that, or is it just your own ignorant 'expert opinion?'
It redirects to a most offensive photograph. I know slashdot editors don't check their links, but FFS, someone's head needs to roll for that one.
When your mom and dad have no problem finding and downloading movies, etc, it's just a matter of time before it ends up on CNN and the *AA folks shut them down. That's why IRC/Usenet/FTP are still around (and usable for those in the know) after all these years.
Just start torrenting Freenet file keys. That would be totally legal. Then Freenet would keep the actual file private and anonymous. This would also save much bandwidth on the trackers as the torrents would be really small. I don't know much about Freenet but it sounds reasonable to me.
for one of the aggrieved parties, let me just say that BitTorrent is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack. I hope they are taken down. When is /. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
BitTorrent is nothing like a Denial Of Service attack, infact, it's the exact opposite.
If 99% of the population wants to copy music, and we live in a free world where Democracy wins against tyranny, why is it that 99% of the population are being oppressed by draconian ideals that are out of date in the modern world we live in? Why are they wrong in this democracy? Society should serve the many, not the few, and certanly not the dollar.
Maybe if the aggrieved parties are so concerned about money, they should just get a different job? Like everyone else who doesn't have enough money? Just like coal miners and town cryers have been superseded, so now have shit artists!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Thanks for the .cx link /. - I now get to see a picture of some asian woman spraying shit on her face.
Gee - I'm glad they pixelated her vagina or that picture would've been quite offensive!!! Phew!!!
Maybe I am just silly but http://www.torrentse.cx/ contains a rather disgusting picture :-D It's just funny seeing ppl here talk about it seriously, whilst I see a goatsecx contender.
the BitTorrent movement won't be killed. first of all it is P2P. thats very hard to kill as its development can avoid detection and routing blocks.
secondly, i'd say only about 3/4 to 1/2 of BitTorrent traffic is 'copyright infringing'. they're just attacking BitTorrent websites because they're easy targets; not a lot of money, usually run by idiots who run like chickenshit fools when they get a letter that has the word 'desist' in it. there are so many legitimate sites using BitTorrent for legitimate reasons that it would be foolhearty to challenge the protocol. this is no napster protocol; this is more like a new form of FTP.
i hate people who jump to conclusions.
Seeing as most gaming sites make you pay to download patches along with everything else bt is a nice program to have now. Instead of being charged to join a site i.e. shacknews, etc. you can just look through the forums and download the patch , etc. for free and much faster.
Even if its not gaming you can usually find whatever file you're looking for with bt. BT itself does not make you download warez or copyrighted music but if you do thats your business and no one else's.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
go to a p2p client and type
.torrent
into the search option.
You'll find all sorts of stuff..
BTW, that was just an observation.
I use torrents to get new distros, getting them from the official
ftp sites is impossible when they are hot off the press.
BT lets me download 3 ISO's in less than three hours..
the torrentse.cx folks are pure grifter-fucks, plain an simple. They got away with a new server, and probably a boat load of cash on top of that to burn.
8 46251&mode=nested&tid=141&tid=97&tid=1 23
They are selfish shits who didnt even release their code (which bytemonsoon did).
The least they could have done is stand up to the DMCA , i mean, theres a very notable and recent case that streamcast/grokster won against RIAA/MPAA http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/25/1
that applies perfectly to them.
Could have hired some lawyer time with the money....instead they blow it like the children they are.
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Ok, I'm actually going to respond to a braindead anonymous troll post. You could have at least claimed to be a member of "GNAA" or some such pathetic bunch of annoyances with feet. Just in case you are really a moron: 1) First, you actually seem to support the idea that politicians should be able to write laws regulating technologies and industries that are always evolving and that said politicians know nothing about. Dumbass. 2) If you put your site on the net, it might get slashdotted. Oh, you didn't plan for that? Dumbass. 3) Go fuck off and play somewhere else. If you are a spokesman for "one of the aggrieved parties", you are even dumber than that post would suggest. You didn't create this technology. You also don't know how this magical new shit called the internet will eventually be used for good or evil; in fact, you know a hell of a lot let less than your clients. Final verdict: you are either a troll or a lawyer. In either case, you know nothing about technology or how it might shape the way future societies communicate. You, sir, are a dumbass. That is not your fault, some people are born that way. Find a good paralegal to keep up with the real and changing world for you or shut the fuck up. Of course, politicians can be even dumber than you. Even worse, some of those wind up in office. Keep it up, get in bed with Longhorn, and count the hours until the internet gets forked after Palladium goes live. Fucking dumbass. People like you are the people that evolution eats. Sorry to be blunt, I'm having a bad night, but that is the deal as I see it. Even if it is undiplomatic to say so. Final word... if you are not actually a GNAA troll (they seem be the most annoying the past couple of days) get yourself an account and post an intelligent rebuttal explaining why old men who think the internet is AOL or whatever their grandkids put on their machine should be allowed to write laws that regulate said network. Then give us all your take on fair use. Just curious, really.
We can and will, your "repercussion" so far has been laughable except for a small number of poor saps who have taken the fall.
Incidentally, I used the goatse site "as contact me info-page" in a reply to one of the Nigerian scammers. Suffice to say that, he was none to happy, as the following reply shows :
And a month or so ago Torrentse.cx were asking for donations for a new server. A bit after that they'd got the cash and purchased the server. Then for several weeks the site was down, and installation on the new server was 'underway'.
Now the site has gone forever, and people's donations have simply gone to buy somebody out there a brand new kick-ass server for whatever they want to use it for.
Nice.
fsck you
There have been other sites (I won't any links) that have suffered from DDoS attacks, and it certainly wasn't from layers. I'm not entirely sure, but I believe the source of the DDoS attacks was jealous and / or rival groups on the "scene". It's sort of akin to a turf war with regular gangs.
...that they bothered to blur out her vagina. Was she to modest for full frontal nudity?
Whats needed is a multiple server database and peer to peer desktop computers that can hide your ip and not be able to be located. Encrypted files like Freenet but nowhere near as SLLLLLLLLLLLLLooooooooooww.
BitTorrent sites could move on to freenet. Then freenet could move so you can only get it off Kazaa. Then kazaa could be distributed only from drug dealers. That'll keep the RIAA off our trail.
How do you propose hiding IP's without using something like freenet? Just because you can't see IP's in the client, doesn't mean you can't see them via other methods.
Tracker-Tracker.com? That site has been up for ages, but only because of the difference in architectures between Hotline/Carracho and Bittorrent. But I still say that the author of Bittorrent should think of a way to create something like, it seems readily possible.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Even if you don't want to share your content on Freenet, which it might not be big enough to handle yet, you could always share your torrent files. Replacing the centralized part with a totally decentralized network.
like a lawyer is gonna post
a) on slashdot
b) anonymous coward
enjoy the rest of the day
Um, the torrentse.cx link has a fairly nasty redirect.
Well played Hello.jpg, well played.
You can go about your business
Why does Bittorrent always get posted up as a "FILE SHARING" program, its no more a "fire sharing" program than windows IIS. Bittorrent happens to make it convenient for a single distributor to allow access to his files without incurring a major bandwidth costs.
IN fact to find out someone who does just that, go to gametab.com, or redvsblue.com
they have saved craploads of bandwidth on there completely legal files. Bandwidth has made it so files can be available that would otherwise be completely unavailable otherwise as the main host went down.
Bittorrent is being abused as a file distribution method for movies and such, but so is IRC, and so are chat programs and e-mail for christ sake.
Are we going to ban file send capabilies from chat now because someone might send the HULK over it?
How about just ban the entire internet? You can argue that Bittorrents greatest use is for downloading large, illegal files,and I might agree with you. But the internet, by your same thinking, is just a big illegal file sharing network too, all you have to do is prove taht more than oh 50% of the bandwidth USED on the internet is used to download illegal content, or hell if your the RIAA just try to prove 20%, and then you could say "well the internet is just a havent for filesharers we should see it shutting down"
what rediculous bullshit. I have loved bittorrent, I use it to download licenced anime, and to download redvsblue episodes and the odd movie that gets slashdoted.
The main difference between bittorrent and kaaza, is bittorrent is not an anonymous fileshare program, there is always a single point of distribution, and thus a single person that can be tracked down to have started it.
why is this a "good" thing? because its not a filesharing program, using bittorrent is not an excercise in your fair use rights, you may be using it as such, but it has a very powerfull, very real legal use for it.
Unlike kaaza, with a littlle tweaking, bittorrent could be the "big" thing patches and such being distributed, even by companies such as IDSoftware, your not going to do that with a program like Kaaza, because you have no trust of what the file is going to be. On bittorrent since it comes from a single original source file, you have complete trust of the content being sent to you.
I dont know, i am repsonding to the few threads i saw "but bittorrent is illegal" and i started in a new thread cause i could easily see them getitng modded down.
Buzz OUT
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Interesting Discussions about the Legality & Anonymity of BitTorrent from the enfamed SuprNova site.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
For all your bitching and bleating, I bet you have never been in a voting booth or been part of any kind of political organization.
Government does the things that it does because people like you bitch & rant on messageboards or to your friends, but never take your concerns beyond that.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
A girl has to make a living. I used to be an html coder but since the crash I haven't been able to find work. They paid me in cash to take that picture, sure it was nasty, but after showering and brushing my teeth it was over and I had enough to pay the rent.
--Tubgirl
If you mean the "Let's pirate like it's legal, openly and blatently" movement, then yes, it will.
It should have been obvious it was only a matter of time before these sites came under legal pressure.
IT's contributory infringement with no doubt about it.. you could try to claim that, as the sites are automated, they have no control over the content... that sort of works with usenet, but that's because the legal:illegal ratio is so high.... in this case, those sites have primarily large files that they do not have rights to distribute, and it's a relatively small number, so to insist they have no control over what's there is absurd.
First off, it's very important to note that bittorrent isn't a P2P network; it is a completely new protocol, fundamentally different then anything that has come before it. In that regard, the "movement" so to speak will not die. The technology will continue to be improved on and it will continue to be used by people who love to get distros the second they come out. Hopefully, we'll finally see bittorrent get some commercial use. There is no reason every game company shouldn't be releasing their betas/demos with bittorrent. It is perfect for these companies that use very little bandwidth, but then every so often require HUGE amounts of bandwidth that force them to use mirrors, which are becoming increasingly annoying. Bittorrent is really a revolutionary innovation, IMO.
But, it has some serious shortcomings that need to be addressed. For a technology that promises infinitely scalable bandwidth, the tracker isn't very scalable at all. Multi-tracker functions (both the interconnectivity of trackers and the use of multiple isolated trackers within the torrent) are an absolute must for this technology to prosper. Also, an apache mod where you could simply upload the file to your web server and not have to worry about running a bittorrent "seed" would be great. From the companies standpoint nothing has really changed, but instead of everyone flooding your website to get this file, the file is only accessible by your bittorrent tracker, so your bandwidth remains consistent. And the company doesn't need to run a separate seed process for the thousands of files it may be serving, the apache mod would only open connections for files that are requested by the tracker (which would only request the file if the full file wasn't already being distributed by those connected).
As for the piracy aspect, I don't really see it going anywhere but I also don't see it growing. There is always going to be some site where you can upload torrents, and that site will always die within 6 months only to be replaced by another.
How on earth is BitTorrent anything like a Denial of Service attack?
Ever since the article by John Gray about the economics of distributed computing, I've been thinking about the marriage of grid computing and a peer to peer filesharing protocol like Bittorrent. Anyone have ideas of the feasability of a project that has a rather large standardized data set that a grid could leverage the Bittorrent protocol for the greater good?
The idea that immediately came to mind was the matching of DNA sequences against the human genome (the GenBank or SwissProt examples in above article comes to mind). Could the Bittorrent protocol be adapted to download a portion of the database and run the distributed matches against it? I'd imagine with a little intelligence built into a client the matches could start nearly immediately against the slices of the database that were already downloaded.
I have theorized that a good (and rather complicated) way to reach profit would be to:
1. Register a domain like torrent.--- or *"storage unit"-"word for a storm"*.
2. Grab open source tracker code for a torrent meta site.
3. Run it on clueless cheap virtual hosting with "unlimited bandwidth".
4. Pay ever increasing bills.
5. Rack up substancial page views and a loyal following.
6. Claim the slowness is due to DoS attacks and take the site down.
7. Go offline for two weeks and come back with message requesting donations for "colocation and a new server".
8. Come back with slightly better dedicated hosting.
9. Put up a message saying you have been threatened with a lawsuit and are closing forever.
10. Go to Las Vegas.
Try http://autopr0n.com/torrents/. I doubt this experiment will work well (I haven't personally tested the link quality) and I don't know about legality, but there's a definite stab at appling BT for this purpose.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I don't see how bit torrent could be shut down. There's no legal reason for the developers to stop coding and distributing their files, and there's no reason to stop legitimate users and uses.
On the other hand, people who host seeds for files they don't own the copyright too are obviously in violation of copyright laws, and the copyright owners have every right to C&D them or take them to court.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
People, this is very simple. Remember the old days of warez on the web? People would post .zip and .iso files on freely hosted websites. These sites would quickly be taken down because of copyright infringement requests.
.zip/.iso/.sit file containing the copyrighted software, and rightfully so.
Torrent files for illegal files are illegal! There's no way you could win a court case--in this day and age--by attempting to prove that you are just providing a "link".
Web hosting providers view Torrent files the same as a simple
BT Developer(s) should:
1.) Find a way to handle Torrent data embedded in HTML, such that someone can copy and paste the Torrent file information from their web browser to their Torrent client
Of course, this is equally illegal, but it is viewed completely differently by ISP's and the casual observer.
2.) Create a mechanism for people to "browse" BitTorrent trackers and submit file information to them for distribution.
This would remove the web-centric part of BitTorrent, at least for illegal files, and make running a tracker "almost legal". See Hotline trackers for a good example of this.
Feedback is good.
I still think distributing torrents via gnutella is a better solution. Some combined gnutella/bittorrent servlets wouldn't be a bad idea either...
It was designed as a way for people to distribute large files without paying gobs for bandwidth.
Wonderful.
So who do you think shut them down? Why? Because the RIAA will destroy any alternate distribution channel, regardless of content carried. If you have not noticed, the "promotion" business is mostly about suppressing other content. If a DoS won't do it, the **AA's will put their own content up and then send a cease and dissist letter.
The **AA are going to fail sooner or later. Their technology is simply obsolete and others are starting to produce too much for them to squash. They don't have the resources to fight everyone, and that's what it's comming to. They have enough money and resources to make a few people sorry before they go away. You have to wonder why they bother.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't think the original intent of BT was warez. And unlike Napster or Kazza each file forms it's own network, so infringing traffic is totally separate from legitimate traffic.
Honestly, hosting a Bit Torrent seed for a copyrighted file is no different then hosting the file itself, other then the lowered bandwidth bill.
Shutting down BT wouldn't make any more sense then banning HTTP or SMTP, both of which can be used to infringe copyright. BitTorrent is hugely helpful for small content developers who want to distribute their work, especially if they become popular.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I was really annoyed the other day when they shut down torrentse.cx .. I was most of the way thru a several gig download of Scrubs episodes (Timeshifting tv shows is still legal isnt it?) Eventually the downloads stopped after enough people disconnected and couldn't get back on without a tracker.
Here you go: I vote. I am a member of the NRA, even though I don't always agree with them. I am a registered Republican, but I tend to vote Libertarian. I don't think politicians should be able to vote on a bill that impacts my personal, private life if they can't fill out a multiple-choice form that shows that they understand how this technology works. They don't (the politicians), and they can't. Ever wonder how many are truly bought and paid for and how many are just senile? They are bought and paid for lobbyists, on the one hand, and whores chasing after campaign contributions on the other. Disney will pass a law, we'll work around it, the whole thing will come back up, etc... Media corporations have already lost. They just don't know it yet.
BitTorrent was never "designed" as a piracy method, it just happened to be usefull for it, just like FTP and IRC. It does require a central server to 'get things started'.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Just an FYI; Vanuatu, the country Kazaa is now incorporated in, can not yet handle web hosting. I contacted several of the hosting providers in this country and was told by all of them that the bandwidth I requested (100GB/month) was simply not possible.
Is anyone familiar with countries that have inexpensive web hosting and lax copyright laws?
Right now I am investigating several hosts in Ukraine.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
This is about websites, that are acting as a hub for warez activity.
It's got no more to do with Bittorrent than a pirate ftp site has to do with ftp. You don't blame FTP, you blame the site.
This is not at all the same thing as p2p networks.
This in a non-US country without a DMCA-equivalent.
More than mere navel gazing.
But some sites did go down or get very slow for various lengths of time as Slashdot linked to BitTorrent sites again and again.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
BitTorrent is NOT meant to handle pirated data! The tracker servers for the torrents are fixed targets, easy food for governments. BT is meant to distribute legitimate content. Frankly, I've been taking advantage of the pirate sites while they've been up, but I'm not surprised they're going kablooey.
Depending on the sort of illegitimate content you're looking for or distributing, try some other protocol. Freenet, or Gnutella2 or something else based on supernodes, will work a lot better than BitTorrent.
Actually, HavenCo is no longer a safe haven. Ryan Lackey will be doing a talk about the events that transpired in 2002 at DEFCON 11. Here's the text from the DEFCON Speakers Page:
HavenCo: What Really Happened
HavenCo, an attempt at creating an offshore data haven, was launched in 2000 by a small team of cypherpunks and pro-liberty idealists.
During 2002, the Sealand Government decided they were uncomfortable with their legal and PR exposure due to HavenCo, particularly in the post-DMCA and post-911 world, and regulated, then took over the remains of the business, forcing the remaining founders out. While HavenCo continues to serve a small number of customers, it no longer is a data haven, and has exposed the ultimate flaw in relying on a single physical location in one's quest for privacy.
Ryan Lackey was with HavenCo from inception until late 2002, and will tell exactly what happened (not the PR-friendly whitewashed version) from day one until the end, what lessons were learned, and how similar goals can be achieved in the future by motivated individuals and groups.
-Shippy
The sheep lawmakers depend on the fact that sheep taxpayers will not ask questions.... doesn't always work that way.
Riiiight....
Clearly this was inevitable with BitTorrent - it is a centralized technology. Freenet, while not designed for distribution of copyrighted material (any more than BT was), at least it afforts protection to the publishers of that material. Currently, in fact, it is pretty much as easy to use as BT - if not easier. Further, I would argue that Freenet has many benefits over BT as a content distribution platform irrespective of its anonymity benefits (such as its adaptive caching).
haha, underrated +1
the fact that a couple of articles ago... someone posted a link to torrentse.cx on slashdot to a copy of the TS version of the matrix... teh slashdot effect hath mutated.
"Just some thoughts and ideas..."
And history repeats itself. East meets West. America vs Russia. Dog vs Cat. Top vs Bottom. Bologna vs Hot Dog.
Bittorrent isn't going anywhere, and it's a great way to download legitimate works.
For example, the Animatrix shorts (the 4 free ones) or the Red vs Blue movies were valid uses that would have recently been crushed by slashdotting.
Bittorrent is the kind of enabling technology that can keep artists like the guys behind RvB from going under when they get popular... to suggest that nailing pirate sites is going to kill this great technology is just dumb.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I prefer RMS' "sharing with your neighbor" to "piracy".
I know lots of people who illegally trade movies, and they all do the same thing:
watch the first half and
- if it's good, go see the whole movie in the theatre, then keep the file if it was REALLY good
- if it's bad, delete the movie and move on
(also, ninjas hate pirates)
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
BT was designed to carry legitimate content; it was not designed for anonymity or uncensorability or anything like that. BT's creator never intended it to be useful for pirates to distribute "hot" content, so it's not surprising that people who try to use it that way find themselves in trouble. Wrong tool for the wrong job. For uncensorability and anonymity, go to Freenet. Supposedly they just released a new version that's ever more efficient.
:)
I'm liking Konspire, by the way. I'm currently distributing a bunch of perfectly legitimate content through it, with the consent of the content creator (mc frontalot, if you're curious) -- drop a line or reply if you're interested in picking up on it. It's the Nerdcore Hiphop channel.
Konspire is designed to maximize bandwidth in a way similar to BT (and there are endless hissy fights about which really is better at it) -- but if you did want to distribute something shifty, it's not nearly as vulnerable to takedowns as something like BT.
It also has a nice comprehensible user interface.
Consider it hyped and advocated.
This has nothing to do with bittorrent, but is realted to 'havenco'. Havenco seems to be based in 'the principality of sealand', which was formed by some guy who found an unclaimed peice of land and made his own government there, with his own rules. Are their any more such peices of land? I would love to just turn up on such a pice of land and form my own government, with my own laws which would be useful to my business and ambitions.
Why should they release their code? I don't understand.
What do you mean, got away with a new server? And a boat load of cash? You mean from donations?
What did you think, donating money for use in illegal activities was somehow protected?
A grokster case is a little differen than running a website that hosts pirated material.
Anyone looked at the CA faultline maps? I want to make sure that RIAA HQ goes for a ride when California falls into the ocean.
now i am gonna get banned
oh sh
You think that you are politically active -- but you're not. You send the NRA $35 a year, big whoop.
Understanding technology has nothing to do with writing law. The concepts that are at the core of Western democracy were developed thousands of years ago by the Greeks & Romans -- modern people have just tweaked things a bit.
Media companies haven't lost -- they have successfully manipulated copyright law for 100 years! There was no "mass media" until the 20th century! Media corporations will be sending people to jail for trading MP3's, and the mass-movement to "trade" media will collapse once that happens.
Do yourself a favor, and go to the library and look for two biographies written by Robert Caro. The first is "The Power Broker", the story of the man who created our suburban culture and was the most powerful (and unknown) man in New York for 60 years. The second is "Master of the Senate", which cronicles Lyndon Johnson's election to and domination of the US Senate.
Read these books, and you'll begin to understand the political system. It isn't the best system, and certainly isn't the worst; but it is definatly not going anywhere.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
While the majority of traffic may be copyright violations, the point is the technology is not meant solely for that purpose. In this case, the technology clearly has uses that do not involve copyright violations. That clear distinction makes a big difference than what Napster was. If Napster had taken more steps to push the P2P concept for much more than just music MP3s (kind of like Kazaa and other P2P) things might have turned out differently, but Napster was meant to trade MP3s (music). Bittorrent is meant to provide a technical solution to file distribution, and several projects and a few companies use that to distribute their work. A cassette deck with the ability to record can be used to violate a copyright. But it can also be used for much more than that. Same with Bittorrent. That little detail makes all the difference in the world.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Put your .torrent files on Freenet.
This is the best of both worlds. You have the efficiency and scalability of BitTorrent, plus the redundancy and anonymity of FreeNet.
Peace and love, y'all
I, as the author of BitTorrent, would like to make it very clear than I have nothing to do with any of the BitTorrent sites, and that BitTorrent is not and never will be designed to be good for illegal distribution. In particular I'm not doing anything to decentralize the tracker or add anonymity. It is in fact quite anonymity-unfriendly. BitTorrent is also used for a lot more than just TV shows and movies, which people would find out if they bothered doing any web searching. I keep telling people that running warez sites is stupid, and they keep doing it. If you wanna brazenly run a massive warez site, that's your prerogative, but don't be surprised when the long arm of the law comes down on you.
The man is speaking the truth.
BitTorrent is intended to ease the distribution of open-source software.
Your comments indicate to me that you hate open-source software. If this is true, you should hang.
This is the best idea I have yet heard about dealing with spam...
-Chris was just about do die when... he rose from
+Chris was just about to die when... he rose from
-took a sip of more Brawls Guarana, hoping he
+took a sip of more Bawls Guarana, hoping he
>Where I live [Ottawa, Ontario]. Many drivers "slide" through stop lines [specially in residential areas where kids and such walk], they speed, merge without signaling, change langes inappropriate [many seem to think you cutoff people instead of going behind], etc.
Let's see the amount of accidents each of these cause in our province:
Ignoring traffic controls (ie: stop signs/lines/whatever) - 4%
Speeding - 1%
Failing to signal / inappropriate lane changes: 3%
Grand total: Accidents reduced by an absolute maximum of 8%. In fact, if it works as well as the photoradar blitz, accidents would be reduced by 0.5%. Somewhat less effective than the war on drugs. Well, a lot more than just "somewhat" less effective...
>Personally I think people rolling through stop lines should be fined 500$. I think speeders should have their license revoked. If the cops spent a day doing a traffic blitz they could probably catch a few hundred people [town of 50K here...] easy.
Personally, I think, as the stats suggest, there should be an enforced "dangerous conditions" speed (7% of crashes). Clearly driving when the weather is good is simply not a problem for Ontarians.
Also helpful would be proper patrolling of yeild signs (10% of crashes), and making it easier to arrest people for following too close (7% of crashes). I'd suggest a law about losing control of a vehicle (8% of crashes), but I think it's usually too late when that happens, anyways.
Technically, it should be illegal to drive properly (45% of crashes), but that's just plain silly.
I also think that speeds should be increased (the amount of people's lives that could be saved by ambulances being able to get to their destinations faster [from less traffic being on the roads] likely outstrips the "risks", which are so small they likely fall within the possible mistake zone of the statistics).
>Similarly, make piracy a huge penalty [e.g. compute ceased, fined 1000$ or etc] and blitz every so often.
Great. So you want to deny access to computers for piracy? Are you sure you've never taped a Hockey game? Do you realize this means offenders would have to be denied their right to use a phone? Do you realize that would mean the government would have to continue to support an extremely expensive and outmoded paper-based infrastructure?
Basically, you'll end up paying for their crimes.
Which reminds me, $1,000 would be a bargain if that's what it really was. In fact, it's usually more around the $100 - $200,000 range. A lot of pirate BBS sysops lost their homes, despite having, at best, maybe $20,000 of pirated software on their machines.
>If you report a pirate [who is convicted] you get x % of the fines. Get the geeks to hunt the pirates!
Yes, let's move from being a socialist country to being a dictatorship! You do realize that the method of control you suggest was the very most popular form of control used during Hitler's regime, right (it's simply a fact -- I'm not invoking Godwin's law here)? And that it was used as a control measure by the soviet union until the cold war was over?
Since we're making up laws to suit ourselves, though, let's outlaw those separate schools. I'm tired of paying for children to be brain damaged, and taught to violate our laws. And it's time to get rid of the CRTC (who make it illegal to have multicultural TV -- only Canadian monoculture is easily available) -- AND I'm tired of having these signals beamed at my house from space and not being able to manipulate them at will. It should be my right to do with any signals being sent to me, against my will, as I wish.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
There is still a thriving Anime community, of which most is entirely legal. Bittorrent really got it's start with Anime and I can see it staying with it for a long time to come. There has really not been such a boon for fansubbers, and anime fans alike, since the advent of Divx.
On another subject, it not only the Bittorrent sites that are being targeted it is also its users. I am actually surprised it hasn't been mentioned. People have received emails from their ISPs who were contacted by movie studios, with cease and desist orders. The files they where sharing are almost exclusively movies that are still in theaters.
One possible approach is to host the sites that link to .torrent files on Freenet. Now, you can't run a tracker on freenet, and the people downloading the files will not be anonymous. Neither will be the person running the tracker, but the site maintainer will be protected by Freenet.
.torrent files; if anyone is willing to help me embed a BitTorrent client in it, pls contact me _in_ frost.
While RIAA/MPAA could still go after individual trackers, they would not be able to shut down the entire operation.
The Freenet client Frost already includes a board (something like a newsgroup) for sharing
Don't go silently into that peaceful night
Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum, Groove Salad, and Sharing in the Groove as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and .flac) music posted daily.
When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.
I was watching tech tv the other day and they said they're testing out ip blockers to stop this BS. Anybody have any information on this?
x .html
http://www.suprnova.org/
http://www.zenith-net.co.uk/
btlinks.no-ip
http://sakstream.tk/
http://www.torrentialbits.tk/
http://www.digitaldistractions.org/torrents.php
http://kung.servehttp.com:8080/live/index.asp
http://absolutesega.bounceme.net:79/
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~crosses/eyesonly/
http://nx01.us/index.php?page=torrent
http://www.hawkie.org.uk/
http://www.sakstream.cjb.net/
http://www.downloadparadise.tk/
http://bittorrent.kicks-ass.net/dvdrtorrents/inde
[n/t]
You do realize that the method of control you suggest was the very most popular form of control used during Hitler's regime, right (it's simply a fact -- I'm not invoking Godwin's law here)?
YOU FAIL IT!
btw- tomstdenis cans the man ham.
life was sooo much easier when things went in their own self contained directory instead of being distributed amongst multiple directories, registry entries...config files....aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!
I wonder when everyone is going to chill out on electronic file replication. Once you let something into the wild, it will take a life of it's own.
-- $G
If they do manage to shut down all the sites, which I doubt they will, then people will start sites in the Netherlands and such, just like cracks, serials and software security sites.
on IRC. That's where they were first distributed, that's where they will continue to be distributed. :)
I mostly use BT for Linux ISOs though. Like Knoppix, for example, seemed to have smashed FTP servers, even weeks after the latest version had been released. The torrent topped out my bandwidth for the entire download. :)
for the mean while we've still got http://www.supernova.org
The RIAA is Satan.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Mwahahahahahaha, you fools! It is I, HELLO.JPG, famous Internet celebrity and founder of Torrentse.cx. The BitTorrent community has given me tens of millions of dollars. What you don't know is that I am actually posting this from my new home in the Bahamas.
You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.
So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove and eTree provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.
More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy /. effect.
Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.
(Stepping down from my sagging soapbox.)
Why are people complaining that sites which get shut down are sharing pirated stuff? Half the software piracy was EVIL MICROSOFT SOFTWARE which is owned by the CORPORATE OLIGARCHY and deserved to be stolen! Bit torrent forever! Down with microsoft! Down with corporate profit! Up with open source! Up with python! Tux4life!
Freenet does not have this centralization problem. And a very good new version just came out. I have been using both but because torrents are such a pain to find I have found freenet to be more useful. The freenet guys said bittorrent would run into this problem. I am surprised it has happened so soon.
I believe you're misquoting. Should be something along the lines of "and Sean Connery as James Bond." ;)
I was trying to install No One Lives Forever 2 yesterday. Bought the game, had the CDs... Second CD just plain wouldn't work. Could have called the company, didn't bother, just snatched it on bittorrent. Much, much easier. I also used it to snatch Pulp Fiction because I love that movie and the download would have better quality than my video capture card. Big deal. Watching a movie in a family room on a 19 inch screen's a whole different deal than watching it on a huge ass screen and sitting through 20 minutes of ads waiting for it to finally come on and suck.
I don't really buy the whole "Warez = loss of potential profit, and should be punished as cuh" Take, for instance, the case of keygens. Keygens allow you to make names for serial numbers for software products. Say I make a 9999 copy license for a shareware game that costs $20. That's 200,000 dollars. I've seen keygens that'll give "multiple user licenses" for as many as 100 programs. So, theoretically, a pirate could generate a list of serial numbers that'd cost something on the order of 20 billion dollars. I actually have such a list for the products of one company - all for registered products that I had paid money for, mind you, but I was curious. You think the game maker would get such profit if the program wouldn't exist? Hell no! People pirate stuff when it's easier to pirate than to buy. I can't spend $400 on photoshop - I don't have a job and this economy isn't helping. I'd have to work an infinite number of hours to buy that program. Hell, it might not even work on my computer - imagine buying a $400 product and have it inexplicably not work on a computer - I've seen it happen before. And they'd just issue another upgrade, and then I'd be in the hole another couple of hundred of dollars. I mean, I already have spent thousands of dollars on programs in my lifetime. Most of the time, I can't even try out the stuff I'm buying before I buy them. It's not even done half the time - I can usually find repeatable bugs in final releases within an hour or two if it's particularly well made. I mean, hell, you can buy a MICROWAVE OVEN for $40 that not only has a turn-table, but does a great job of popping popcorn, and has absolutely 100% bugless software.
It's the same thing with Music. It sucks. It sucks big time. I'd like to be able to listen to a disk once before buying it. You can drive a car before you buy it, right?
All I want is a way of previewing releases before I spend money that could be better used on eating and finding a job on crappy software. If that means violating a few copyrights - so be it! I defy movies to stop sucking, music to stop sucking, software to stop sucking. Yes, your profits would increase a miserablely small percentage if there were no way to violate copyrights, you miserable RIAA cocksockers, but that's no reason to shut down a service that elimantes the suck from gaming like a bittorrent tracker.
Ha, you read two books and you think you know something? What the fuck are you doing but fucking around on a messageboard? Don't be a hypocrite. You're just as politically impotent as the next person.
God, like, cause he can do anything and all, he made himself forget how many sinners there were in Sodom. And really he was testing Abraham, you know, to see how many righteous dudes Abe could find and how bad Abe would weasel his way down from 50 to 10, dig?
But for real, check this out, dude:
Could Jesus microwave a burrito SO HOT that even he couldn't eat it?
an honest bitTorrent User. I've only used it for legit stuff so far, and it's been a fantastic life-saver each time (maybe half a dozen times)
simon
home page
but since the MPAA killed Archie, I can't seem to find the source for the server.
Microsoft remembers it as "that virus thingy." They've classified the authors as unamerican terrorist communists.
In other news, UUCP piped through ssh is the latest warez craze. The MPAA is declaring war on Canada to kill off the OpenBSD developers. (Terrence and Phillip as well.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Quiet, you fool! You'll ruin it for everyone!
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
One major factor that you forgot in your quick history of warez, IRC. I am too young to know BBS, But FTP and IRC were my favorites.
FTP was simple and easy to host content. IRC intimidates newbies at first, but the community was very open and helpfull.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
> If 99% of the population wants to copy music, and we live in a free world where Democracy wins against
> tyranny, why is it that 99% of the population are being oppressed by draconian ideals that are out of
> date in the modern world we live in? Why are they wrong in this democracy? Society should serve the
> many, not the few
If 99% of the population wants to BEAT YOUR ASS, and we live in a free world where Democracy wins against tyranny, why is it that 99% of the population are being oppressed by draconian ideals that are out of date in the modern world we live in? Why are they wrong in this democracy? Society should serve the many, not the few.
By your logic, kicking your teeth in is something society should support if enough people are okay with it. You sure about that logic?
Go look up "tyranny of the majority", do some thinking, and then come back here.
All the P2P clients that are starting to block RIAA and other enforcement goons employed by the RIAA/MPA are going about things the wrong way. Also the proxy/chaching way of thinking is totally off base as well.
Frist the nodes need to be able to identify who is able to spoof IP addresses. Second, clients need to be able to (re)assembly target binaries reliably from one-way UDP "contribution" packets. Second, contributing clients need to spoof from RIAA (and it's goons) address space. This follows (somewhat) the anonymous broadcasts mechanism of the "cocaine auction protocol".
My guess is that overpeer will just chalk the traffic up as enforcment and will hopefully bill the RIAA accordingly.
Finally, Honeytokens could potentially be used to identify RIAA (and their thugs) address space usage.
Postscriptus: two sure ways to bring about a totalitary state is 1 - to allow it to develope. 2 - have a significant minority behave in such a manner that the majority actually perfers totalitarynism to what they are currently expereincing. Fortunatly, lawyers, (misguided) musicians and (theiving) businessmen do not constitute a majority.
This same whole thing goes back to when they wanted MP3 files irradicated. A MP3 is NOT a song. A MP3 is a compressed digital audio file. It's just that the majority of use for MP3 compression is for songs.
BT is like MP3. It's not the product that's a problem, it's how it's USED!
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
you could just forget about Freenet and use GNUnet. :)
"Democracy wins against tyranny"
Democracy in its purest form is nothing more than a tyranny of the majority. We like democracy because it is the lesser of evil's, not because it is intrinsicly good. If 99% of the populuation wants to 'copy' music, why should they be allowed to disenfranchize the other 1% who create music?
"Society should serve the many, not the few, and certanly not the dollar."
Also, if the goal is liberty and freedom, then society should not serve any group whether it be the 'many' or the 'few'. It should serve the individual.
freenet + bittorrent is a powerful combo. :)
Because it certainly isnt now. I ran a test DL of 2 music CDs with my cable connection which is maxed out at 150kb/s transfer, and they both were done in just under an hour, averaging 120kb/s transfer rates. For right now, I don't see torrents going anywhere.
These threats have been against sites that blatantly posted links to known copyrighted material.
The sites mentioned where havens for movie rips, commercial music, anime, tv shows and commercial pornography. They were sent cease and desist letters and I'm fairly confident that if they chose to reopen, sharing only legitimate files they would slip right back into lawyers blind spot.
Bittorrent as a technology is doing fine and I'd look forward to seeing its legitimate use continue to increase. Slashdot is a prime example of a site that is ahead of the technical curve there, making honest and informed use of this beneficial (mostly to us) technology.
Quack, quack.
Of course they have a disclaimer "...The administrator of this site (www.zenith-net.co.uk) cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so."
Uh yeah... I was shocked to see almost all the posted torrents were illegal.
Speaking of Sealand... has no one noticed that Ryan Lackey is giving a talk at Defcon about how Havenco died?
Learn from the Horses' Mouth
... so I don't see how these sites going down affect BitTorrent for legit uses.
BT is decentralized, so taking down trackers that just have warez doesn't take BT down for trackers that have legit files.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
If memory serves me correctly, iD Software receantly released a new standalone RTCW based game for free. One of the major distribution methods eairly on was a bitorrent running off of their servers. This game was widely downloaded by many.
Besides, just because something has a fair bit of illegal users, doesn't mean it ought to be illegal. Take bongs for example. Now some places (unjustly I believe) have made tehm illegal but in most places they are still legal. I would wager to say that a great many are used for smoking marajuna, however they are also used for smoking tobacco (espically flavoured variants).
Religions are institutionalized cults. Thats the only reason many of them aren't looked at in the same light as cults. We just need to do the same thing with BitTorrent.
Seriously, imagine a website like FilePlanet seeding all their files with the torrent, not only would it save them bandwidth, legitimitize torrents, but you wouldn't have to wait in line so god damn long to get that cheezy demo, or the latest game propaganda/trailer.
Lastly; if a site such as FilePlanet depended on bittorrent, to distribute their files and run their business, the RIAA or other such agressive organizations, would be less likley to go DMCA on their ass.
It would be a sue fest back and forth. The RIAA claiming that the torrent technology is in violation of the DMCA, and then the websites suing back for huge financial damages to their business and company
I dunno, just a thought.
>Just like coal miners and town cryers have been
>superseded, so now have shit artists!
Like programmers involved with internet-related projects?
Sealand is a sovereign nation with one mounted gun. The RIAA has more than enough money to afford a fast boat, a couple of torpedoes, and several guys nuts enough to attack Sealand. What laws would prevent the RIAA from launching a couple of torpedoes at Sealand's pilings and blowing any fiber connections between the machine room and the ocean floor to smithereens? If the entire "country" is destroyed by one corporate attack, there's nowhere to extradite to, nobody to complain to the U.N. about it, etc... What's the story there?
Insofar as there is a "bittorrent community" (seems a little bit like saying the "ftp community" to me), this should be a good thing for it. This should help make it obvious that BT is not a very good choice for distributing "WareZ" (whether software, music or video), as it's too easy to find these sites and shut them down. Which in turn means that all the people using BT for legit purposes won't have to worry about being slandered by association with these types any more.
And geeze, does everything have to be a "community" these days? BT is more like FTP than it is like much of anything else. Why does it need a "community"? Can't it just be a tool that people use for various purposes?
For an example of their "insights," siouxmoux wrote:
"Good Bit Torrent Was pointless. Its was the first P2P network with all it app with zero search function. Only the Evil RIAA would come up with this crap."
I know it could be a troll, but after reading countless other similar and childish comments on that site I doubt it. This is the same place where once the RIAA threatened to sue major downloaders all the warze kiddies stated demanding people make anonymouse P2P apps.
Oh well, maybe now BT will be used less for warze when in addition to the sites being shut down the warzers realize it isn't anonymous and you can get caught.
The content was provided by MPAA. If they have a right to distrubute copyright holder's work, the download is legal. I don't see how they can display a copyright/legal use notice BEFORE someone downloads the .AVI, in all the language of the world including Navajo, with existing P2P software that doesn't display any notice before downloading a file. If not, the author can only sue MPAA because they misled private users.
You will think I put copyright authors in an impossible situation. But in fact, they just have to switch stategy by focusing on people who distibute their work without permission.
Posting anonymously because I know the people involved... (Apologies if this is a double post, but it seemed to get deleted the first time.)
There never WAS a 'cease and desist' order, at least not a real one. But it was planned for a long time. The scam was to squeeze as much money out of the filesharing community as possible, via donations for a new server.
The 'new' server (which was the same box as previously) would be up for a week, then suddenly get brought down by this invented C&D, before anyone would notice that there's been no performance improvement.
Mister "Hello.Jpg" is now richer to the tune of several thousand dollars, definitely proving there's no honor amongst thieves.
Nice work if you can get it.
theres NO PROBLEM for a BitTorrent site if it
Torrents legal data. eg Linux ISO's, big patches
etc etc.
I see no problem with illegal warez sharing
Torrent sites being taken down. Same with misuse of P2P apps
grow up. use some sense. etc etc
It's funny how fast they stomp down on protecting information, yet guns are so proliferate and no one seems to care about the damage they are doing. Is it just me, or are there serious issues within The United Corporation of America?
Just post the torrents on freenet.
BT? Seriously? The trance dj? Cuz he lives in Sherman Oaks, CA and we could go kick his ass if thats for real.
I know this is totally off topic but does anyone find Sealand the funniest thing they have seen in a while. Never heard of it before today and I live in London. WHen I first started reading it I assumed it would at least be an island. THen I saw a photo of it. Seriously what a cack!!! Whats it like out there in a big North Sea storm. Nice little earner now though with HavenCo.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
What is wrong with the law is that intellectual property is not truly property. Property is that which can be defended against other people. But ideas (thought) cannot be defended. Therefore, if the government is going to try to claim that ideas are property, then it's going to have to try to control everybody's every thought and action.
That's going to eventually break the government, but it will make tons of people miserable meanwhile.
So yes, there's something wrong with the law.
Meanwhile, you have "great men" who view their subjects as sheep, sometimes to be sheared, and often to be eaten. They feel that the more people they can control, the greater they are. [Note that to me, saying "he's a great man" is not a complement.] So anyhow, they find that by passing these laws, they can chalk up more control in their own personal scoreboard. So yes, there's something wrong with them, too.
But now we get to the people breaking the law. First of all, if you are going to break with a government, you really ought to do it completely. To break just in part, is kindof like lying to other people around you. This is also damaging, because it destroys respect for the law, and since many are limited not by morality but by legality, destroys the line that many will not cross that keeps society whole. Yeah, that's right: the legal line is artificial, but it often approximates the moral line. When you wipe it out, you cease to give people a warning that they may be starting to hurt others.
So if you're going to break completely, there's two ways of doing it. If a whole bunch want to break together, they declare their independance, and then get slaughtered. The other option is that you or a whole bunch of people move somewhere else where the government is good, or (alternatively) where you can defend yourselves, and do. En masse. Maybe, you go and buy a good chunk of Zimbabwe at a low low price. Then it one week you move a whole merc army in, armed to the teeth, and declare independence. Then once the bullets settle down, you move your builders in.
I, though, listened to Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, and simply found a better country. That's really what I suggest doing.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It's good to see people USING technology and developing it properly, rather than abusing it, and undermining the nation. I think IP in general is a bad thing, but I think breaking the law is worse, because it destroys trust, encourages looting, and thus destroys the economy.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
That site has been hacked and i some how am hosting illegal files on it! please! do not dl stuff from it! you can dl stuff from me from kazaa!
As someone who has created art in the past, I would point out that the 1% are not creators, they're parasites in suits. And they WILL take action to shut down not only "copiers", but artists who believe their own creations should be free - a favorite is to claim you used a sample from a song "owned" by them, and, even if you didn't, the legal costs will be enough to shut you down.
Everyone is an artist, really - the ones that make art are the ones who didn't have creativity and independent thought beaten out of them in school.
What about the distribution of fan subbed anime? Without bittorrrent thousands wouldn't be able to watch anime that probably would never come to america otherwise.
Society should serve the many, not the few, and certanly not the dollar.
Unfortunately the few are in collaboration with the dollar and have conditioned the many to believe that this is the only way it can ever be.
That information wants to be free. Every Slashdotter knows this. It is impairing human progress to try and control information, simply put, information does not want to be controlled. It wants to be examined and improved on through a completely decentralized transfer system. That's why the GPL is so important. And it's also why protocols and communication lines must not be hampered by the "long arm of the law" as you put it. If "copyright holders" get hurt by this, too bad for them. That's collateral damage. Freedom of speech is more important than some copyright holder's (like the RIAA) whining about only getting $7.48 billion instead of the $11.85 billion they should have gotten.
Emphasis mine.
I fail to understand why BitTorrent is so popular among Slashdotters. Compared to typical P2P apps like Kazaa Lite, BitTorrent is much slower (if I can get a download going at all, I get a transfer rate of 15 KBps/sec max on my broadband connection, compared to 50-100+ on other P2P's). But my biggest complaint is that finding what I want is a royal pain in the ass - I can't just type in a search and view the results. I have to slog through a bunch of BitTorrent websites and try to search in each one until I find what I'm looking for (and usually I don't find it anyway). Using BitTorrent reminds me of the pre-Napster Dark Ages when you had to look for MP3's on unreliable FTP servers that required you to visit 3 porn sites before giving you the required login and password.
The thing that always bothers me is that in almost all discussions about free music downloads and the 'evil' RIAA is that artist compensation is rarely mentioned. Ussually, there is a breif passing comment that artists' money is made from touring or merchandizing so record sales don't matter to them.
Fact is recording contracts vary greatly. True, first contracts often suck big time and new artists are often screwed over. But, some artists have been able to re-negotiate 'better' recording deals (for example; packaging costs paid by label, other re-coupables cleared so royalties start to become meaningful to the artists for earlier recordings). Recording contracts with labels associated with the RIAA aren't always necessarily bad. And some indie labels are truely evil and abuse their artists in ways the big boys can only dream of.
As far as artists making money thru touring and merchandising; many midling artists have a hard time making cash thru these avenues as well. Touring is always a costly affair and, as in the recording areana, artists are the last ones to get their share of the gate cut... only getting their cash after everyone else has been paid. (interesting aside... some labels, indie and major, help the artists with touring costs and administration thus making it more likely the artist will be able to make money from a successful tour. This is particularly helpful for those midling artists who don't do stadium tours and have to eek out their rounds on fairgrounds and other small venues.)
I am an avid BitTorrent user when it comes to downloading LEGAL stuff like Linux distros. But Bytemonsoon got what was coming to them. A quick glance at the first few entries showed "Win XP Key Generator.rar" and "X-Men 2." To answer the question, "Will corporate pressure kill BitTorrent?" My answer is no, but idiots like the Bytemonsoon webmasters will.
To put it another way, too many people with technical knowledge to create or expand upon something wonderful such as BitTorrent allow their greed to cloud their judgement. It is possible to be greedy over non-physical posessions. Just think about how many people you know that horde movies and music, just to have them, most of which they have never even bothered to play.
I happen to know quite a bit about how R.S works internally and I can say that it is far more sophisticated than BitTorrent. Unfortunately, Red Swoosh isn't Open Source (something that makes BT more useful in the long-run), and I can't really justify that claim without violating a confidence.
Before p2p file sharing, people searched websites and ftp servers for files. Because the files were at a fixed address and were easy access, many sites got shut down. That is why when p2p came along, it was such a hit. Since p2p is distributed, there are no fixed locations to 'shut down'. It is much harder to go after the masses of file sharers than those who explicitly share music on web sites.
BitTorrent was a step back towards the days when the web and ftp was the main source of getting MP3s or whatever content.
I know BitTorrent has technical advantages when it comes to handling load. But in terms of anonymity, it is easier to find the person sharing on the web (or giving an access point) then it is via a peer to peer network. The site is always there. It is hosted by someone who is associated with the owner of a domain name.
That's right.
After further observation, I've determined two other fiendish protocols that are too often abused.
The other day I noticed that IRC and FTP are used by the unwashed masses too.
Let's shut them down too!
FYI, I'd estimate more like 0.0001%.
Also, distributing copyrighted materials != piracy. Copyrights would be worthless without being able to distribute. If Bittorrent is LAWFULLY distributing your copyrighted materials, then you can turn a maxed out T1 into ~50k-100k/sec while increasing your throughput by orders-of-magnitude.
Outlawing a crime is fine. Outlawing the method for committing the crime is morally questionable, practically debilitating, and generally the idea of people who aren't willing to admit the world is a complex place.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
This is me announcing my opposition to that movement, that way of thinking. One datapoint to be counted against all the others and a reminder that not all Slashdotters (and not all spoiled tehno-brats ;-), think alike.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I think you raised a big amount of money prior to the re-opening of torrentse.cx a few days ago. Now that you are closed for good, will you send the money back to the donators?
Would that be the beginning of a solution ?
I haven't seen any BT site on freenet but I wouldn't be surprised to see some soon... Try to shut down the sites in question then...
Wouldn't that be a cool option ? They can always try the site in question if it's on Freenet...
Anybody's seen that kind of site yet
?
Sorry. Got carried away by the excellent username.
Absolutely with you, anyway. The simple fact is that I have a broadband internet connection, a good soundcard and a big hard drive. Since I only tend to listen to 2 or 3 tracks on each album I buy, the form of music distribution that makes sense for me is to be able to pay to download a track at a time.
I have now made my home computer 100% free and legal. As far as I can tell, there is not a single piece of bought software or violated ip on it. As nice as this is for my sense of moral well-being, this means that my broadband internet connection, good soundcard and big hard drive are now next to useless for obtaining music. Even though I am more than happy to pay.
I don't have a mac and I don't live in the US so, unless someone can point me to a website that will prove me wrong (I'll be very grateful), I have no option whatsoever for accessing large quantities of non-obscure music (I choose my words carefully) through my internet connection.When enough people want something, they get it, regardless of the law. Cannabis is illegal. People want it. As a result, IIRC, Britain's black market for cannabis is bigger than it's tourist industry. People are buying the stuff in huge quantities from illegal dealers. It doesn't mean they have no respect for the law. They would happily buy it from legitimate dealers if there were any, even if it involved paying heavy taxes, but there are none. There is no alternative to breaking the law. In such circumstances, sitting in parliament fiddling with legislative details, or picking people off the streets and fining or imprisoning them for owning cannabis, or even tracking down international cartels and incarcerating their leaders is not going to make the blindest bit of difference. It's like trying to stop a hurricane by blowing in the opposite direction.
The *AA can bully and sue as many people as they like, but that approach has never worked anywhere in the world for cannabis.
The *AA have it easy compared to the anti-drug types. They don't want to stop everyone from listening to music. All the *AA wants (or should want) is for people to do it through legal channels and pay. Well, then, if you want to be paid THEN SELL THE FUCKING THING PEOPLE WANT TO PAY FOR!!! I don't want cd's, I want to download tracks. The minute I can, I'll pay whoever offers the service. In the mean time, it's been more than a year since I last bought a cd. My stagnating music collection pains me, but I simply can't bring myself to fork out for a CD. The prices nowadays, I'd rather do without.
Absolutely fucking stupid, the lot of them.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
"We have acquired irrefutable evidence that the Principality of Sealand is in fact building weapons of mass destruction. Make no mistake, if they refuse to stop their nuclear program and fail to deliver their missiles to the UN, we will lead a coalition to free the people of sealand and stop their doomsday plans"
Ok, ok, its slighty offtopic and something of a flamebait, but I couldnt resist...
While most of the tracker sites offer up zillions of pirated , it is a nice protocol for distributing large files. The recent Redhat 9 example should have opened the eyes of at least a few people out there, if all the distros would offer permenant torrent links, they'd find their bandwidth bills going down sharply.
Of course, I will miss being able to download episodes of old TV shows that aren't available in any other format that I know of. Seeing a couple of Blake's 7 episodes again was pretty cool.
So if a system is judged by its predominant use, does that mean that e-mail is illegal? After all, most traffic is created by spam (now illegal at some places).
you mean the hoax hosted in the United States by Net Access PO BOX 502 Glensdale, PA 19038 ???
that havenco?
With regards to what happened to Torrentse.cx, that sort of thing always happens. A site comes along and shouts from the rooftops about how much stuff it has; that it's the world's best site for XYZ downloads. Egos start to get bigger and bigger.
Then, a Cease and Desist notice or some similar legal thing comes along, and that site owner's balls suddenly shrink to microscopic proportions. The site's been shut down, it'll never return, the owner has disowned the site. To him, it was a great idea, except when the feds found out.
>IMO, what BT needs is an easy way to join a torrent as a sharer at boot time.
/etc/rc.local to run bittorrent + your .torrent file.
.BAT or .vbs file in your StartUp items folder, but of course someone needs to login first (or enable AutoLogin... it's zero security but it does do the job).
Why add an OS-level task to a user application?
Edit your
If you're on Windows, it's not as easy. You can stick a
The RIAA started out by going after the makers of P2P software. Everyone here yelled "Its not the technology, stupid, is the file traders, go after them instead!" Then recently when the RIAA announced they were going to do precisely that, the same group that was yelling "go after the traders" all of a sudden got their panties in a twist and started crying about how the RIAA shouldn't do that.
It was the SAME GROUP? Really? How the fuck could you possibly prove that? Slashdot has hundreds of thousands of readers.
We should *not* have to run and hide like scared children.
We are the people that support these loonies by purchasing their products that give them power..
We are also the people that elect the morons that allow this insanity to continue.
1 - vote the bastards out of office.
2 - stop supporting the *AA industries.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
>I still say make it a sport. If you report a pirate [who is convicted] you get x % of the fines. Get the geeks to hunt the pirates!
That's almost how the drug war works. Look up the documentary "Snitch".
Basically, you can get away with rape, murder, blackmail and even limited drug dealing... IF you you accuse someone else of drug dealing.
>make piracy a huge penalty [e.g. compute ceased, fined 1000$ or etc] and blitz every so often.
"Huge penalty"? You mean like disproportionately increase the legal penalty? Again, that's how the drug laws work.
Morally, I consider a murderer or rapist to be a bigger threat to society than a drug purchaser or seller.
Murders and rapes should never happen, but they DO happen. Ignoring the emotional issues for a moment, the penalties for these crimes are about where they should be. There are exceptions if you are wealthy (like OJ), but murderers generally get 20+ years, and at that point only get out if they exhibit some level or remorse and self-reform. Charlie Manson will never be released.
Anytime you allow a government the ability to apply a disproportionate penalty for a crime, you open the door to government abuse. Example: that California hippy a couple months back who grew pot plants on his property... even though he was within California law AND his plants NEVER crossed state lines (so Federal has *zero* Constitutional authority) the Feds requested a SIXTY year jail sentance. SIXTY YEARS.
I don't care how bad you flout the law.. the penalty should be in line with the crime.
It's this paranoid realization that caused the Founding Fathers of the US to require tough legal standards for "treason" charges.
I'm getting off topic here, but copyright violations belong in CIVIL courts not criminal courts. It is a lot closer to a contract violation.
Copyright is supported by the Constitution.. so there is some cause for the government to get involved, but they should be doing so BECAUSE copyright enforcement "serves the public interest", not because of lobbyist money.
I put forth that the public would ALSO be served if the same government resources were applied to investigating MPAA and RIAA's tactics: from CD price fixing, blacklisting artists, the methods in which albums are financed released and prompted.. an artist can sell a MILLION records and still make only $45,000 for the year.
Justice requires THOSE crimes be investigated also. Read Courtney Love's writings on the RIAA over at Salon.com
This basically already exists: http://www.overnet.com/
I never used (or thought to) to share copyrighted files...
I used it for downloading things like the halo2 e3 trailer...
I hope ike hell that bittorrent makes it through this... I think its great for people that don't have huge amounts of bandwidth...
"Warez started with BBS, when found they were easy to kill."
:-)
Guess my recollection of passing Sinclair Spectrum stuff around on the 2 metre band back in 1982 ( ish - lots of Tequila fog between then and now ! ) is lucid dreaming then
Even had an encryption program called amgine ( enigma backwards ! ) to camouflage the data.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
That's what services are for. Torrent probably doesn't run as one, but "server" processes should.
Startup scripts (no, not symlinks in pf->startup), or service wrappers might get the job done for primitive software as well.
As always, I am surprised by a lack of recognition for eDonkey2000 at Slashdot. The ed2k is, I believe, technologically superior, it has better clients (and larger variety, and the leading ones are also open source). The system is also provides prolonged availablity much better.
.bittorrent files that have to be hosted somewhere. This is also the reason why ed2k-link sites are more resistant to lawsuits.
In addition to this, ed2k is better protected from "anti-piracy" attacks. There is additional server layer, very resistant to servers being temporarily shut off and requiring (I believe) less traffic. A lot of negotiation is performed directly between clients - the Overnet model does not require servers at all. Finally, the actual links are in the form of short text links that can be e-mailed, printed and even spelled over the phone, not in the form of
P.S. This seems to me just one more case of an inferior technology receiving an unfair share of coverage. Like MS dominates the media, BitTorrent seems to dominate Slashdot...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The question really is how many levels of indirection do you have to be away before you're safe? The people who are the ones making the copyrighted material available are obviously breaking the law. Is the site to which they can post links breaking it? Probably not, unless they are making money off the downloads, or are promoting the site as a means to get illegal stuff, or are involved in choosing what gets posted and what doesn't.
Now what about a news organization that posts a link to the site, saying "... BitTorrent has also come under fire for the amount of material illegally traded using the system. Some sites such as <a href="">ByteMonsoon</a> seem to have almost exclusively illegal .torrent links..."
To me the issue here is that it seems more and more like the decision about whether or not a site stays up isn't about whether it's actually breaking any laws, but rather the relative economic power of the company it pisses off and the person running the site.
Will the continued use of bittorrent by warez kiddies destroy its reputation as a good way to get legitimate files?
No. It's like asking : "Will the continued use of guns by criminals destroy its reputation as a good way to protect oneself ?"
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Thank you, TNN (aka spiketv). Anyways, I have to say that the legal pay-per-track option has it's pros and cons. Most of the sites I've been to only have a few labels, and those labels don't even have anything that I'm looking for. So if I even wanted to do the pay-per-track thing, I couldn't. It's honestly limited to whoever joins the program and is willing to make a little less money for a lot more satisfied customers. And why the hell should I pay $1.00 for a track encoded with a lossy codec? If I'm going to pay for inferior audio, I certainly won't pay the relative cost of one track from a 15 track CD. But whatever. I'm still proof of the concept that people buy the music they download off of a p2p netowrk... whatever digital format (lossless aside), it's inferior and still sounds better coming from my DVD/CD player than an .ogg file. And since no one distributes any .ogg that I listen to, there's another reason for me to buy the CD and rip it myself. Still gotta get a Neuros though...
Insert clever one liner here.
or I could write my own init script (on RedHat), but I don't know how to start bittorrent from a script and a .torrent file. I guess what I'm whining for is better docs, but I'm too busy with other things to actively contribute, so I'll just shut up about it.
Thanks for the reply!
think earthstation uses it. new filesharing program. don't have link . sorry.
>I don't know how to start bittorrent from a script and a .torrent file.
/home/user/torrents/sharing/mytorrent.torrent
/home/user/torrents/sharing/*.torrent` ]; then /home/user/torrents/sharing/*.torrent`
.torrent file's create-date. If older than 14 days (etc), move file out of 'share' dir.
I think you can just do:
btdownloadheadless.py
from rc.local. I wouldn't even bother with an INIT script until you have something that works.
You could even make a system where you do:
(untested bash code)
if [ -f `ls
for tor in `ls
btdownloadheadless.py "${tor}" &2>1 >"/home/user/torrents/logs/${tor}.log"
fi;
fi;
read as "for torrent, share it"
extra credit:
Modify script to check
You could even do a wget on a web-based tracker, check for files that have 0 seeds, and if you hav that file then re-enable sharing.
( there's probably a much smarter, lighter way to detect unseeded shares than web scraping. I haven't done this myself so I'm not motivated to look. It will work either way. )
I guess I"m not in that group. I thought going after the technology was stupid.
- Napster was a corporate target, who's business was based around enabling people to do something illegal, despite it's legal uses. So they got what they deserved.
- The p2p smear campaign is not good, it blames the technology, not the poeple.
- Going after individuals is fair. Some penalties may be overly harsh, which is NOT fair, but hey, the reason a great many of us DONT set up big pirate mp3 sites is because it's illegal.
is when you look at what the site is actually used for.
In your scenario, I'd say no, you aren't responsible. That's not what's happening, though.
IF you kept it running for months, and participated in ongoing upgrades to it, and capacity upgrades, and the vast majority of the content was obvious copyright violation, you could not sit there and claim it was not your responsibility. People DO have a responsibility for their own actions, and those things under their control.
Furthermore, if you knew your site contained copyrighted information taht you were not permitted to distribute, you WOULD be in violation, regardless of whether or not you put it there. IN teh case of these sites, they have nice front page lists containing tons of stuff.
Simply saying something is forbidden does not exhonerate you from all responsibility.. not when something is so obvious.