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Exeem "Successor" to Suprnova Announced
First, Exeem really isn't an extension of Suprnova as the hype might have you believe: the connection between the two seems more marketing than anything else. Sloncek has been hired to promote their product as the heir apparent to his popular website, but his involvement really seems to be almost entirely PR. It'll work obviously: my headline on this story mentions Suprnova, and so will hundreds of websites around the world in the coming days. "Yet another p2p app" would not create anywhere near the waves that "Successor to Suprnova Announced" will. I hope that people judge exeem by its own merits and not by its (clever) marketing.
Second, Exeem is pretty much what was rumored earlier: a blending of the tracker, the BitTorrent client, and decentralized indexing. It's Windows only. It's in beta now, and will be out at some indeterminate date in the future. It also has a rating and commenting system which appears to be somewhat rudimentary. It's unclear to me if the rating system will be as useless as other attempts, and I think this is the critical thing: Suprnova succeeded because the content available on it was verified and trustworthy. Suprnova was as much the work of a few dozen editors as it was a list of torrent URLs. So far no other p2p system has achieved that level of accuracy. Exeem supports magnet sites which is a start, but not exactly p2p either. And did I mention that it's adware?
Third, there's a mystery company. Someone is paying Sloncek. He won't say who, but there's a history in the p2p world of secretive development. Since Exeem is to be adware, someday it will have a billing address, which means the legal issues faced by predecessors like Napster and Kazaa will be forthcoming, which is of course why we have a mystery company that Sloncek won't talk about in the first place. We definitely haven't heard the last of this.
Personally I was hoping for more: source code and cross platform compatibility never hurts. These are the things that made BitTorrent a huge success. I guess I was hoping for a new protocol instead of just another Kazaa. I guess I was hoping for a monumental leap, and instead Exeem to be a more incremental step. I'm sure we'll learn more in the coming weeks.
So it's Windows only and adware. This is nothing like Suprnova.
The parent article is a Troll.
I cared before, and now I know I don't need to care any more. So to me, this news story was useful, even though like you I no longer care.
501 Not Implemented
Do you surf the web? Do you use IRC or any chat service? What exactly does bittorrent, a web or IRC server or client do to make sure that no one is using it to distribute child porn? What does any technology actively do to make sure it isn't being used to distribute child porn? *crickets* That's what I thought.
You are free to have your beliefs, but that does't mean that they aren't absurd.
You are right about the speed issues with Freenet though; I'll give you that.
Just because you're paranoid does not mean that the world is not full of assholes.
IF, you could create a freenet that only hosts torrents, and not the files themselves, had searching for torrents (which they don't have), and then somehow tracks the downloads totally anonymously, then yeah sure why not.
Somehow I don't think it will happen, currently freenet doesn't have indexing / searching of contents, you need to find a link to the content through other means. Isn't that all that a torrent actually is? a link and identifier to the content and the tracker?
I don't want to host contents of unknown origin, I shouldn't need to keep a node running 24/7 in order to find and download the occasional file, and I don't want to wait in a queue of 1000 leachers to get what I want.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Sure, I bet you could find child porn on any major P2P service; the difference is that Freenet almost *encourages* it because of their philosophy. With any other P2P service, you can choose to avoid it, you don't have to download OR upload it. With Freenet, apparently you don't have that choice. I think we can agree that all Slashdotters here would not want to aid unwillingly in the distribution of child pornography, which is why Freenet has been received with cold reviews in the past here.
What the RIAA/MPAA don't realize is that they are trying to close the barnyard doors after the animals have already left.
Information and content is a lot cheaper and more easily accessible than it was a few years ago. The RIAA still sells CDs for $10-$20, when a CD holds 700MB of music/data, tops. Meanwhile, a DVD, with 8GB of Video/Music/Data, is usually in the $20 range. Already, CDs seem overpriced.
But now take the cost of a high speed internet connection ($30/mo. for cable modems around here), and how much data you have access to in how much time, and you realize that the world has definitely changed. These aren't the days of the local library and record store, but of Google and Kazaa.
The RIAA/MPAA are dinosaur organizations who don't realize the meteor has already struck and they are soon to die. So they go around frantically foraging all the food they can while the doomsday clouds loom above. Information and content is cheap. Dirt cheap. Users want fast access to it. Message to the RIAA: adapt!
People have the connections, they have the big powerful computers, all they don't have is the service. If the RIAA had the foresight to realize that a) CDs are overpriced, b) too much of CD profit goes to marketing/advertising firms and the cushy CEOs of record labels and c) they can readjust the price of music, offer it online, and dominate the market, then today we would probably have an immensely popular online music service that offers songs for $0.25, compensates artists adequately, and keeps the RIAA in business.
You have to keep up with the technological innovations if you want to survive. People pirate movies, but not nearly as many people as those who pirate music. Why? Pirating a movie is a pain in the ass right now. You get a low-quality DVD rip that doesn't easily play on your TV. Music, on the other hand, you get at near-CD quality (or CD quality), and you can easily burn a CD or put it on your MP3 player. The day that one can download 8GB of DVD video in a few minutes is the day DVD videos in stores will be severely overpriced at $20/pop.
As to your other point, the reason this research focuses on censorship-resistant systems, and uses the word censorship, is because as it stands today using no fancy techniques, one cannot be assured that the publication of any document will not be censored by those who can control access to your particular server. And if the government or any other agency wants to censor the publication of a document on the Internet, currently it can (maybe not 'legally', but technically). So this research does have a place, and is well-named.
The suggestion is to use freenet to distribute torrents, not to actually serve as a tracker. It can do that, surely, since torrents are tiny and one-shot downloads. This makes the MPAA's whack-a-mole game more difficult, since they have to go after each individual tracker rather than any centralized site hosting torrents (pointers to trackers).
Thank you for generalizing that everyone with an opposing viewpoint from you is some type of spoiled rich kid. Actually, I have met quite a few people who are in favor of changes to "intellectual property", from liberals who have spent years helping with poverty-stricken families in third-world countries and have little sympathy for CEO's who don't make another million, to archconservatives including my father.
Which one I am, if either, is not really relevant to our discussion here. I do not understand the concept of "intellectual property". Want to "own" an idea? Keep it in your head with your mouth shut, and if you write it down or otherwise record it anywhere, make sure that it's somewhere no one will ever find it.
An idea, spoken in public, is public property. Period. Doesn't matter if the "idea" is a song, a computer program, a movie, or anything else.
Awwwwww, big corporation can't make money? Too bad. No one has a "right" to the continued success of their business model. They have the right to adapt and find a way to provide what the consumer wants, the way they want it, and make money, or die. Copyrights and patents create artificial scarcity and give "ownership" and exclusive rights to the first person to come up with something which cannot be owned-an idea.
But it'll stifle innovation? Biggest load I've heard. Those who have great ideas and are passionate about them need no reward. Socrates was KILLED for putting forth his thoughts, but even facing that he would not back down. And we suggest massive amounts of money are necessary to encourage this? It never was before.
Of course, there are those who can consistently do a great job at coming up with and putting into practice great ideas. They'll make a living. (No, I didn't say "killing").
All "copyright" creates is a massive media monopoly capable of controlling the distribution of 98% or so of creative work. The "little guy" doesn't even get heard amidst their marketing noise.
No one has a right to make massive amounts of money for the REST OF THEIR LIFE plus 75 years because they do a good job one time, or even several times. Most of us must go to work, every day, and do our job well each and every time. I don't get to say "Well you know what, boss? I've done a damn good job, and this company will benefit from that work for quite a while, so you owe me royalties for the rest of my life while I do no more work." If an artist/programmer/filmmaker/whatever is out of ideas and can't do his job anymore, it's not time for him to retire and profit at 31, it's time for him to find another job.
As for the **AA's, they are as animals whose ecosystem has been radically changed. They can either a. Act like nothing has changed, and face extinction, or b. Adapt. Right now, they're thinking they'll roll back the clock, and that does not constitute option c. or any other.
Collective license would solve this whole problem. If the "IP Industries" are unwilling to embrace this model, they have chosen option a., and I won't mourn their passing.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I agree with the idea that if there were no theft there would be no DRM. I also agree that you can not legally justify downloading a movie/game without reimbursing anyone for it (or getting permission from the creators to have it for free).
One of the carrots that's dangled every so often, though, is the idea that if piracy of a product were 0, the price of the item would be drastically reduced. This is a lie.
Souring the game industry:
Case in point, the Nintendo Gamecube. It was thought of as "unhackable" by the PR folk at Nintendo and yet the cost of their games was just as much as any other console. Do actions like this not foster cynicism among both paying and non-paying gamers? People were already expecting a price drop as the alleged source of high prices with Nintendo before was the fact that they used cartridges instead of CD-like media.
Souring the film industry:
Putting red dots on the screen to psychologically interrupt a movie experience is ridiculous. This form of copy protection should be the bane of any film director who respects his or her works as art. Can you imagine the Mona Lisa having these dots over top its portrait? Does interpolating the frames before and after the dots as a way of removing them make this form of protection all that effective when you consider how the work is marred in contrast?
Souring the TV industry:
The industry itself is inherently sour. The medium of network and cable television is not a delivery vehicle for content, it's a delivery vehicle of advertisements to viewers (who are the end product). If any form of entertainment needs to go pay-per-view on a per-episode or per-season basis, it's television.
Again, I'm not saying any of this justifies theft of artists' works, but I do think there are serious problems on BOTH sides of the fence. Simple finger-pointing by industry lobbyers / sycophants at pirates in order to justify artificially inflated prices and obscene forms of copy protection is morally -- and should be legally -- wrong.
The RIAA/MPAA are dinosaur organizations who don't realize the meteor has already struck and they are soon to die. So they go around frantically foraging all the food they can while the doomsday clouds loom above. Information and content is cheap. Dirt cheap.
It's worse than you say. The RIAA and MPAA are cartels of content distributors. Sure, they may finance the production of some content and play favorites with the content they've got their fingers in, but they were built to distruibute content because in the past that was hard part for the people who made music and movies. Now, you don't need trucks, newspaper ads and shelfspace to distribute anymore. Distrubution is cheap and easy. There is no reason to pay them for it anymore. The message shouldn't be "adapt" it should be "go away". It's worse for the RIAA than the MPAA because arguably you still need the MPAA around to deliver huge spools of film to theaters, but that will change soon, and when it does you'll start to see movies get funded by people outside the film distribution industry just like you're currently seeing a new explosion of independant music with financially successful musicians. As the creators of the content (think directors, producers, actors, writers) see that they aren't dependant on the cartel anymore they'll realize they can make more money and gain greater artistic independance if they cut them out of the loop. The noose will close from both ends. The only way the traditional distribution cartels will continue to exist is if our governments grant them guaranteed profits through legislation, and even that can't last forever. This is the end game.