Slashdot Mirror
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.
I can't help but wonder if BitTorrent is the application that finally pushes people towards Freenet. That would appear to be the obvious way of decentralizing it, without requiring platform specific software, and providing anonymity for both producers and consumers in the process.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I really need to be able to mod slashdot errors...
-1 Annoying!
-1 Obvious! *sigh*
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
So it's Windows only and adware. This is nothing like Suprnova.
The parent article is a Troll.
you can already find cracked copies of the latest version on *gasp* bittorrent sites :)
Investing forum
If you know where to look, there's a closed beta of eXeem avaliable - however, it needs a beta key in order to join the network - and it can't be a random key, i.e. it's assigned by the Suprnova team. At the time of writing, the version I have is 0.16, and does NOT include any adverts of some sort, although yes Sloncek did confirm this earlier this evening.
The basic user interface is friendly, and it's basically a "compact" version of Kazaa (you have to use it to really understand).
As for the release date, it "won't be this week, or next week, but very very soon". It'll be an open beta, to chink out all the bugs.
Shouldn't these developers take a look at some of the research in this area?
Tangler, FreeHaven, and Publius come to mind.
I for one have no intention if even trying this piece of rubbish, but I welcome it simply for the fact that it will attract attention away from the more traditional torrent sites that seem to be getting so much unwanted legal attention at present.
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
Link to a torrent of interview as an MP3.
With all due respect to the Freenet team, they have done a lot of good work, but the network isn't designed for things like bittorrent. What you need is a low-latency network like TOR or i2p. With that said, anonymous Bittorrent already exists, its available to work on the i2p anonymous network. Just go to the i2p website, , install the software and then click on this: There are already bittorrent trackers on the i2p network. Why this hasn't been on slashdot is beyond me.
eXeem 0.16 beta screen shots.
I've seen /.'ers suggesting freenet as possible {il,}legal content distribution method. I'd like to disagree with this methodology.
There is already a working way to have anonymous BitTorrent - using Onion Routing protocol. It's great for privacy concerned netizens and if more people set up Tor Servers, Tor would gain critical mass needed to support both tracker AND data connections for BT.
Most of torrent clients supports Tor out-of-the-box, as tor is nothing but socks proxy for your programs. Torifying various applications is really a snap and there is a detailed guide on how to make Azureus BT client work flawlessly with Tor (see section 2.2 Totally Anonymous BitTorrent).
Currently, the only concern for the Tor authors is the fact, that the Tor network may not be able to handle the amounts of traffic, bittorent is able to generate.
However, if each one of you would set up a server with couple of kbps spare bandwidth, the tor network would immediately start scaling up.
Since BT relies on multiple (slow) transmissions occuring at the same time to create the "torrent effect", even if all the transmissions pick different routes trough tor network (taking slight performance hit), the overall performance of BT would remain unchanged.
There is also a very important aspect of tor. It allows you to create hidden services. Basically they are accesible via bogus URLs (like LKbalkbsflKflasbd.onion). The anonymity of the server is assured. More about hidden services at this address.
So, before you let the *oids start reinventing the wheel (and charge an arm and a leg for it), do your bloody homework and use what's already there :)
PS. tor is free software.
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.
eXeem is a piece of shit. Not only that it will have adaware and spyware, it is also a "lock-in". You will only be able to use it on SuprNova. They have modified the torrent file. It is missing a lot of dictionaries ("key -> value"), and dictionaries that should have been subdictionaries start directly in the file. For example "files" is not in "info" it starts with it directly. This torrent changes were unnecessary. Also, the "announce" and "announce-list" are missing. eXeem has a hardcoded url of a tracker of all the peers on eXeem. The original seeder of a torrent acts as a tracker (so SuprNova won't have to host torrents), but eXeem is in no way decentralized because of the tracker that keeps in contact all the eXeem users (it does not care about torrents, just eXeem users). So, all you have to do is to kill the main server, and all the users of exeem will be disconnected (this happened when suprnova died). THIS IS WORSE THAN THE WAY TORRENTS ACT NOW. EXEEM IS HYPE AND A WAY TO MAKE MONEY. IT SUCKS! I think the best way to decentralized BitTorrent, is to have trackers that are decentralized IRC server style. If you people want something decentralized and a little bit of BitTorrent, get G2 (Gnutella2) and add BitTorrent's tit-for-tat to it.
So, the "mighty" owner of suprnova closed his website.
Very nice.
He advocates this new technology.
Who said the MPAA/RIAA did not stuff him some "funds" to provide the people some nice software
(ie: adware) that cleanly informs those nice
associations with the ip address of every peer/seeder. Think about it.
who did say the new software does not harvest ip
addresses and nicely hands em over to some place
accessible to the MPAA/RIAA ?
I do not know about you, but I am convinced some
donated funds from MPAA/RIAA could change the mind
of any site owner to join the " side"
just 0.02 euro
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.
Why not just use usenet to distribute the Torrent trackers? On usenet one can post anonymously, and they are automatically distributed to other usenet servers.