Slashdot Mirror
From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life
powerline22 writes "From the people who gave you the Internet Archive comes Ourmedia, a place for grassroots media to flourish. Upload anything, maybe a video, some pictures, your custom applescript, and it gets hosted for free, for life. Drupal is hosting the site, and the Internet Archive is providing hosting and bandwidth for the files."
AWESOME! Screw bittorrent now I can just download everything I need from this site. Porn, music, pirated software. Thanks archive.org!
So what happens when goatse is posted?
Porn
Let's be honest here. Your own private permanent porn collection. What could be better?
with their caching idea (like coralcache) but 6months later they stopped it, whats to say the same wont happen here ? when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth
I mean, what's the better way to stress-test their servers than announce it on slashdot.org?
How long will it be before someone uploads his porn collection?
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.
Cool, sounds like the perfect place to store Rooftop Warrior [warning, bad quality homemade ninja movie]
"For life".
Think they're going to hold to that?
And I don't just mean in the case of the 90% of content which will be posted there illegally, or even the 80% of the leftover content which will be highly pornographic. What if I post an MPEG there and it gets linked on fark and winds up eating terrabytes of the site's bandwidth? How long you think it will remain there?
Wow, that was really diviod of info. How much space, what limits? P0rn? Copyrighted items?
/. use this as a mirror with no consequence?
Can
How bout some REAL info on stuff that matters?
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
wow - thats the one drag and limit to working with video online - bandwidth. this could really open up possibilities for video clips and shows for the people by the people..
the 'permenant for life' thing seems a little wishful, but we'll see.
air and light and time and space
it probably is.
Free?
Free hosting? For life?
Sounds like a classic ponzi scheme.
... trying to go bankrupt.
Could I give them 19 nickles for a dollar?
Things are never too good to be true, especially in the computer world.
Sweet informative mod.
Three comments and all about porn. What's wrong with you, slashdot people ?
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
all is well and good, until they get bought by someone else. what happens to the data then? what happens if they go bankrupt, and their hard drives wind up on ebay?
"I'm sorry. You can't run this site since it hosts material deemed illegal by our hate-speech laws."
Free speech ain't always pretty.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.
It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.
I Want To Believe
For Life (as in Michael jackson soon)? Until the service goes bankrupt? or you have to start paying for the subscription... call me tinfoiled, but there is nu such guerantee and besides, who wants to keep his apple script for life?
On the bright side, it is a nice service and it is free..
I can't say I have high hopes for how this will be doing in a few months if it's dead already.
What is Drupal?
Not unless "for life" suddenly means "until the story is up for five minutes."
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
This proportion will reflect the content of the archive website, as well.
Hopefully "for life" didn't mean the life of their websever, because that was shortened to about 5 minutes after the story was posted. :)
It's already dead... some promise that was.
The site can't even handle being slashdotted... free video hosting, for life, for everyone?
Yeah.
Right.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Slashdotted already. Thanks for playing
-- Boycott Shell
In case of a slashdotting, here's a mirror of OurMedia on the wayback machine:o rg
/ironic
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ourmedia.
Okay is it free as in beer or free as in get your free i-pod? Sounds great for now.
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
At my website... it wouldn't exist at the size it is now without archive.
Speed Demos Archive - Lots of speed runs!
All sites that are linked to by /. should be hosted here...
What is the use in trying to say "first post"? It's really old and not even remotely funny... shutup!
until they run out of money by giving away free services which cost them money.
If it can't handle being /.'d, how is it going to handle millions of users?
Proverbs 21:19
apparently that isn't going to be enough bandwidth. There's one question answered.
If a measley Slashdotting is gonna kill their bandwidth, how can they possibly expect to server media files to a couple million people?
Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?
Now they don't have to buy storage and bandwidth to host their music.
Not sure what hosting costs your average indy band, but anything that saves them even a few bucks is a boon.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Hmmm, I thought the dotbomb already made it abundantly clear that "free" is not a successful business model. Maybe I'm out of touch, but dont servers, storage, and bandwidth still cost money?
FEED IT DATA!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
The server appears to be hosed. It looks like:
ourmedia.org resolves to 69.44.153.99.
69.44.153.99 is part of ServerBeach's netblock
I guess our only hope is that server isn't a shared one, taking down several other sites with it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
archive.org is still going strong.
-- Boycott Shell
Google cache: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:_Eg_-msQTqYJ: www.ourmedia.org/+ourmedia&hl=en
Coral cache: http://ourmedia.org.nyud.net:8090/
In case of Slashdotting, break mirror.
Need I say more?
Given that the site is slashdotted by you hordes, I'm basing from the article posting it seems to me that this could be an easy way to obtain copyrighted material without getting any **AA involvement.
Here's the plan:
1. Claim to host multimedia for life.
2. Open access for users to *upload*
3. ???
4. Shut down because of bad business plan.
5. Reap the rewards!
Technically you didn't download any files, and by the time *AA comes by, you've shut down and stopped hosting files. (But really we all know you've made those backup copies offline.)
Am I right, or am I right?
Live forever, or die trying.
Ok, now I'm worried. If they hold up their end of their bargain and start running out of money, they might start killing people!
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
Yet again, some altruistic project to try and better the knowledge of mankind...
/dev/random to it or it gets swamped with kiddy porn or other crap.
I wonder how long it's going to take for some asshole to try and upload
I wish I had gotten here sooner so I could have looked and seen if they had any policies about stuff like that, but - well, the Slashdot effect is strong...
I see that they are partnered with wikipedia, what exactly is the relationship of this partnership?
What? Doesn't everybody?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Go ahead and search it yourself, everything is deleted before 9/11 up to a month or two. Certain articles and websites end up being deleted too. And it's not because it wasn't archived, it was there before. It's quite interesting. Makes me wonder who really runs archive.org..
This will go with that free email account that I signed up for four years ago that was suppose to be free for a lifetime....
Well, it would if the email company hadn't decided to switch to "pay or you lose your address" model a year later.
That should have been http://www.superblog.org/index.php?setlanguage=en of course...
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
Even if independent recording artists go along with posting their recordings for free on a site like this, what makes you think the songwriters will too?
about page home page
I'm surprised at the cynicism. This is a place that can host *thousands* of losslessly encoded live music shows with the permission of the artist with very little downtime that I've seen. Cost to the user = zero.
looks like that should have read "for the life of our servers, which will be 5 ms after our link gets posted on /."
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
Isn't he that cross-dressing black guy?
All the better reason to destroy internet archives NOW. They will judge us from all of those terrible fetish-hentai-furry-goth-and-much-much-more sites out there.
...after the story appears on Slashdot, how are they going to handle hosting all of those multimedia files?
Insert witty sig here.
So how many people you think are going to store and preserve copies of Goatse for future generations?
Home of the midwest loser - www.say-10.net
http://www.geocities.com/jtd514/stuff/InternetArch iveGaps.gif
..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".
Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.
Perhaps the biggest infection within our society is this notion that you can get something for nothing, and how otherwise seemingly intelligent people turn into brain dead drooling baboons at the thought of getting a freebie.
Just encrypt that tarball, upload and presto: instant offsite storage.
Linus would be proud.
Interestingly, I cannot access archive.org's archived websites via their wayback machine at work. Guess they don't want us getting to the already blocked sites through alternative means.
Here's a cache
Unlike most acronyms posted on slashdot, this one actually seems to have been coined as a fad and hip bit of slang well before the personal computer. (My origins don't go back much further than that so I can't comment on it's real coinage).
Of course, this type of language research in the past has been helped by the need for people to write things down in physical form. If this isn't a scam where the poster waves their copyright or something (which is very possible), I suspect that these motives to monitor evolution of thought and language might be their noble (but naive) purpose for offering this service.
Would make sense, wouldnt it?
Right next to Lucasarts new corporate compound. I guess that means we'll have to put up with that fucking Jar-Jar for a lifetime. Or worse, George will bankroll some of its funding and we'll have to put up with endless plugs for the next Star Wars DVD retread release with extra-super-never-before-seen-insider-scenes.
I can't access it.
Well, it was a good idea while it lasted. Lifetime storage, but nobody can get to it!
Maybe this will last longer than they're free mirror service
How Long Until the idgets post copyrighted stuff and the cops come out and impound the web servers?
-Mattman
http://OneBillion.blogspot.com
It's nice to see that free services like that are flourishing...
jamendo does it too, for CC music albums, and they use bittorrent.
Their rules and policies aren't very clear. Much of the media being created for and posted to the web falls into the "gray" areas of copyright--media whose copyright status hasn't been tested in court because the RIAA/MPAA/big media companies are afraid to lose, although they might just win. I wonder if they want that media or not.
The about page on archive.org states they received funding from 'Alexa Internet' http://www.alexa.com/. Is this the same Alexa that is known for spyware applications?
Honestly, sometimes I think people post their websites to slashdot just to do load-testing.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I think you are incorrect. There are just too many examples of getting things free and you never have to pay. The term "gift" comes to mind: gifts typically involve this.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
P0rn? Copyrighted items?
It may surprise you to know that most porn is copyrighted as well. But for some reason, most people don't see hoarding porn pics/vids in the same category as leeching MP3s or NES ROMs.
Mabu may have a point. If someone gives you a free baboon, you end up paying dear.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
>it gets hosted for free, for life
How will they know I'm dead so they can take it down. Or, can I upload myself and become a Stored Mind, as in The Boy Who Would Live Forever?Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
In this case, one "pays" by providing media to the metaphorical media bank if you're using their hosting service, and you "pay" by giving attention to the media posted there (and therefore directly or indirectly attention to the creator(s) of the media) thus encouraging people who want their media distributed to continue providing more if you are simply downloading media from them.
Still, I agree with your sentiment. In the USA, we USED to have this thing called "The American Dream", which referred to the idea that anyone could come to the country, and if they worked hard, they'd be "successful" (which meant having a home and a reasonable selection of minor luxuries e.g. a car, television, etc.). We STILL have something called "The American Dream", but it's not the same one, now it just means "getting a pile of money for little or no work", such as through winning the lottery or profitable lawsuits. The part of the equation that related the amount of success to the amount of work one did has somehow been removed from the concept, and it really bothers me...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
those terrible fetish-hentai-furry-goth-and-much-much-more sites
Hey now. The so-called "much much more" is the only stuff that can excite me.
bukkake tentacle pr0n! BUKKAKE TENTACLE PR0N!!!
/Please donate karma and try the beef!
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
There is such thing as a free lunch. I've seen it in countless forms, including as an actual free lunch. One relevant example was a guy in Europe who provided free web hosting. No ads, no problems. You could even seamlessly connect your domain name there. Great support and everything. There is such thing as a free lunch.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Think this is an isolated cae? I can tell you a similar story about a company who promoted their free e-mail accounts with the phrase "Bigfoot for Life". Now since I don't cough up a monthly fee they cut my mail off after a small number of e-mails each day. The spammers use up that capacity, so I seldom get anything useful to my Bigfoot account, although on a rare occasion e-mail for an old friend I had lost contact with does still sneak through (the only reason I still bother to sort through the sapm).
In the Internet world free for life seems to mean free until you get dependent on the account and have your address passed out to all your friends, then we start charging you. It's a shame to see Slashdot involved in this type of marketing hype.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Nah. I think that the first thing visting aliens will see will be the 400 km wide three-dimensional Goatse carved into the Tibetan plateau when some scriptkid hacks a spaceborne combat laser array sometime around 2070.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hey, great! Of course, it'll only take twenty minutes for OurMedia to get it OUT from a requesting page to the user's browser.
You know a year ago, on StreetFire.net we launched a "hard drive for life" with 1GB webmail, calendars, user groups, 2GB file storage, sharing (share with user, group, domain or web).
Guess what? We only had 100 people sign up and half of them didn't use the system.
So we:Then we renamed the service http://videos.streetfire.net/
Guess what? now it's a run away success, with 50% traffic growth and we're up to 44,000 unique visitors in 3 weeks and will have half a million videos served in our first month.
So the moral of the story is, it isn't the service it's how it's marketed.
-Adam
from article: "We'll store your video, podcasts or digital photo collection for free -- forever. No catches."
also from article: "If you uploaded any media before March 18, 2005, it's likely that you'll have to do so again. Sorry 'bout that."
I'm still not quite sure what the exact question is, but I think the answer is 42.
http://www.ourmedia.org.nyud.net:8090/
"Please don't post material that you don't have the right to publish or violate any copyright or other proprietary rights in your posts."
That's all they say. It's good enough for me: I bought this CD; just putting it up on a Webdrive, and listening to it myself from wherever, is fair use of the copyrighted material. But for how many microseconds will a record company exec pause before deciding that someone else, somewhere, might listen to some music on which they have the copyright, without paying the record company extra? And pounce with every harassment, especially legal, to stop me from fairly using it myself, though I do no abuse?
--
make install -not war
You can still download files from the backend servers if you know the URL.
s /SamBisbeeYo uAreHere_0/sam_bisbee_you_are_here.mov
Example:
http://ia108032.us.archive.org/0/item
Is it just me, or does it seem likely that the primary use of this nice offer will be for pr0n hosting?
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects, such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service, where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.
Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations from people like you.
There Still Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Those "freebies" you got still cost somebody something. Just because they didn't cost you anything (directly) doesn't mean they were without cost.
I'm getting a mirrored copy of a MySQL error from ourmedia.org; in other words, Coral Cache is working fine, it's the ourmedia.org hosting service that is apparently still not quite ready for the popularity.
Digital Citizen
So the deal is: Yeah, you can post pretty much anything here, for free. No porn or pirated works, though. Sorry 'bout that -- we'd like to remain open, thank you very much.
As far as "only copyrighted works" -- not quite. We'll host any materials: public domain texts and movies, GNU General License software, works that fall within well-accepted fair use standards. And, of course, the stuff you create yourself.
We're trying to help enable remix culture, so that people will be able to find works they can freely build upon, remix and recirculate. Without getting a call from your friendly RIAA/MPAA legal team.
-- jd, one of the founders
OK. Please deposit your slashdot fee right away...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Wait a second!!! If one site archives another, but yet that site achives it, and then back again, does that cause a black hole?
Seriously though, if archiving the internet, wouldn't you have to be selective on what sites you archive? You can't archive an archive. Thus, you can't really archive the internet.
What's wrong with the moderators lately? Who could possibly think that this asinine comment is insightful?
But what about the media whose copyright status hasn't been established, such as fannish works and other remixes of popular media? The work that might fall under fair use but might not . . . the work that there's no case law to establish its legality?
Fair use is only a defense, not a protection.
We're got a first-rate team of Drupal coders on the case. Throttle is being turned on (so blocks won't appear, but site will still function), unused modules are being removed (even unused ones contribute to load as code gets parsed) etc. etc.
There is also a *lot* of php code and mysql tables that need to be vetted. there is a ton of custom code that has been volunteer written for ourmedia - so part of the task too is assessing some of this as we move along.
one side note: as for the serving of the actual media - it all happens from archive.org which does give us some short delays here and there. but nothing unsolvable.
Remember, folks, we're an all-volunteer open-source project. People have put in hundreds of hours -- and we ain't gettin' paid for this!
So please be patient and be gentle (right!) as we work out the kinks. As the site says in bright lettering, we're in Alpha mode!
- jd, schmoozer in chief and co-founder
Yours, or the life of yet another .com?
Brewster (the big cheese archiver) generally plays it safe, removing content that has been shown to be questionable. While the archive has people like Larry Lesig on their side, they do have a finite amount of resources.
It's logically trivial if you don't present your archive in the same communications medium as the one you're archiving.
Like archiving Internet2, and presenting it on the internet. Or (not AND) vice versa.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What the hell -- we're a free, not-for-profit, open-source media project. It doesn't get more Slashdotty than that.
We're looking for coders to help out on Ourmedia -- to make it a Slashdotter's multimedia wet dream.
The Ourmedia Project is relying on open-source developers to build new functionalities for the site -- such as media ratings, new RSS features, playlists, social networking, license searches, improved taxonomies -- and to help build a global registry connecting a network of grassroots media sites.
That means six months from now we don't want to be just a destination website -- we want open-source schemas that will let any site hook into a global network of freely accessible grassroots media.
But we can't pull that off unless more expert coders pitch in. (Here's our current project team and advisory board.) (Apologies, we're adding more servers tonight.)
See our Volunteer page for details. Pass it along. Or ignore this, as you wish. :~)
-- jd (email), co-founder
?: I don't have any personal media to share. Can I still join?
!: Yes, and we'll even give you a free blog.
?: Is there an Ourmedia community?
!: Yes -- many communities. You can use Ourmedia for any legitimate purpose: as a social meeting space, a gathering spot to diss Big Media, a learning center for tips on how to create compelling video or photos, or for other reasons. It's up to you.
?: Hey, MP3s by David Byrne and the Beastie Boys are on Ourmedia. What are they doing here?
!:Ourmedia is for amateurs, hobbyists and professionals. We don't discriminate against artists just because they're under contract with a music label. We try to help bands, DJs and solo musicians achieve greater visibility, so it wouldn't make sense to banish artists who have achieved commercial success. Ourmedia is about inclusiveness.
?: Many artists like Byrne, the Beasties, Le Tigre and others are letting you remix, re-create and recirculate their works -- for free -- under a Creative Commons license.
!: I didn't upload my stuff, but I see it on Ourmedia anyway. Why?
?: If you assigned your work a Creative Commons license in the past, that means you agreed to share it with anyone. Ourmedia is about exposing and sharing works, so someone probably took the initiative to place your work on our servers for sharing. Please feel free to make changes to your work's media page; we'll make sure you have full access.
!: If someone uploaded your material to Ourmedia and it does not have a Creative Commons license, that means the person violated our Site rules and we'll remove the material. See our Deletion and retraction policy.
?: Why can't I leave anonymous comments?
!: This is a community. Only members may blog, post comments and participate in our Forums. Registering takes only a few moments.
?: Your site doesn't look complete.
!: Ourmedia is in alpha, which means we're still in our early stages (next comes beta). Instead of spending years working on the site behind closed doors, we decided to ask other volunteers to join us in building out the site and adding new functionalities. We're an all-volunteer open-source effort. Not to brag, but we've already come farther than a lot of sites with a full-time paid staff. And here is what's on our drawing boards.
?: Dude, there's some pretty harsh stuff on Ourmedia!
!: We can pretty much guarantee that you can find material on Ourmedia that you won't like. That's the price of visiting an open library and global town square. This isn't a watered-down, PG-rated, safe-for-the-FCC mass medium. Our Site rules explain that as a global repository, we draw the line at pornographic and infringing materials, but we are not in the business of censoring media we disagree with.
?: No porn, you say?
!: No porn. Go away.
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
Did not take long to come up with another example: someone gets a nice new TV and they toss the perfectly good one out by the curb for anyone to take. It's a free lunch. I've seen it.
Or, a church has a Thursday night dinner. They end up with some leftover, which goes to the homeless shelter. Another free lunch, literally.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's been a coincidence that this came out today. I too have been needing a solution recently for hosting a new food network.
Hopefully since archive.org works out for you, Radix, I have the same luck. We'll see. I started experimenting with torrents too.
I found it a little tough for a newbie to start using torrents. I found and am using Blog Torrent. That's been a neat tool to get into torrents and trackers with the least effort possible.
This is going to end up just like adorablebunnies.com
The problem then is that it's going to be refusing a large amount of the 'grassroots' media that is being produced in the web community. How that affects their mission . . . well, it certainly limits it. If you follow Jenkins' theories on the origins of media fandom and the creative production via fandom--it'll be missing our modern-day continuation of the oral storytelling and transformative tradition. (And media that's openly archived and distributed elsewhere, although by sites that are intended in less permanent terms.)
And the relevant help page is a dead link.
Good concept, needs work.
when 11 hours after the post they're still /.ed from folks just doing a page lookup??