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!
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 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?
Things are never too good to be true, especially in the computer world.
Sweet informative mod.
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
You are new here, aren't you?
Just be happy that they weren't advocating porn that includes grits anymore.....
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Hopefully "for life" didn't mean the life of their websever, because that was shortened to about 5 minutes after the story was posted. :)
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.
At my website... it wouldn't exist at the size it is now without archive.
Speed Demos Archive - Lots of speed runs!
Easy: When they run out of space, they start killing the users. No problem.
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.
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
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.
I see that they are partnered with wikipedia, what exactly is the relationship of this partnership?
..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.
The rules: fair use
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Is regular tin foil okay, or should I be using the heavy-duty kind?
It's nice to see that free services like that are flourishing...
jamendo does it too, for CC music albums, and they use bittorrent.
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?
Also it says "no porn"... I just posted about it on a previous thread with a link, it's up there somewhere.. :)
The Internet Archive has been around since 1996. We're funded by webcrawls-by-contract and by the Brewster Kahle Foundation. The Archive is a non-profit organization. We have no creditors. So relax.
It is in our charter to perpetuate our archives forever, and it's a charge we take seriously. As our hard drives go bad (and oh do they ever!) they are replaced by new ones, and we are protected from data loss by mirroring our archives across machines, and across data centers in different countries.
-- TTK
What I posted was only half the story .. in full, the Archive gets its funding the same way that traditional libraries do, through grants from foundations, donations from private entities, and in-kind donations from corporations. The K/A Foundation and crawls-by-contract are just the sources of income with which I am most familiar (I'm just a dumb-ass programmer, so that part of the business isn't very visible to me, thus the oversight).
-- TTK
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.
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
Well, the UI (the page linked to by slashdot here) isn't hosted at The Archive, for better or for worse.
The non-waybackmachine web servers (ten, at present) at archive.org proper are load-balanced via keepalived, and should stand up okay before a slashdotting. We learned things about the limitations of our webfarm from hosting the tsunami videos in the wake of that disaster, and beefed them up significantly.
Non-waybackmachine web traffic usually hovers around 40 to 60 hits per second, here, and we should be able to handle four or six times that before we start dropping anyone's connections.
-- TTK
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... ^_^