Slashdot Mirror
Skypecasting - P2P File Sharing
shashark writes "Technologically savvy users are merging these technologies to "Skypecast",
using Skype's service to distribute recordings across the internet for free.
This allows expert users to run their own mini-radio stations, which can be
accessed by any Skype user. Skype does not actively support these uses, but
encourages its users to find new applications for their service. Other possibilities discussed by Skypecasters at
Unbound Spiral or
Moodle are to turn an MP3 player into a radio station for any of Skype's 29
million registered users to dial up using their Skype line. Instructions also
are available on how to record a personal soap opera and use Skype to distribute
it en masse. Even more ominously, some Skypecasters record Skype calls and post
them on the Internet."
I sure hope the RIAA doesn't ask the Federal Govnerment for wiretapping rights to see if VoIP calls are really U2 songs. [shivvers in corner]
That link should be .html, not .htm
click
" Even more ominously, some Skypecasters record Skype calls and post them on the Internet.""
Remember: Blame the users, not the technology.
Wonder if the various wiretapping rules will eventually come into play. And if not, why not?
It's not even difficult to setup -- there is a Winamp plugin -- pick it and hit "Play" and you have a radio station.
Doing it this way requires to to plug a physical device (MP3 player, radio) into your soundcard..
Bringing you a friendly message from the Apple-zealot: In the name of the great Apple. We were first, and it's called PodCasting. Not mp3-streaming, internet-radio, skypecasting or anyother non apple-related term.
It is .html, not .htm.
why is it that two of the urls have dw.com.com redirects? smells fishy to me
Skype calls are encrypted end-end. Even if RIAA gets the wiretapping rights to see if VoIP calls are really U2 songs, it'll be hard for them to snoop in. And skype is just a beginning.
With ever increasing options of sharing digital media, RIAA really has only two options left-
* Get the govt to ban *any* kind of peer-peer activity. Might be a possibilty, esp given those money bags involved. Don't underestimate your govt. yet.
* Embrace the change. Move out of media-brokerage business and let the artists provide their creations on whatever media they choose. Change Happens.
--
All your music are belong to us.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
i don't use skype so i don't know... but i assume, it being a telephone-oriented service, that it has a hard-limited bitrate?
usually telephone conversations only need 8 KHz recordings, in mono. If converted to mp3, this would result in FAR inferior-sounding recordings for music than CD-quality.
but, like i said, maybe this is not a limit.. i don't really know.
in any case, why do people always have to take a decent service and twist it into something the authorities will find "questionable"? It's like they are trying to help discourage VOIP or something by exposing its potential for misuse. Use it for what it was intended -- telephone conversations -- and no one will care. I imagine the current P2P technologies are better adapted for spreading music anyways.. but i guess the rule is, if there's a crack, someone will always fill it. humans are weird.
Anything that threatens the big Telcom companies will get shut down by government. The companies will find some excuse, they can be used by terrorists, they will collapse an industry, they will cook your brians. The telcom companies have enough lawyers and lobbyists to thing of something.
I just hope they don't kill this technology because they use the argumet "It is for P2P and illegal file sharing".
I wonder how this will all work. It sounds promising. But if someone has an open wi-fi port, say near a university, how much bandwith will 10 people take up making phone calls? 100 people?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
This sounds like some marketing droid at Skype trying to invent a phenomenon by pretending that it already exists.
Ok then, I'm interested. Any links to Skypecasts or sites indexing them?
Didn't the government already rule that wiretapping applies to internet communications?
And having a phone would only stregnthen that argument for requiring ISP companies to have technology which allows for wiretaps.
But I don't see how VoIP will help P2P, it is just between 2 people, not like Napster was, or BitTorrent where one person shares, and anyone can d/l.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
So how long before I recieve a call in the middle of dinner asking me if I'd like to buy the following new hit single:
[music]Oh tell me baby, how was I supposed to know, that somethin' wasn't right yeah...[/music]
I really don't want to be telemarketed to by Britney Spears, some indie artist, or, god forbid, some Indian guy getting paid to do his best to present the work to me.
Is there a way to fit an MP3 client backend to a Skype server frontend? Then that middleware could put existing Shoutcast (Icecast, etc) servers onto the Skype network: instant content for those 29M Skype consumers. An easy way to improve one's up/download ratios - quantitywise, at least.
--
make install -not war
I don't get this 'skypecasting'. A search on google tells me it's about recording conversations that raises concerns. Other results tell me it's about relaying audio blogs.
I seem to be lacking information on what skypecasting is exactly, and how one listens in or creates such a system.
So far from my understanding from what I got on google, it seems to me that people are recording convos on skype, and posting it on a site for downloading.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Quick little blurb about skype... its an application for your computer, created by Sharman Networks, the people who brought you Kazaa in all its glory and shame. Its P2P software that encrypts and tunnels voice conversations generally at better quality than normal phone conversations. I first found skype about a year and a half ago... and have been using it since to make calls accross the US, and around the world. During this bit of time they built themselves a network and suddenly provided the service of allowing you to call normal phones from your computer... the price for using SkypeOut to call most locations on the globe is .02 Euro~dollars per minute. Very recently they came out with SkypeIn where you can have a phone number routed to your computer and a list of secondary locations... at will. Haven't used that one personally.
The only times where rate limiting degrades the performance to below same-room communication is when you add normal phone lines to the mix.
http://skype.net
Gravity Sucks
A lot of people here are questioning the worth and/or validity of skypecasting, citing out technologies that will do the same thing, same as, I believe, Winamp, and other players that will allow you to stream your audio to some other person on the net.
But skype is p2p, so that instead of you streaming directly to your audience, listeners may stream from you AND some other listeners, obviously minimizing the bandwidth required of the originator. The other alternative software packages are client-server, one to one, correct?
Also, one thing that makes this worthwhile as a slashdot topic is that there is already an established base of about 30 million skype users. So, this could serve as a jumpstart, just as napster did bittorrent, even though napster, like skype is proprietary....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Humans come equipped with aural input devices, called ears. These devices are NOT protected against copyright infringement activities! Looks like we need to get into the brain and change the bios around a bit to fix that.....
"This really shows how little your average slashbot understands about the music industry in general and the RIAA specifically."
Well if all the advice I've seen over the years is any indication? They don't understand business (any business), economics, law, women, etc. They can't even understand themselves.
That's why I say: Slashdot is to the Internet, what Tabloids are to journalism.
Why did shashark ebmed the links to Unbound Spiral and Moodle (defanged here) in dw.com.com SPYWARE links? Is this the sleaziest submission scam yet, which actually forces us to install spyware to follow a frontpage Slashdot link? Are all those jokes about soulsucking NYT registrations really true about shashark? This should be the abuse that finally forces Slashdot editors to check the links on submissions.
"dw.com.com is advertising-oriented spyware (adware) that downloads and displays new advertisements in a popup window while a user is browsing the Web. dw.com.com is difficult to remove, as it does not provide an uninstaller."
--
make install -not war
Lets hope that such a great telephony application doesnt become an illegal file trading application and get shut down by RIAA
PeerCast does try to do what you describe, but last time I checked it didn't do a very good job of it.
What happens to Skype when The Aussies sue Sharman into oblivion?
Big deal. Flycasting has your Shoutcasting beat by decades.
Come to think of it, so does Plaster Casting (no, I'm not going to link to that, you smutty-minded Slashdotters).
We're getting way too much of this crap. Are Slashdot editors too busy playing The Sims to do their jobs, or what?
*cast has overtaken 'cyber', 'my' and even 'i' as the new king of overused technology *fixes.
When you loaded your programs of casette tapes? A lot of beeps and bleeps. Then some radio stations would broadcast a "program", you could record it and then later load it in your computer. How nifty ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There's another fault with his argument. The dependency on an Internet connection (and more practically a broadband connection).
A requirement that forces a choice upon people. Those that don't have, for physical, or economic reasons are left out of this "New Business model", and those that don't want the "New Business Model" are likewise left out. The present "Old Business Model" doesn't require the internet, and doesn't penalize those who don't desire such a thing.
Likewise his "New Business Model" penalizes those customers who for whatever reason, can't or will not travel to were the artist is, but does penalize the artist who can't travel all over the world, or sell out on all his merchandice.*
Which in general reenforces the "Faith" that people have for technological solutions (Specifically the internet) to all problems on Slashdot.
*The barriers to the "Starving Artist" state are much lowered, while the "Old Business model" takes out some of the risk of being an artist.
Interestingly enough, I experiemented with this last week for a school assignment. I tried calling some people in Nepal and Kyrgyzstan, but the connection quality was terrible...
Eventually, I settled on Iraq. With the audio out plugged into my minidisc recorder, and a microphone jacked into the soundcard.
http://ohjon.com/p/JRN112.Iraqi.Interview.mp3
Due to a technical problem, their audio was recorded while mine was not. I had to re-record my voice so in that sense, it's not a real journalistic effort but rather some sort of "Reality Fiction" type thing.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting. Let me know what you think.
- Jon
http://ohjon.com
"I wish that skype will die and that it will be replaced by some open and free standard."
Ah, yes. Capitalism must die so that RMSland can be built.
While they share some of the same founders, Skype uses a different network with the same technology. See JoltID about the network. See the Skype Developer Zone for more on the APIs.
Phil Wolff. Skype:evanwolf. editor, the independent Skype Journal
http://www.peercast.org does this. As the other poster says, Skypecast doesn't.
Does anyone know how legitimate internet radio in North America really is?
Radio stations pay a fee to broadcast music. The companies that broadcast the music you hear in stores pay the same fee. Churches pay a fee so that people can play and sing music. What makes internet radio different? There is an established system where you must pay to broadcast other people's music in public.
I'll probably get modded as a troll but it is a serious question.
You're just jealous that Freenet doesn't support realtime audio streaming.
:)
Yet.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The point of this is that someone wanted to use the word "Skypecast".
...In a way that has little to do with any of the advantages of modern peer to peer distribution, as Skype uses P2P merely for point to point, one to few transport.
Look at the the "bullet points" from the article:
>>A growing number of people are sharing the digital music on MP3 players and other music devices using freely available software and Skype, a free Internet phone service.
How are mp3 players part of this? Sure, you could rip the stream from skype, tag it and save it, then transfer it to your iPod, but it would be a pain and sound pretty bad.
The enthusiasts are borrowing heavily from another personal broadcasting phenomenon called podcasting, in which digital recordings are posted on a Web site for download to a variety of music players, including desktop PCs and portable gadgets like Apple Computer's wildly popular iPod.
They're borrowing more heavily from kids who used to play songs for each other over the telephone, with similar results.
"Skypecasters," as they call themselves, use Skype's peer-to-peer telephone network to distribute recordings over the Internet directly to each other for free.
This is a case of someone tossing around buzzwords without understanding the technology, in an "iPods! P2P! Skype! Isn't it all just so neat!" kind of way.
I give it a week before some bonehead is yammering on about how "BlueCasting" is all the rage.
-- My Weblog.
Australia has had a Shortwave Receiver
(for verifyably licensed Radio Amateurs,
it's also a remotely controlled HF/VHF/UHF
transceiver) based on Skype for yonks!
(Make a Skype call to it to listen...
access a web page to control the radio
and (if licensed) transmit. A bit like
the receive-only JavaRadio (Javeradio?
these days...?)
I guess this is a bit different, since
the radio-based Skype applications are
Real Time, not recorded.
My school uses Moodle for online courses, not for MP3s, voice chatting, P2P file sharing, or anything else of that manner. The link takes me to a login page, and I can't find any mention of Skype anywhere else on the site. Can someone explain to me again exactly what Moodle is doing for skypecasting?
for instance in a Moodle course, an instructor can invite a guest lecturor in via skype, let students ask questions, and archive the 'show' for review.
This is also great for discussions and presentations in distance education, where the cost of interacting with means besides text has been very high before skype and other voip apps.
Of course the usual laws regarding recording apply: you have to let everyone being recorded know ahead of time.
Are telephones "ominous" because one can record them? In education, folks record coference calls and video conferences all the time, to be able to do this is generally seen as more of a 'feature' than a 'bug'.
To be able to do it affordably using skype and an open source course management system like Moodle is great!
require registration, click the big "login as guest" button and read away (not sure why the article just sends you to the main page, but you can click the "Using Moodle" link and search for skype to find the discussions).
p e&id=5
You can do that as a guest, too:-).
For example: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/search.php?search=sky
Remember, click the 'login as guest' button.
Sharman Networks produces a program that allows p2p file sharing... Completely unexpected.
So, people are actually calling these skype "broadcasters" to listen to their hold music?!
Yes, but that could be said of all .htm links ;)
I wonder if conference mode actually works to distribute the same data to more people. A shame with p2p networks is that you have to do as much upload as download, and for people with little bandwidth this is a problem.
Maybe this would be a solution but if it is it will put serious load on the skype servers. Normal calls do not pass through the server, I don't know about conferences. If they don't then this is of no use.
On the other hand what about p2p through email? You can log in into your free email acount and send 10megabytes in attachments to 50 people. You are only doing traffic once.
Although I feel it would be a shame abusing a service that is offered to you for free. The result might be that targeted providers will set limits on the type/total size of attachments. And I think the same will happan to skype when people start flooding them with music streams.