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Bram Cohen to Release BitTorrent Search Engine
AI Playground writes "Within two weeks, a BitTorrent search engine will be available at BitTorrent.com. From the Wired News article: 'Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen's popular BitTorrent protocol.'"
I haven't seen this many drugs in a Wang since I ran a Chinese Opium den.
Looks like I'm going to die.... oh well.
First, it would have cost the university a software audit. "Who cares?" you say. This would undoubtedly turn up something on someone's machine that was illegal, and the university would be fined. Then the university would make damn sure that this guy never worked anywhere in academia ever again.
So, if you are prepared to deal with this sort of thing, it's not a big deal. Stand up for your rights. But, unless you want to lose your job anyway and then not get hired elsewhere, it's best to resign.
Unfortunately, as previous posters have noted, that's the way it works in academia.
If he'd been a tenured professor, he wouldn't have been under as much personal pressure to resign but that wouldn't have stopped his department from being "audited" to death by the industry, and he might still have chosen to resign to "take one for the team."
I hope there's an investigation into the outside pressure:
Either there is reason for department to be audited or it shouldn't be, but the topics of discussion in the lectures should NOT be a determining factor, and his resignation should NOT change whether or not any audits proceed. The fact that his resignation changed that outcome means it's political, and as such there needs to be an investigation, so this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
I can't believe how quickly these creatures have crawled from beneath the bridges and translated their near-unintelligble grunts to paper.
Mods, please mark "Troll" to anyone who posts anything like:
"He's a wuss, he backed down and quit."
or
"He resigned, he didn't get fired. TFA != Story Title"
Half-truth: He resigned.
Complete truth: He was forced to resign, and denounced by the university. The university said, "he only taught a few classes," when he'd been teaching full-time for 5 years!
This is BS, and censorship at its worst. I'm working on becoming a Computer Science professor, and this article makes me glad I don't live in Spain. Does anyone remember this from a few weeks ago? The RIAA wants just as much control over U.S. universities as the Spanish equivalent already has over theirs.
A university isn't the same as a business. The notion of academic freedom is central to a university, and the fact that a group of record companies could pressure a dean in this way shows that these guys have taken upon themselves far too much power. It was wrong, it was a violation of the notions of academic freedom, and I think the time is coming when we better sit down and figure out just how much power we want RIAA and its clones elsewhere in the world to have.
IANAL, but in most countries if you are forced into a position where you feel incorrectly pressured to resign, and you do resign, that is still grounds for an unfair dismissal case. He was effectively fired by the comments that were presented to him.
However, I do agree with some people that it would have been a clearer argument if he waited longer for the situation to develop more and made proper recordings of phone calls "discussing his problematic situation".
I got confused and thought that was an article on Wikipedia, hahahaha roffle
The hand of theirs is clearly behind. As an example, the teacher had a conference room booked like a week before, just to be said that it was suddenly "not available", although it was empty. Also, some of their listeners did book another room by theirselves, without mentioning at all that conference, and had their reservation cancelled right before the conference without any reasons given at all.
I think you don't really know how much power the SGAE has here (RIAA equivalent). They, a private organization, with no publical accouting at all, got the right to collect a tax on every CD and DVD media which increased their price around 40%. I thought before that taxes could only be collected by the state, but it seems I was wrong, not to mention something called "presunción de inocencia", that's "you're innocent until proven guilty". Or you used to, at least.
That's their main way of funding, but they use many other extortion tecniques. As an example, if a band wants to play anywhere (whether it is a town's local celebrations, a bar, a local radio, even playing the damn hymn of a football club in the stadium) they force the owners of the place to pay them, EVEN when the band plays their own music - in fact, almost every free concert has to give free tickets for them to be able to know how many people did attend. Of course, there is no transparence at all on how the funds get distributed between their artists.
And, again, they're arrogant to unbelievable extremes. Always whining about the "death" of the culture, when asked about the CC licences applied to music, one of their representors did laugh at the interviewer, answering that "you'd be fool to not register your song, because I could do it and collect the money in your place".
Of course, noone does anything between the political parties. With the PP (conservative party) that canon on CD's was imposed, and PSOE got a lot of their election campaign funds from them... So the problem does not exist at all.
F***ng thieves. This country sucks a lot, really. If that was the major problem...
Interesting how one of the pressure tactics were the license audits. Propriatary vendors obviously have the right to do this, but it appears to have been a source of great leverage in silencing critics.
Also interesting, the teacher was only going to share his opinion on why using P2P may be legal. In America at least we are generally pretty protective of the right to debate ideas. The MPAA and its spanish counterparts though appear to be opposed to this concept.
If you're going to be an academic institution it would seem prudent to move away from software and support of groups that are unwilling to even allow different opinions to be expressed on a college compus about a topic. We used to call that type of exchange education.
It seems that a year ago Pingtel had its doubts about SIP as the sole technology for VoIP. And they are right, of course.
The key to making this work is a combination of SIP and other related technologies, but most of all, VoIP needs a solid business plan to work. Despite good technologies and intentions, without a business plan that is well-designed, the project will be doomed to failure. Pingtel thinks they have the right business model. Time will tell
Oh, and to the point that Skype's firewall piercing is unique or unacceptable -- it isn't. See an analysis of Skype signaling done at Columbia University. Skype appears to use a variant of the STUN/ICE technique currently being worked through in the IETF for use with SIP, too. What isn't acceptable in the corporate environment is the local LAN probing / discovery that Skype does at startup!!!
So I want something that plays well with me, and others.
Darl must be beaming and handing out cigars by now.../p
Yup, we could call ourselves the Open Source Association of America. The OSAA would would be a cartel of orgs big (IBM, Redhat, Novell, etc) and small, and we could go about auditing businesses' code for GPL violations.
When PHBs see our 733T audits-required letters, they'll _finally_ take Open Source seriously, because everyone knows you're not a serious player in this biz unless you send threatening letters by the dozen.
To get a better deal from IBM. That would lower their costs and lower the prices of the Macs.
Essentially they're shifting part of the cost burden to IBM, while keeping their share of the profits intact, in an attempt to boost their sales.
Also, it could be an attempt to make sure that IBM, with its focus on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Revolution, does not forget about Apple.
The Register already has an analysis on this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/23/apple_inte l/
The conclusions are: Apple already use a lot of non PowerPC chips (iPod, AirPort base stations), so these talks may well have nothing to do with Mac's. Also, it could be a scare tactic to make IBM a bit more eager as a chip supplier.
The thing that sets Apple apart from all other companies in this area is that they aren't just a hardware company or a software company. They are both. Most people buy the hardware because of the excellent software they offer on top. It's the combined experience that makes their hardware stand above the rest.
Are you serious? The G5 generates a ton of heat. Why do you think you haven't seen G5 powerbooks yet?
For the n-th time, what would Apple have to gain? Who would buy a Mac when they could buy a Dell.
Maybe someone who doesn't want his Tech support calls forwarded to Bangalore? (Not that I don't have my complaints about Apple support, but at least I could figure out what everyone was telling me, leaving out the ambiguity of figuring out whether they really sucked or whether I just thought they sucked because I couldn't figure out what the hell they were saying.)
And your face is on the front page!
If we suppress every topic that might be used to do harm, there will not be much left in our universities.
That's the point.
If people are too uneducated to resist they're much easier to control. Just feed the smart ones enough Prozac and you have a New World Order.