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P2P Population Growing Again
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck news is reporting that the file-sharing population has recovered from its mid-year plateau and is once again growing. At 9.45 million users, it is only slightly below its greatest height of 9.6 million users in August. Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."
The article says, "Various reasons, such as returning or departing college students, broadband penetration, computer and MP3 player sales, all have an impact on the strength of the P2P community." However they missed 1 all-important factor, and that is simply that the content that's up for grabs also affects the numbers. The article goes on to say, "Indeed, the month of November 2005 represents one of the strongest months yet with a total of 9,465,000 total connected users.....", odd how that coincides with the release of Half-Life 2...
The numbers are down. No one is using P2P. P2P is dead.
Got it? If we keep that message up, the *AA will go away.
Isn't that like doing a survey of search engines and not including Google?
Here's a link to the actual survey. It's not too informative, but it shows the cyclic nature of the p2p userbase mentioned in the article.
Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."
Damn right they don't. MPAA and RIAA don't quite know how to tackle that one. Kazaa et al are small potatoes compared to the really good, private, Bittorrent trackers.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is already accepted to some extent by anti-SPAM policies that forbid access to external SMTP servers, and has been used to great effect by university administrators.
It would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
What earth-shattering news! I am surprised this isn't the top story in all major media outlets. I mean what gives? P2P falls off by 150,000 users and no one is worried??? I mean, those people could be dead or something. Did anyone call the hospitals when this happended?
Ah, crap, I can't keep typing this with a straight face...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
TFA mentions that the survey was done by Big Champagne, and if i remember correctly, apps such as Peer Guardian, etc, typically block Big Champagne's IP ranges. So this could potentially misrepresent numbers of real-world P2P users. Not sure if that has been factored in, but if not, the reported numbers will definitely be on the conservative side.
Thats because a lot of users are students, and most went home for the summer break.
Should see a similar reducing around the Xmas holidays and spring break.
Nothing magical here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Recovered from its midyear plateau? Wha the fuck does that mean? I'd love for my stock portfolio to "recover" from annoying midyear plateaus.
Let's not forget what happens when you go "bigtime" with P2P.
2 6228 shows.
As this related Slashdot story http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/2
There is a case to be made, I think, that if certain ports were disabled for home users a serious dent could be made in this P2P population -- not to mention the great deal of bandwidth freed up for more serious Internet activity.
O RLY?
"In fact, some Bittorrent clients are pick alternate ports at random during startup to help avoid ISP filtering.
I would recommend a high port range, like 59052-59059, and also be sure you have those ports forwarded if you own a router. I've done this with Azureus, ABC, and Bitcomet and could leech and seed fine."
link
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I would have modded you up if you had posted logged in.
Because there are a LOT of legal uses for them. Just because something can be used improperly does not mean you should just automatically penalize those that are not.
The 'pirates' would just go father underground and as long as you allow any connections then the data will flow. You *cant* stop all flow of data, or you wouldnt be providing a service anylonger.
The only way to stop it is to make bandwidth so expensive its cheaper to go buy the item. ( but of course lose all your customers in the process )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wyck: Now, as you know, the Bittorrent users consisted of several millions.
George: Oh. I know they have some millions.
Wyck: They had more than some millions. Many, many millions.
I meant lower-case 'spam' there (unsolicited commercial e-mail), not upper-case (meat product good with cheddar and onion in omelets).
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The only way ISPs could block P2P is if they blocked every single goddam port excluding 21, 80 and a few others for AIM. Then someone would make filesharing that used those ports. So no worries, P2P isn't going anyway. Besides, it's part of the constitution. Remember prohibition? I don't, but I heard that shit was crazy.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
...because removing anonymity is the Holy Grail of the RIAA/MPAA strategy. They've been flogging their legal team to produce results now, and after Trusted Computing takes hold, expect the lawsuits and 'cease and desist' orders to increase (although I have great faith some smart person on the side of good will have TC broken before it goes mainstream). Lawsuits don't work now and they're not going to work in the future.
NeverEndingBillboard.com
NeverEndingBillboard.com
Good news - P2P is the thorn in the backs of music publishers that will force them to embrace legal digital distribution schemes like iTunes.
Like it or not but P2P is the best way to share information that's ever existed. I hope it will never go away unless a better technology comes into play.
The True FOSS Skype Replacement
Pardon my ignorance here but just how does an RIAA snoop bot on Kazaa or another similar P2P network know that someone using IP address 4.153.221.19 downloaded "Who let the dogs out" from ip address 131.96.1.6.? I can see how it might determine he searched for the song but how does RIAA prove he actually downloaded it? (or is this a point that the granny or the 12 year old could bring up in court?)
1. Downloading music with crappy bit rates, clicks, pops, and incomplete songs.
2. Downloading "fake" songs that are only garbled nonsense.
3. Downloading songs in zip or rar format that require a password to unzip.
4. Ominous feelings that the RIAA will slap my neighbor with a cease and desist letter because he lets me use his wireless connection.
Perhaps the record companies could take a look at #1 and release some decent quality songs with caveats. Something like reduced quality, incomplete, or with a small advert at the end of the recording that says: Purchase this song, video, and other exclusive features at www.youmustpayforyourtoppings.com. Maybe if they flood the networks with new releases with these annoyances, people will pay for legitamate full-featured, full-versioned copies.
Namaste
Judging by the quality of your average seeder on larger sites like IsoHunt, yes; BitTorrent usage is certainly gaining rapidly, if the asshole quotient is anything to judge by. I'll stick to my private communities for now. :D
http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/
If you can't buy downloadable music online without DRM, piracy begins to look pretty appealing. Pay and be restricted, or pirate and play anywhere?
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The beauty of the American legal system is that the burden of proof seems to be on the defendant nowadays.
It's up to you to prove that you didn't download the file.
there's more than one way to do me.
I was listening to Hard Attack and Sirius Radio and really started to like Between The Buried and me. Never heard of the band but liked it. I looked it up on the internet and bought two tickets to a show in town. Tickets were $13.50 each, but with the fees a set of TWO tickets cost me $47. That's almost double the price! That's a lot of money to spend on a band I've only heard on the radio a few times.
So I tried to buy the CD on the bands website, and the store keeps fucking up. Won't let me buy it. Page acts like it's about to load up and then stops. Maybe it's because I'm using a mac, maybe it's just messed up.
I'd like to copy the CD onto my iPod so I can listen to the whole thing first. I don't even want the CD, I'd like to listen to it tonight, don't want to wait for the mail.
Can somebody upload a Bitorrent of the the Alaska CD please? I tried to buy it really.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is true. Think about web page/email/IM/whatever packets being sent back and forth between clients and think about the massive stream (torrent?) of packets being moved between people seeding an ISO/DVD image or cracked game. 1/3 of all internet traffic sounds reasonable.
"You know, in your heart that it's all ripping off profits of hardworking, honest, family-type people who really have to scrape to make ends meet in the record industry... you *"
Yeah, you get a funny because you propogate the lie that piracy is just music. Only a fool believes that. Movies, music, games, printed material, software, anything that can be translated into bits, or already is, is pirated. From web sites that are copied (ask any webmaster about this), to artists archives that are distributed even though there's a "please do not distribute" at the bottom of the web page. Piracy (regardless of the degree to which it happens) is all about giving a middle finger to all the people who produce something that makes you happy. The artists hurting or not hurting is irrelevent. It's all about the lack of respect it shows. The fact even that you make fun of people attempting to make a living (let me guess, you're not making a living) just shows how much contempt we all have for our fellow people. "Damn you artists for trying to feed your family. Damn you for trying to provide for yourself. You should follow the RMS model, and be dressed in sackcloths, and living amoungst the animals, otherwise you're too good for the rest of humanity and need to be brought down and humbled like the poor, destitute pirate who doesn't even have a computer or broadband connection to his name."
Thousands of users made the switch after realizing that they're STILL going to have to put up with the infamous NAT Error, and it STILL drives Ubuntu users crazy...
Of course - not everyone can use torrents. Here in Santa Barbara, Cox Cable filters out bittorrent traffic by examining the packet headers. You can't get around it by changing the port for example. Really sucks - I can't even patch WoW without it taking 2 hours unless I find a direct download.
Bittorrent is P2P, however I know that on many occasions I have used BitTorrent to download America's Army, and Linux ISOs (Usually the dvd versions). Just because they're so many of them doesn't mean they're illegal. Just a guess (nothing to back this up), but there is a higher percentage of legal files going through torrents than on pure P2P apps such as Kazaa or Limewire etc.
It seems to me that a 'count' of peer to peer users without including BitTorrent (at least an estimation) ... is rather pointless.
... and it isn't like BitTorrent is some secret to the P2P community, heck, Slyck even has a link right on their site with a bunch of info on it... so why they didn't even try to include it is beyond me.
I would figure there are at least 9 million people using BitTorrent (legitemately or not)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Legit download sales have fallen, CD sales have fallen and P2P users have increased. Hmmmm let me see If I actually want to pay for music I can choose to have either a file which may or may not work with my mp3 player or A DRM'd malware infested CD that may or may not play on my CD player. /me bashes Carrey Sherman over the head with a clue!
DRM and financial persecutions encourage music piracy.
I wonder if we are now seeing the beginning of the end of the music cartels as tech savy teens begin to question the moral ethics of buying music and supporting such corrupt entities.
An industry which treats both the content creators and the fans with contempt should not survive. I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
I feel really sorry for you. Switch ISPs now. Seriously. And while you're at it, publicize the fact that Cox Cable is censoring their traffic, and therefore no longer deserves the title of common carrier, and therefore is liable for the actions of their users.
Ironically, if you think about it, they're putting themselves in danger of getting a lawsuit from the RIAA.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Is the packet sniffing done at the boundary?
if so would anyone know of a protocol tweak that would make bittorrent prefer localish connections over remote?
liqbase
last i heard, bittorrent made up more than 1/3 of all internet traffic (not just P2P). i'm not sure what proportion of traffic is p2p in general, but bittorrent is almost certainly the biggest piece of the pie.
Have you tried using a public proxy server? some isps are known to do this, and 9 times out of 10 using a public proxy will solve your issue...
I wonder if this isn't to do with recent economic fluctuations - it might be interesting to compare the state of the western economies with the rate of illegal filesharing - I suspect that it's usage increases when people have less disposable income to spend on themselves, which would explain a recent upsurge - people downloading stuff for themselves as Christmas means they feel they have to spend all their money others, and can't buy themselves things. Or maybe I'm just oversimplifying a complex situation. Would be interesting to check though...
There are still people who are using something other than bitorrent?? What????????
I kill harmless processes for sport
I hate being the one asking, but, I gotta wonder...
How many trillions of megabytes is that, in porn?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Obviously, most people don't think it's unethical to download music. And when the majority of society disagrees with one of its laws, that law will change. At least it should.
Guess you haven't tried those invite only torrent trackers...
I have not - are there any you would recommend?
It's an Infinite Loop.
Reminds me of the show, "It Takes a Thief". The premise was similar to the Chappelle show, if you remember. It featured Robert Wagner, and his later-to-be-wife, Jill St. John. In it, he stole, stole, and stole some more. Apparently, stealing was illegal then, unlike today where e-rags like /. tout "stealing is all right" often.
"Obviously, most people don't think it's unethical to download music. And when the majority of society disagrees with one of its laws, that law will change. At least it should."
At one time the majority of people believed that slavery was acceptable. Ethics shouldn't be dictated by the whims of the majority, but instead on rational thought. So, if you believe there is nothing wrong with violating copyright in downloading music, justify your opinion with a reasonable explanation. Don't just say it's ok because everyone is doing it.
Vote for Pedro
Would it be possible to use port forwarding and ssh tunnel the traffic to a friend's box outside of (suck my) Cox Cable?
Try switching to port 1720, the standard VoIP port. It works with Rogers Cable in Canada. They don't run packet shapers on any traffic on that port, for fear of lagging VoIP calls.
Call them every other day about it. Say you can't play WoW correctly. Encourage all the other WoW players in the area with Cox to do the same. It's impacting a very important usage (WoW being very popular, still).
Some ISPs are throttling your connection if you use p2p. A friend who is addicted to empornium.us for his latest porn fix, has his connection suspended for hours at a time by comcast. At first we thought there was a computer problem, but once I started searching around, it became obvious other comcast users have the same issues. I guess I would not blame the ISPs since so much bandwidth is used on P2P, however, I wonder how many more users would use p2p if they simply could.
Intelligent Design
Or you can switch to a client that encrypts the header. I know that in the world of private tracker BitComet is hated, but it really is a great client once you disable DHT tracking and enable header encryption, although Azureus may support it, too. My university also filters bittorent headers, but once those headers were encrypted, I was back in business.
Hmm. I wonder what barrier to entry is keeping me from being able to use an invite only tracker?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
9 million people is not "most people". It's not even 1% of the people on the planet. In fact, there are probably more illegal Mexicans in the United States than illegal file-sharers in the world. Hrm...
Suppose that I am expending bandwidth broadening my movie taste by dowloading legal out-of-copyright movies and you're browsing /b/ on 4chan. Why is your internet activity "serious" while mine gets throttled?
Could it be that you are in fact expressing a purely personal bias as if it were some sort of universal judgement?
There is an upcoming new use of the P2P distribution model: P2P TV.
Instead of downloading videos off eDonkey and then watch them afterwards, I watch video streams "live" with PPLive.
Stay tuned, I'm guessing that P2P TV is the next big thing after Napster/KaZaA/eDonkey!
w00t
It is one of those things that most people don't feel like it is a crime and there is nothing MPAA and RIAA can do. No amount of lawsuits, no amount of sappy ads before every movie in the theatres showing poor set designers that are now starving because those pirates stole the bread from their kid's table, is going to change that. Because people don't think it is such a big crime to share and download mp3 files and movies.
I am not saying whether it is good or bad, or that it is right to download music from P2P without paying for it - all I am saying is that most people don't see it as such a bad thing. As it turns out the order and peace and quiet in a most societies is not kept by police or any forceful tactics, but by the fact that the majority of the citizens like it that way. For example if tomorrow morning everyone got it into their heads that pillaging, vandalism, looting and killing each other is perfectly "ok" there will not be enough police or lawyers or soldiers to stop everyone acting in that manner.
I think the same goes for illegal file sharing, the majority of people don't see it as a particularly bad thing and they will continue to do it. In fact what people finally see is how Sony/BMG, Universal, EMI and friends have been screwing everyone all these years by selling crappy music for $15-$20 a disk. The artists weren't getting the money - it was all going into building vacation homes and buying Ferrari's for the executives of those production companies.
Now someone might say that the laws in our supposedly democratic society clearly reflect the attitudes and the will of the majority of people, so how come downloading is still illegal. I think it is because the laws today are created by those who have large amounts of accumulated wealth and can sponsor and lobby the Congress to make it pass whatever they want. Also, when is the last time any of us contacted our local Congressman and petitioned him for anything?
I think the best the recording companies can do is to bite the bullet and re-structure their business accepting that the old days when they could make billions by selling overpriced crap are coming to an end.
Damn you, Taco. I'm on a daypass and there's a big fricking IBM ad right there. Which I don't see when I use adblock.
Plus: don't let Zonk put his reviews on the front page, they're not news, and sub-IGN in quality anyway.
It must have got lost....
This may have something to do with the fewer number of publisized lawsuits against individuals these days.
I've tried Azeurus, Torrentstorm, and Bittornado but I get NAT errors (that I can't fix, I've followed the guides) or REALLY slow/non-existant connections. LimeWire has always been easy and fast, for me. And yes, I do buy the stuff I don't delete, it's just easier to sort through the neck-high crap out there by "borrowing" some data temporarily before I buy a CD with only two good tracks. Artist to online music subscription/store is the way of the future, and if Apple were to add movies and games (a la Valve's Steam service) and not have to pay the RIAA tax (about 80 of each 99 cent song I hear) we'd have convenience, a good price, decent DRM, and the artists would possibly earn more. My 2 cents, Paypal and RIAA tax deducted.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
If ethics is something that should be based on rational thought, then you assume that rational thought will always end up producing good ethics. But don't you also think that one can come up with a rationalization for any ethics. In other words all the great genocides and a lot of crimes commited by states have been produced by what seemed rational thought at the time.
Stalin, for example, if you would listen to him, he would rationally justify his killing of millions of people, especially intellectuals and priests. He would tell you that, even though he might not have liked it personally, it would make _rational_ sense to eliminate them as they would be the first to challenge the authority of the regime.
If you were in Germany during late 1930s, you would have heard a lot of _rational_ arguments explaining why some people should be killed ,some should be sterilized and some shouldn't even be born. Or would you say that everyone who listened and accepted Hitler's ideas were dumb as bag or rocks? I think they were some people among them who were seemingly _rational_
You cannot cheat and look back now and say "Damn, that was _irrational_ and _stupid_" you have to try to be honest and put yourself in the that time and place. I think a lot of people of present day America or Western Europe could have become members of the Nazi party or a Soviet Communist Party informer. Maybe they are a part of something now, and are just not aware of it....
Anyway, the point is that unless you believe in some higher power (God, Buddha, Mother Earth,.. Linus.(cough!) ) that dictates what is ethical and what is not, ethics then becomes just what the majority decides. In our society the ethics become manifest in legislature - by punishing someone for murder there is an implied ethical guideline : "killing is bad", or "stealing is bad" and so on.
BUT There is currently a dissonance between how people feel about downloading music and the laws concerning it. Because our system is screwed up and only those with large pockets can afford to lobby (or bribe) the Congress. Or let me ask, when is the last time you contacted your local Congressman?
Dont' worry, it won't last long.
Some decent citizen will 'bring justice' to the scum bags at cox, who are perpetrating these illegal and harmeful actions against us.
-- Firmly entrenched at the bottom of 'Bad Karma', now I can 'finally' speak my mind..
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
I don't know what "infamous NAT Error" you are talking about. If you correctly configure your NAT device and Azureus, it works just fine. I run Debian through a NAT'ed DSL connection, through ports that I chose and configured, and it's fine. The "NAT Error" link you gave simply explains how to correctly configure things, and the Ubuntu problem you linked to has nothing to do with NATs, it has to do with Ubuntu's native Java support, which can be fixed by users. I hardly think the number of Ubuntu Azureus users has anything to do with these statistics.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I posted a comment, so would someone please mod the parent up, please? =)
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Looks like these labels are not members of the RIAA. I've downloaded a few artists from these labels (I refuse to support anything from the RIAA, and I send a couple bucks to the artists that I do pirate from) and upon finding this out I'm going to be purchasing these CDs from these labels to support them.
I know this is a scapegoat arguement, but if not for piracy, I wouldn't have purchased anything in the past five years. I never would have purchased music from Blind Guardian, Demons and Wizards, and Candlemass if I didn't pirate the bands first and find out if they were any good (I'm more into black metal, and never would have gone out on my own and purchased these CDs).
First off, Slavery wasn't outlawed because most people thought it was wrong. It was outlawed because the North beat the crap out of the South. If the South had won, we might very well still have slavery today. That's totally conjecture, though.
As for laws changing... Laws don't get removed from the books until a court case is proven against them. When you can get a random group of jurors to say Johnny didn't do anything illegal by downloading songs he didn't pay for, the laws against it (whichever they may be) will hold less power. The more times this happens, the less power they will have.
How many times has this happened? None!? Are you SERIOUS!? I thought we just decided that most people felt this wasn't unethical, let alone illegal??
I think most people recognize that downloading songs you haven't paid for is ethically incorrect, whether it's legal or not.
What's the simple test for ethically correct? Here's mine: If someone did that to me, would it hurt?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You should definately switch ISPs, but if not try BitComet. IIRC it has a feature to get around that. It also better if you can't recieve incoming connections or have other restrictions like that.
That really isn't the way to word an email on such a topic to a corporation, you need to be more formal...
-------------
To Whom it may concern,
I have noticed that you are shaping packets (*are they shaping, or are they blocking the traffic?*) which you identify as being BitTorrent traffic (http://www.bittorrent.com/). I assume your reasoning behind this is that BitTorrent traffic accounts for a very high percentage of overall bandwidth usage on your network and your assumption that all BitTorrent traffic is of an illegal nature.
However your actions are affecting many completely legitimate uses of the internet and are making your service severely crippled for many of us. For instance, the most popular online game in the world at present is World of Warcraft (WoW). This game, as most do, supply occasionaly patches and updates which require downloading of sometimes quite substantial volumes of data. BitTorrent makes this method faster for the end users (myself included), and reduces the load on the company's servers also, allowing more people to download the content in a far shorter time. Apart from this use, which is impacting me the most, there are many other items transfered using BitTorrent which are just as legal and useful to your paid subscribers.
I ask you to reconcider your blocking of this traffic, else I would like to be released from my contract to you with no penalty as you are no longer providing the service which I initially signed up for.
Sincerly,
Yournamehere!
--------------
Something along those lines anyway... (spell checked of course)... and I would lay off the legal crap... nothing will turn off a tech support or customer support officer more than some little kid (whether you are or not, that's what they'll see you as, trust me... I have run an internet provider's customer support centre) claiming that they know something about the law when really they don't... it just makes them instantly go "We've got another RIAA nut here...." "Really? Send them the pre-canned response".
Threatening to end your contract with them and demanding to be released without penalty will get you far more action than vague mentionings of cans of worms and lawsuits.
P2P pop will keep growing if guys are this idle http://coolornot2005.blogspot.com/
You can't trust a guy who writes Pascal-style comments to write a good letter to a corporation. (* Or can you? *)
;-)
....unless you use their business network.....I get to pull down the occasional torrent without issue, and I am on the border of Santa Barbara/Goleta.
Phew! Lay off the beans and boiled cabbage, man. Either that or take a bit of Beano before you eat.
This space unintentionally left blank.
sorry to reply to my own post, but I had to say that one of my co-workers is a huge WoW player, but has never complained once about getting the updates. He too is here in Santa Barbara, and uses Cox.
You mean, people are sharing information.. DIRECTLY, rather than through some services that filters it for them to tell them what they are allowed to share?
What's the world coming to?
Apparently BitComet has the ability to encrypt the protocol headers (though, only when talking to another BitComet client) to stop traffic shaping by those ISPs
Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Maybe if they flood the networks...
You just lost my respect. They're ALREADY flooding the network with bad and incomplete files.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe they should, y'know, embrace the internet and actually find a business model that works with the digital age? People want the song they just heard on the radio, and maybe that one from the other day, and maybe they'll take that other one their friend has. They don't want to have to go through the hassle of buying individual tracks when they can, through whatever effort, get them for free elsewhere.
Now, I've stated this countless times before here, but I'll say it again: An all-you-can-eat subscription model, with no DRM, fast downloads, and elegant searching and metadata (user ratings, lyrics, maybe liner notes with the files, etc.; I have a feeling this could be done with an extension to ID3), would have people flocking to use the service. Ease of use is a very valuable commodity if done right (as evidenced by iTunes, which is still an imperfect solution).
The thing is, the record companies don't see this and aren't prepared to take any risks; they make their money from artist-strangling contracts anyway, they'd rather things just stayed the same.
But they can't for the following reasons:
An MP3 file is NOT A PHYSICAL OBJECT.
And I'm not talking strictly about the MP3 format here either, I'm talking about any media file. You can't attempt to control how and where they are copied because it's just a series of ones and zeroes: If I wanted to, I could make 5,000 copies of an MP3 on my HDD and nobody would know. This brings us to the next reason, which is
DRM is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED.
DRM attempts to make a file behave like a physical object, when no matter what you do to those ones and zeroes, they're still ones and zeroes. Burn it to a CD, and you have a CD... with ones and zeroes on it, which can then be copied anywhere else. DRM attempts to artificially limit an advance in technology the impact of which the world has not seen since the printing press. People KNOW this. People WANT to be able to use their own technology. And that is why there will always be groups of people decoding and unencrypting DRM methods because they want to be able to use their OWN technology on what is, once they've purchased the rights to a media, their OWN FILE.
Even if you wrote the song, you can't control what I do with it on my hard drive.
By hook, crook, or payment, I will get the song in the format I want. Which would you rather it was? And I, like many others, are willing to pay a decent amount in order to get these files, but if you don't offer them to us, we'll get them on our own time, cutting you out of the loop on your own music. And the sad thing is, we know you, the artist, are an important part of that process, and we want to keep you making the songs (or videos, or other content) we like. But your business, be it by your own fault or the fault of your recording company, is not responding to the demand of the market, and in this case, the market is cutting out the middleman, because the market can now manufacture ITS OWN supply from the supply IT ALREADY HAS. This brings me to my next point:
Recording companies are UNNECESSARY.
In the age of the internet, artists can publish a file by copying it to a drive to which the internet has access, and telling people that it's there. In my ideal service, this drive would be full of open, high quality MP3 files available to those who paid the subscription fee, which could be run by a non-profit industry organization of some type (and I know there are tons of those in the music industry). Nowhere in here is it necessary for anyone to control how, where, and for how much an artist can publish his / her music; if they need software, they can buy it; if they need recording studios, they can rent them out. Anything else is artificial control over the industry and an attempt to dic
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
A movie/music company scans a user's computer,
* figures out how many songs were downloaded
* what songs were downloaded,How long the file was on the hard disk[If the user claims he downloaded the song only to sample,they counter by saying the file was never deleted]
* for how long the users has been doing this..
How the hell are these companies able to do this....we talk all the time about protecting the PC from Virus/Malware/spyware,we use antivirus/Firewall/router & all those things to protect the PC,But isnt there any protection from falling victim to these guys???No Software?
For any security hole in browser/OS we crib so much,but what about this BIG HOLE in our computers that allows these companies to do all snooping work??
Why does yahoo do this
"First off, Slavery wasn't outlawed because most people thought it was wrong."
Lincoln didn't like blacks.
"What's the simple test for ethically correct? Here's mine: If someone did that to me, would it hurt?"
"Do into others, as you would them do into you." aka the golden rule. Slavery fails that test, as does illegal copyright violations."*
*Remember that slashdot story about the banning of Bitcomet. Do into content providers, but don't do the same to me.
I know I"m off topic here but I feel I must reply. Ethics does begin with considered convictions, but it isn't true that everything is up for grabs (not normatively anyways). Kant's Categorical Imperative does not denote an ethical truth but rather a test for rationality which states that a moral principle must be universalizable in order to be justifiable. For instance, lying is immoral because it fails this test in that one could not wish that the permissibility of lying be universal law. If lying were morally permissible, we could never count on anyone. It is therefore irrational to accept the permissibility of lying as a moral principle. Obviously slavery would fail this test as well.
Further, slavery fails epistemic constraints and is, derivatively, false (in the factive sense). Slavery rests on an assumption along the following lines: Certains races, or otherwise distinguishable categories of persons, are inherently inferior to others and are somehow "built for" a life of slavery. This is as false as the claim that the sun revolves around the earth. I take the burden of proof to rest with anyone who feels that an acceptable moral principle can rest on manifest falsehoods, regardless of a general consensus to the contrary.
The reason slavery is unacceptable today is because the vast majority of the world believes that it is wrong. The ideas of personal freedom and free-will have spread around the world. That is why is it unlawful.
I submit that one of the reasons slavery is unacceptable is because it rests on the above falsehood.
The ideas of personal freedom and free-will have spread around the world. That is why is it unlawful.
lawful != morally acceptable
Descriptively speaking, what is *considered* morally permissible is very much dictated by a general consensus, but normatively speaking (speaking in terms of what ought to be the case), morality is subject to a host of formal constraints.
Use MUTE, it encrypts the connection.
And why do they allow VOIP and not filesharing?
Do you get what you pay for? You pay for bandwidth, do you get it or not?
If you don't get it, sue them, it's not that hard, go find a suit that's close to what you want to do and copy it then file it.
I'd like to thank whomever moderated the OP (-1). Oh not because you were correct, but because you've provided another textbook example I can show the outside world why a moderation system founded on the "fox guarding chicken house" principle will never be as good as a moderation system founded on trained, competent, and caring editors.
A fuckload.
Try switching to port 1720, the standard VoIP port. It works with Rogers Cable in Canada. They don't run packet shapers on any traffic on that port, for fear of lagging VoIP calls.
Of course, all that bulk data transfer is going to ruin the latency for anyone trying to make a VoIP call in a way that even traffic shaping can't.
But there's no need to worry as long as you're getting your mp3 fix, right?
Although I've no doubt that you've selflessly restricted your BT client's upload to 1kb/sec to reduce the impact.
I have mod points, but how about if you expand on your post so it doesn't get modded to -1 overrated/offtopic. iTunes infringes on fair use rights. Get that through your thick skull. How can you turn up your nose on "illegal" p2pers while using your iTunes and rendering copywrite law useless by total lack of legitimacy? Where there is not legitimacy there is anarchy, which builds new legitimate laws. Your comment which caves to legal/social pressures is not only offtopic, it is bad for society, and reflects a personality driven by fear, not innovation. I pity you.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Besides, if you're paying for a bandwidth of X, why should you use less just because the ISPs can't keep up with demand? Surely its the ISP's fault for trying to provide a service it is incapable of delivering?
If you want a way around this I suggest using a VPN as some kind of gateway, for example there is a product around (cannot remember the name) that is designed to speed up modem connections by downloading data, compressing it and sending it compressed and i think optionally encrypted to the user. Should hide the headers if you cant use a normal VPN (which would hide the headers). [cfranklin 1 0 5 [at] hotmail[dot]com
What programs they are using for p2p. Like right now I'm using shareazza and soulseek for mp3's and bittorrent for movies. I'm always looking for new programs though.
My theory is that people start buying new mp3 players around Christmas, so they need music to go along with it. If music were cheaper...say...25 cents each, I doubt many people would bother stealing music. $1 is still too much for me to purchase something that I already can listen to for free over the radio.
Surely its the ISP's fault for trying to provide a service it is incapable of delivering?
That's not a simple problem you can blame on any single entity. The only true solution will be to complicate ISP pricing schemes with the option for higher-priority, more expensive packets.
If someone is running typical P2p (or other large file transfer), per-packet latency can easily exceed 5-10 seconds without causing a problem. But VoIP needs at worse sub-second latency. There's no way the same network can be optimally designed for both those applications, unless either (a) users have the ability to flag some packets as requiring faster service or (b) the whole thing is made 10x more expensive, so that all packets are very-fast, even those that don't need it.
Don't be afraid of premium-IP-packets as exclusionary or elitist: instead, view them as a way for the rich to subsize bulk access for the poor.
Grammer tip: 'Effect' is used as a noun. 'Affect' is used as a verb.
Spleling tip: Grammar
The record companies are the Slave owners,
the entertainers are the slaves.
Free the slaves from music corporations.
Bands should all have their own websites, where they give low-fi 48bps copies of songs away for free,
if they have talent, people will pay up $5 for a CD of 256 bps MP3s.
The real fun (and $$) is at a live concert - not listening to some recording.
Why go through a middle man, if the band can build a studio with a couple of iMacs?
This is the evolution of society, away from corporate slave owners, to a state of Free entertainers.
Any group that can put a band together, sing, and build a web site can go head to head with the top acts in Vegas - all because of the interent.
Freedom to the people!
'I have a dream, that one day all bands will be free to sing, sing proud without slavery to a foreign corporation!'
Oh, ya - BOYCOTT SONY!
p.s. Sorry Aaron Tippin - I was gonna buy your CD yesterday - but it had the BMG stamp on it - so I put it back.
See you at a live concert, where I know you'll at least get a fair cut of the money.
The reason slavery is unacceptable today is because the vast majority of the world believes that it is wrong.
:-)
The reason slavery is unacceptable today is because of geeks producing advances in technology.
Slavery started up when we stopped hunting and gathering and started staying in one place and needed masses of manpower to do agricultural work.
Then the techies of the past, the Eli Whitneys and the Cyrus McCormicks, improved agricultural efficiency (in the US, 84% of the population in 1810 was involved in agricultural work. Today only 1.9% is. The Industrial Revolution made manufacturing a lot more relatively valuable than agriculture. Combine those two factors. Now you have a big drop in demand for unskilled muscle power, and keeping a bunch of slaves around to do manual labor just doesn't seem to be all that good of an idea.
The morality of societies adapt wonderfully to the times. For example, polygamy makes a *lot* of sense in an environment where you have lots of hand-to-hand wars in which lots of men are killed. You don't need lots of men to retain your population's reproduction rate (which is a big chunk of why men traditionally composed armies) -- the number of women available is the bottleneck. Now you have a bunch of war widows. If you marry then off to some of the surviving men, you don't lose your next generation of children (and the society that chooses to do that is asking for trouble in one generation, when the guys in the next city-state are more numerous and looking for land).
The real knights in shining armour, the ones going out and making everyone wealthier and happier, are the ones pushing technology ahead. It's easy to forget that. Your graph theory paper fights slavery!
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
> Although I've no doubt that you've selflessly restricted your BT client's upload to 1kb/sec to reduce the impact.
Why? So I could get a 1 kbps download? You DO know that, aside from the trackerless torrents which have a problem keeping track of your ration, that is a BLOODY STUPID IDEA, right? The tit-for-tat nature of torrents makes it such that leechers will get slowed to hell unless they share.
Oh, and it doesn't really matter which port you're on--it's the total volume of traffic going in and out. But you might've actually known that one. God forbid people use what they paid their ISP for instead of putting up with over-subscribed, crappy services and such.
AN interesting philosophy. Let us follow it through. This means that it should be made ok to donwload music, games and movies without paying for them, agreed?
But hold on, who is going to make next years Half Life 3, Photoshop 10, New album by band X?
Aha I think I have the answer:
Nobody.
Because believe it or not, all programs, music, games and movies arent made by kids living in their dads basement.
This isnt a theoretical argument. I make indie games for a living. If people like you pirate them on a widespread basis, I'll sell less copies, won't be able to pay the rent, and will eventually take a job doing something else. The end result is no more games from me. Scale this up big time, and before you know it, people quit Valve, id Software, Microsoft, Paramount etc etc.
So I hope people like youself are REAL happy with this years games, apps and movies, Because if we follow your plan, these are the last ones to ever get made.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Or lower the contention ratio.
HDD prices continue to drop at record levels.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Has it ever occurred to anyone of the people who repeat the mantra "VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET!", and subsequently get modded up to +5, Insightful, that maybe, just maybe not buying the RIAA crap makes them go "hmm, sales are down 25% this quarter.. Damn p2p pirates. We need stronger copy protections and more lawsuits!"
Viscious circle and all that...
Correct me if I'm wrong.....but Bittorrent seems more vulnerable to interference from outside precisely becasue it relies on trackers. Whereas networks based on gnutella (Bearshare, gtk-gnutella, iMesh, Limewire.....etc) have no center, no trackers - just self-promoting "ultrapeers" who may come and go hourly or daily. Seems the latter network is more "secure" from any organised attacked.
Only boring people are ever bored.
It's true that those two numbers are equal but they are not the right numbers. What you want to compare is the number of new CD sales to the number of used CD sales. And the difference is that a used CD can be sold any number of times. There is nothing to stop a store from selling a used CD and buying it back three hours later for a slightly lower amount: say, two dollars less. It's Blockbuster's model with two twists: the customer takes the risk of the disk taking damage, and any reasonably new computer already has a CD burner that can make perfect copies.
This idea is kind of like the analog hole. It doesn't matter in practice today but it does in principle. Most people don't buy and copy used CDs because downloading MP3s from P2P is easier and faster. But it's still perfectly doable, and if in some fantasyland the RIAA were to make P2P actually difficult for average people, they would start doing it.