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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."
Uh, Half Life 2 came out in November 2004.
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 ----
Good news - P2P is the thorn in the backs of music publishers that will force them to embrace legal digital distribution schemes like iTunes.
And you also get to kill the indy scene at the same time. But hey, that's good for them too!
P2P networks are totally legal, SOME content on them is not.
I like muppets.
Therein lies the irony. People piss and moan because Hollywood releases nothing but crap, but when the studios finally do make something worth watching, they're rewarded by higher numbers of people downloading their movie without paying.
There's a big problem with this idea: normal users don't pay their ISP for "more serious Internet activity". They pay their ISP for things like email, surfing the web, and, yes, downloading stuff from P2P networks.
If an ISP were to block P2P activity, they'd lose a hell of a lot of customers to the competition. If all the ISPs did it, that would leave a fantastic market opportunity for a startup to take their customers away from them. That's the nature of a free market - don't supply what the customers want, and somebody else is ready to take them away from you.
That only works because the majority of users are perfectly happy using their ISP's smarthost to send mail. The same does not apply to P2P traffic.
You're assuming that ISPs have something to gain from stopping copyright infringement. Think about it this way: if you could wave a magic wand, and make copyright infringement disappear, would that make the average user more or less likely to pay for home Internet access? And what affect would that have on ISPs' bottom lines?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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.
What's more important than filesharing? I mean really, the internet is a great resource for sharing information. If you remove the information being shared, what's left? more bandwidth for popups?
"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
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...
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 *
Sounds funny until you think about all the regular folks that work in the entertainment industry that are affected by piracy. All those names that go by when the movie/game ends. All those names in the About [Software] screen. And yes, there are thousands of non-managers working in the record industry.
ACME Septic. We're #1 in the business of #2.
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."
That really isn't the way to word an email on such a topic to a corporation, you need to be more formal...
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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!
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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.
Crime? Tell me who's the criminal here.
In one corner, we have people who infringe copyrights.
In the other, we have corporations who spy on people, subvert computer security and massively breach laws they lobbed for themselves.
The former is the same crime as copying the recipe of a prize-winning bakery. Sure, you take away profits the inventor of the recipe would get -- but you don't even steal a single cookie. Or, as another analogy, copying the dress design of a lady who paid bazillions to go to a royal ball in an unique dress -- and suddenly some pesky commoners wear the same. Yes, she is hurt in some way.
The latter is a case of break-in, overturning all possessions of the victim looking for allegedly "stolen" property, beating the victim in the face and threatening him with further actions of your gang.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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
That's also how I work (albeit mostly for music), P2P gives me "free tries", if i'm not interrested I delete the file and don't buy the disc period, if I like the group album I buy the CD.
And most of my friends do the same, it's a convenient way to build a collection you *really* like without having to blow your money on 90% of crap.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler