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Early Pirate Bay Server Immortalized In Museum
Nerval's Lobster writes "One of the first servers used by notorious torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has ended up at the Computer Museum in Linköping. A picture of the exhibit sent to TorrentFreak shows the server in its original tower casing. The hardware will headline an exhibit on 50 years of file sharing. As the exhibit notes, The Pirate Bay is one of the focal points for the file-sharing phenomenon, used to share both copyrighted works (such as music and movies) and free-for-all material (open-source Linux distributions and the like). The sharing of the former has created a worldwide cat-and-mouse game, with governments doing their best to block file-sharing sites, capture their servers, and prosecute their operators. 'In less than ten years The Pirate Bay has become a contemporary historical phenomenon, due to its distinguished position in the file-sharing debate,' according to the museum exhibit. 'The discussions that have sprung from this simple computer server concerns serious subjects as freedom of speech, global democracy and of course the sole existence of copyright.'"
Before FBI raids the museum and seizes the server.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It seems the author missed the opportunity to learn even the basics of copyright from this exhibit : all creative works automatically acquire a copyright. The Linux system has copyrights.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
It is copyrighted, and distributed under the GPL v2.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
BitTorrent is just a better FTP. And the gradually added the functions to it, that all other protocols had *loong* before. Some of those, which existed before BitTorrent was even born, are still not implemented, and, because of the stupid limits of BitTorrent, never will be.
Napster & Scour Exchange -- One centralized sever, built-in search, automatic sharing of a local directory, no encryption, no anonymization. The first generation. SX was heads and tails above Napster, both in functionality, but Napster is what the idiotic press went after.
Gnutella & FastTrack -- Added full decentralization. The second generation. Impossible to take down. But slower search. Swarming and even encryption were added later.
eDonkey -- Step *backwards* to multiple centralized servers. But in theory faster search. Also features swarming. (The Razorback servers *definitely* deserve a place in that museum.)
Overnet & Kad -- eDonkey, but fully decentralized again. Encryption was added later too.
WinMX -- Honorable mention, because it had really nice rich functionality. A bit superior to Gnutella. Faster search.
Darknets like Perfect Dark, Freenet -- Adds full encryption and advanced anonymization. Also, because of distributed keyword/hash tables, search is rather good.
BitTorrent (original) -- HUGE step backwards. Multiple centralized servers again. NO search (WTF?). NO encryption. NO anonymization. Cumbersome way of sharing files (With torrent files, and manual uploads.) Relies on web sites, to be usable *at all*. (EPIC FAIL)
BitTorrent (nowadays) -- *Finally* managed to graft decentralization on top. And at least mostly encryption too. But not on the darknet level, of course. Still no anonymization. And if clients have a search function at all, they just use a website internally. Ditto for sharing files, which still is only partially automated, even though Napster already offered fully automatic directory sharing.
I wonder when BitTorrent will also get darknet-style anonymization, on top if it all, to become a Windows-ME-style mutant of a upside-down pyramid on top of a turd... And what *actual* modern file sharing networks will have then.