The filesharing documentary Steal This Film has been a great success. Yet, despite millions of downloads and a lot of support from the P2P community, they admit they haven’t yet covered the costs of producing STF II. There is hope though.
Every now and again, a software release comes out for BitTorrent that is truly revolutionary and revered. And other times, the source code should just be reduced back down to those ones and zeroes as quickly as possible. Here is a rundown of some of the world’s most useless BitTorrent apps.
When Robb Topolski made the initial discovery that Comcast was interfering with BitTorrent traffic, he couldn’t have imagined that it would lead to an FCC hearing or, more importantly, to apparent reconciliation this week between Comcast and the rest of the world. Thing is, Robb doesn’t believe a word of it.
The sale of Bebo.com to AOL for $850 million last week sparked a fresh wave of opining about music piracy, with Billy Bragg and Michael Arrington both stepping into the ring. The problem is, they are both wrong.
It’s hard for large organizations that move at glacial speeds to compete with individuals taking their content and creating new distribution systems, revenue streams and business models, but the fall of the major record labels taught the rest of the corporate world a lesson. In many cases, piracy it is helping people to innovate and create new legitimate market spaces.
BitTorrent sites are overloaded with ads for malware ridden BitTorrent clients and paid tutorials that promise to quadruple your download speed. They try to lure naive users into downloading their products with catchy phrases such as “Breakthrough Information Will Have You Downloading Torrents Up To 475% Faster”. It’s time to take them down.
Over the past week, some servers used for updating the anti-virus software NOD32 were labeled as anti-p2p by a popular list maker for PeerGuardian. In response, NOD32’s company, ESET, has categorised PG2 as malware in some of its latest updates.
These last few years P2Pers have got used to TV entertainment ‘our way’: unfucked, de-loused, delivered efficiently in economical, good-looking codecs. Because we rarely turn it on, it’s been easy to forget just how cynical, unsatisfying and downright venal television, as a distribution medium, has become.
There’s been a lot of buzz about a story The London Times ran this morning under the headline “Internet users could be banned over illegal downloads,” which also appeared on the BBC website under the even more alarming headline “Illegal downloaders ‘face UK ban.” Time to get a couple of things straight.
