“Our hearts go out to the Scantleberry family for their loss,” says RIAA mouthpiece Jonathan Lamy unblushingly in what will certainly go down as one of the most disgustingly fulsome statements ever to be issued by an organization that’s infamous for its bald-faced lies.

“We had decided to temporarily suspend the productive settlement discussions we were having with the family,” says Lamy, quoted in Boing Boing.

“Mr. Scantleberry had admitted that the infringer was his stepson, and we were in the process settling with him shortly before his passing. Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case.”

“Query,” posts Ray Beckerman on Recording Industry vs The People.

“What do they mean by ‘this particular lawsuit’? The lawsuit against the decedent would have had to be withdrawn anyway. Are they going to now sue Mr. Scantlebury’s son? Or have they given the Scantlebury family enough grief’?”

Stay Tuned…

P2Pnet

Source: talking sense into the riaa

Smirnov comments on Relakks at the US Pirate Party site”

First, both the Relakks site and the announcement make it very clear that the service is supposed to provide anonymous access to the Internet. What isn’t as clear is that Relakks is just a PPTP (VPN) provider. Customers sign up, pay €5 a month and get on their merry way. All of their traffic is encrypted to the Relakks servers, at which point it travels the Internet like regular traffic.

As far as I can tell, all your traffic carries a Swedish Relakks IP, presumably mapped to your real IP somewhere on a Relakks computer. Now you can’t connect to Relakks anonymously, because then they’d have no way of verifying you are a paying customer (plus VPN authentication is based on identity verification), so Relakks knows who you really are when all your traffic goes through them.

Let’s compare this to something that has been traditionally called an anonymous network — Tor, a program implementing onion routing. With Tor you connect to an onion router, which then builds a path for you through other onion routers to your destination, in such a way that it makes it very hard to determine both the sender and the receiver of an on-going communication. The entire link is encrypted, unless of course you are outproxying to the intenet (then traffic has to be decrypted either way when it leaves the outproxy). But at least with Tor, it is very hard for the outproxy to figure out where the real request came from.

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged.

The problem is that since Relakks knows who I really am, and that any outgoing connections from them are unencrypted, I really do have something to fear.. Relakks. What is the difference between trusting them and trusting my own ISP not to give me away?

Relakks could be logging behind the scenes, turning on a silent switch without telling anyone. Even in a case where we do trust Relakks not to keep the logs of the actual data that goes through, they will still have mappings between Relakks IPs and Real IPs at any point in time — this is just begging for an organization such as the antipiratbyran or the MPAA/RIAA to set up honeypots across various torrent sites, until finally they have enough Relakks IPs information to be able to sue them in court if they have a real IP, at which point the Swedish police could raid the Relakks location and get those real IPs.

If Relakks did not have their own direct connection to the internet, their outgoing ISP could be tapped and then setting up such a honeypot would be trivial. Otherwise, multiple peers could actively participate in swarms on sites such as the Pirate Bay, logging actively all of the IPs of the seeds and the superseeds on such swarms.

Secondly, the Relakks service is called a “Darknet.” After reading the paper that originally introduced the term Darknet at http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/msdrm/darknet.htm, I am hard pressed to understand what makes a VPN tunnel a Darknet.

The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:

1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

This seems to me to describe a subset of P2P services, perhaps F2P. A program such as Waste, facilitating connections to your friends would fit the bill, but a general-connectivity tunnel? Would that not be akin to calling IPSec or IPv4 a darknet solution because it allows programs such as Freenet to operate under it? Would that not make any low level Internet protocol a Darknet then?

The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

Yet I do not recall Darknets having to be anonymous. Pseudononymous, perhaps, but only because that is a side effect of keeping the connections limited to a group of friends. Even if a Darknet had to be anonymous though, as I said earlier, Relakks hardly keeps your identity safe — they have to know who you are at all times (unlike say Tor)!

Lastly, I have some less related comments I wish to share with you:

The PPS does not own Relakks, they seem to be affiliated and perhaps will get a share of each person they refer to Relakks?

I wonder what political repercussions the PPS is hoping to achieve by actively promoting a network which will incentivize users to engage in illegal activities (such as unauthorized works distribution) behind the scenes of a “trusted” outproxy.

P.S. My views do not represent the official views, positions, standings or otherwise, of the Pirate Party US, unless otherwise stated by an appropriate party official.

Via p2pnet

Source: How Relakksed is Relakks?

The inquirer writes:

The cashless site runs on a simple points system. Members receive one point for sending a book, and pay a point when they receive a book. Books sent internationally and books on members’ favourite books lists are worth two points, which provides extra incentive to supply these. Members also earn a point for every ten books they list on BookMooch. Membership is free.

There is a problem, and thus a significant difference from the real BitTorrent: The books have to go from A to B, and that costs money.

So if you’re a real bookworm with a not-to-delicate book taste, it is probably cheaper to have an additional library membership. But the idea is great, and if it has the potential to become the biggest library in the world. BookMooch founder John Buckman even thinks about launching “MoochFests”.

I was thinking of “MoochFests” where a group of people meet physically, say at a cafe, to exchange a pile of books they’ve all decided to mooch from each other. That would be a way to avoid postage, but more importantly, meet people with similar book tastes and possibly make friends.

BookMooch

Source: BitTorrent For Books?

You can use your web browser to read detailed information about each program on the CD: what the program does, its key features, useful related websites, view a screenshot, find links to the program’s website and to download/install the program from the TTCS OSSWIN CD.

The CD (burnable ISO) includes a broad range of applications in the following categories: desktop, educational, games, graphics, internet, server, sound and video, and utilities.

Great stuff, read more about the CD, and check out some screenshots on the TTCS homepage. The torrent can be found on the download page.

Source: Torrent: Free and Open Source Software CD

SqrtBoy is known for his work on Torrent Trader Lite, VBTT, IPBTT and other several BitTorrent tracker php/mysql scripts. It is great to see that someone is proposing a standard for BitTorrent rss feeds.

Every webmaster probably has his own thoughts about how the perfect rss feed would look, but this document is definitely a step forward.

SqrtBoy told TorrentFreak:

I have found that each rss feed was different from one site to another, and from a BitTorrent script to another. The multiplication and organization of different feeds formats was leading to confusion and was making it difficult to read in rss clients, and also some other feed indexing applications. The purpose of this document is to give some recommendations to webmasters on how a rss 2.0 BitTorrent related feed should be designed, so maybe we can see a standard appearing.

I think it is extremely important to have a proper standard for BitTorrent rss feeds, especially since the number of people that get their latest torrents though feedreaders, media players and BitTorrent clients is growing.

Using the same feed style will only benefit the usability of BitTorrent & rss, and their implementation in feed based TV players like Democracy, Fireant and IM.

BitTorrent RSS 2.0 Feed Specifications White Paper

Source: Towards a RSS 2.0 BitTorrent Standard

Guba recently signed a deal with Warner Bros. to spread DRM loaded movies and TV-shows online.

According to the press release “GUBA is filtering movies and TV shows using a proprietary technology, codenamed “Johnny.” Johnny analyzes video in digitized form and generates a unique fingerprint for each video. Once Johnny has scanned a video, that video is blocked from illegal file trading or distribution on GUBA’s site”.

The MPAA responded:

“Providing consumers legitimate ways to get movie and television programming online is essential to our industry,” said Chairman and CEO of MPAA, Dan Glickman. Collaborating with GUBA has given us an opportunity to test new technology that will help ensure consumers can freely share videos without being exposed to illegal programming, which could lead to copyright infringement.”

Source: MPAA & Guba to use Johnny

In the documentary “done the impossible” the fans tell their part of this success story. They explain why and how they managed to get their Firefly heroes on the white screen in the popular movie Serenity.

The makers of the documentary offer a free, Creative Commons licensed .torrent download of their film. They state:

In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born.

Personally I’m impressed with the quality of this documentary, I highly recommend this one if you are interested in the story behind Firefly and Serenity.

You can view the trailer over here or download (.torrent) Done the impossible

Source: Done The Impossible .Torrent

The great thing about the project is that the movie is made entirely using Open Source software.

The movie is 11 minutes, including the credits, and they offer an impressive high definition AC3 5.1 surround copy.

The graphics are absolutely stunning but I found the story a bit disappointing. You can grab the .torrent over here

elephantsdream.org

Source: Elephants Dream

Ownage.

Torrent Raiders is an arcade-style video game and a dynamic network visualization. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance, amidst the recent revelation of the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping and the increasingly Orwellian nature of our so-called “homeland security”. Players take on the role of a government agent tasked with surveilling the ad-hoc networks generated by torrents linked to copyrighted material.

A Beta built of the game will be ready January 2007.

Torrent Raiders

Source: Torrent Raiders: BitTorrent The Game

The extension is currently in the Beta-testing phase.

Dmitri Popov, one of the Allpeers Beta testers wrote a reviewed the extension om NewsForge. He concludes:

there are some kinks in the AllPeers extension that must be sorted out before the public release (most notably, re-installing the extension requires a manual reset of your account at AllPeers’ end), the software looks very promising, indeed.

Let’s wait and see…

Source: Allpeers Review

Firefighters attacked the fire from a ship, but it is unknown if they succeeded and what the damage is.

Sealand and it’s hosting company havenco have no regulations concerning copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing, DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues; child pornography is the only content explicitly prohibited.

BBC

Source: Sealand on Fire

Support the battle! Donate and send a letter (or more) to Congress.

Source: The Corruptibles

At least, according to a chat Chris Pirillo had with MS Mindshare Manager Aaron Coldiron. Coldiron said:

We are pumping out bits as fast as we can. If we pushed out bits any faster there would be a measurable impact for the Internet. So, we are literally saying that if we increased our bandwidth any further there’s a possibility of taking down the Internet

When Chris asked why they couldn’t just seed it as a torrent, Coldiron responded:

There are legal and privacy issues which unfortunately make that not an option for Microsoft to officially sponsor a BitTorrent. I really wish we could do it, but we can’t. If someone [seeds or downloads a torrent] we can’t guarantee that they’ve got an unaltered copy, etc.

This is obviously bullshit, Legal and Privacy issues? Sounds to me like Microsoft just isn’t capable to produce an MD5 hash, like Chris Pirillo already noted.

Update: BitTorrent.com and vistatorrent now provide clean Vista Beta torrents

Source: Vista Beta Torrent Not An Option

Download a P2P streaming player from the forum Football Streaming Info, which is stuffed full of links to downloads and tips if you get into technical trouble. TvAnts is a front-runner due to its ease of use — a big plus is that the channel menu is mostly in English, unlike many of the other players which seem to be in Chinese.

Once you have a player installed, a clear and detailed schedule of the day’s games and where to view them can be found at BoxtoBox.

Wired also points their readers to BitTorrent. The World Cup matches are posted on several trackers within a few minutes. No real-time streaming, but very useful if you miss a game.

Over at tvRSS you can find some matches in hr.hdtv, and subscribe to the world cup rss feed.

Update:

In a previous article I pointed to the article in Wired, with some tips and tricks to watch the world cup online. But it seems that quite a lot of people still have problems watching world cup streams online. Don’t worry, there’s another p2p world cup stream player, and it’s easier to use.

People from the UK can use the BBC streams. The rest of the world should try the TVUplayer.

Tune in to the ESPN2 channel for English commentary, and you’re ready to go.

And yes, some people say it’s illegal…

Source: World Cup Streaming & Downloading

The pirate party has three issues on its agenda, one of these is to reform copyright law:

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of publishers and consumers, in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today’s world. If you haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

You can read more, and join the party over here

Source: US Pirate Party

It sounds absurd, but it’s true. As if Kazaa isn’t evil enough as a crappy spyware bloated virus spreading piece of software by itself….

But serious, what’s really at stake here? Where’s the so called freedom of speech? Can people start suing bloggers for quoting anonymous comments?

Is that the future of blogging?

In my opinion there is one important question:

Do you believe it could be true?

I think that whenever a blogger hears or reads something that is interesting or noteworthy, he or she is entitled to quote it, without being sued by anyone. Let there be room for debate and discussion.

Jon Newton posted a story on Nikki Hemmings “money mansion” quoting AP and a comment on a previous story.

The first quotation is from a respectable news source (which doesn’t mean that it’s the truth), the second is from a anonymous commenter. The statements could be true or false. And if you take the time to read the comment, you will see that it is obviously not in favor of Nikki Hemming, but it’s more than the regular rant.

Of course, like we all know, comments quite often nothing more than rants and raves. Like this one I found:

Nikki Hemming is getting really desperate and has pretty much lost control of her personal life. She is battling with an addiction to pain killers and with a realization that as she turns 40 and is now past her peak as a woman, her life has been more of a failure than a success. Ironically it is the wealth of Sharman Networks which she is hiding from the Australian courts, that has been for her a curse rather than a blessing. It has given her enough idle time to destroy herself and to lose perspective on reality. She lives in a world of falsehood and deceit and she has no real friends…

So will I be next now?

Read more about the case, Jon’s thoughts, and the latest updates at p2pnet

You can support Jon, and thus bloggers rights by donating.

Help Jon beat the lawsuit

Source: P2Pnet vs. Kazaa: Bloggers Freedom at Stake

What is it?

Basically, a PocketPacket is a modified envelope stuffed with personalized, free, hand made content and left in a public space for a stranger to find. The contents are decided by the PPP community over at sister site Bricolab.com, and are changed month by month for a different flavour of PocketPacket.

Flavour of the month

The first ‘flavour’ is the PocketPedia. The PocketPacketer prints off a Wikipedia article about something they are passionate about – the Pirate bay, for example – and stuffs it in a PocketPacket, along with a recommendation, invitation to PPP and other downloadable PocketPacket goodness. Next, they dump it on a train, a bus, or in another public space where bored people are likely to pick it up.

Through a simple act of sharing, the word gets out about p2p culture, and commuters are saved from having to read advertorial rubbish, churned out potboiler novels and train ads. Everyone’s a winner.

Go PocketPacket

You can download everything you need to get started at Pocket-Packet.org. Take p2p to the streets today.

Source: PocketPacket Takes P2P to the Streets and Subways

A (small) team of dedicated designers and coders is working on a huge project. Their aim is to scrape every online media file (audio and video), index these files, and create torrents for evey one of them. The process will be automated and there will be no user submitted files. Additionally every file will have a streamable version (like google and youtube) to satisfy your viewing / listening needs right away.

All torrents will be web-seeded, so you don’t have to worry that the downloads will be unavailable, or that it stops at 99%.

The great advantage of this project is that it’s possible to archive high quality files, since every peer will contribute some bandwidth. The team is currently scraping audio and video files, and they already have 1TB music ready to seed.

But they can use a little help:

1. People who would like to run a tracker

2. Someone with experience in writing a tracker (to cluster the trackers)

3. Someone to assist in making a modified democracy player for this project

If you’re interested, mail tyrantbuilt (at) gmail.com

Source: BitTorrent Online Media Archive

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

But how does this affect the widely debated “network neutrality”?

BBC’s Newsnight asked Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent about this.

“I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there’s actual censorship… however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don’t result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can’t drop spam or stop… (hacker) attacks. ”

Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? “Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it,” says Cohen.

And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?

“It depends really on the nature of the whole thing… I’m against net censorship. However when you’re talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved… (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it’s just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.”

hmmm…

read on

Source: Cached Torrents and Network Neutrality

First the MPAA’s DVD sniffing dogs, now a trojan that’s targeting P2P content. Although the creators of the trojan are unknown until now, my guess is that the MPAA will be quite delighted.

Graham Cluley of Sophos, the company that discovered the virus, commented:

“The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it’s perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too”.

As far as I know BitTorrent is safe, for now.

Source: Anti-Piracy Trojan

Here it is, after 2 months the first installment is ready. Be sure to tell your friends. It’s huge, 43.8GB! It contains over 300 videos of various TechTV/G4TechTV shows including: The Screen Savers, Call for Help, X-play, Unscrewed, AudioFile, Big Thinkers, Conspiracies, CyberCrime, Extended Play, Eye Drops, FreshGear, GameSpot TV, Internet Tonight, Max Headroom, Silicon Spin, Tech Live, Thunderbirds, and some really old ZDTV shows.

Source: Tech TV Torrent

* How to get BitTorrent working in Itunes

* I steal TV because I have to!

* Fenopy, the Ajax Torrent Search Engine

* Secret Cinema & Camera Obscura (private), for the cult and arthouse movie junks

* RIAA bandwidth leeching

* BitTorrent & TV at macworld

Source: BitTorrent & P2P Linkdump (15)

* Interview with the man behind the BitTorrent Song

* A day in the life of a Tv-Torrent geek

* New Ipod Torrent Site

* Port Washington, another independent movie release on BitTorrent

* Click and view, article on BitTorrent and TV

* HBO not happy with TV-Torrents

* Teenager Indicted On Online Piracy Charges

Source: BitTorrent & P2P Linkdump (14)

Using BitTorrent makes it even more cheaper, if more people need to download the file since you only have to pay for the traffic that the S3 seeder generates.(dev docs)

S3 supports the BitTorrent protocol so that developers can save costs when distributing content at high scale. There is no extra charge for use of BitTorrent with S3. Data transfer via the BitTorrent protocol is metered at the same rate as client/server delivery. To be precise, whenever a downloading BitTorrent client requests a “piece” of an object from the S3 “seeder,” charges accrue just as if an anonymous request for that piece had been made

This is how it works:

Any object in S3 that can be read anonymously can also be downloaded via BitTorrent. Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a “?torrent” query string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object. No authentication is required. Once you have a BitTorrent client installed, downloading an object using BitTorrent download may be as easy as opening this URL in your web browser.

So if you’re looking for relatively cheap online storage and distribution, S3 if definitely worth trying.

Check it out
Amazon S3

More, via

Source: Cheap online storage with BitTorrent support

Check out George and his Ipod

Bush: Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know –
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.

But now about the torrents. The guys from Bushtorrent.com give you an impression what Bush his torrentsite would look like:

Have you ever thought what it would be like if the President of your country was using BitTorrent technology as we always do? What sites would he visit, what torrents would he download, what nickname would he use in forums?

The President isn’t afraid of MPAA, the torrents will be always seeded for him and passwords will be always known. All private trackers will be opened for the President with the highest downloading speed. Isn’t he the lucky one?

We tried to imagine what George Bush would do in such a situation and what in the world goes on in that mind of his. We are pleased to announce to you the new torrent site opened by George Bush President of United BitTorrents: http://www.bushtorrent.com

Bushtorrent

Source: George Bush’ Ipod and Torrents

Red Herring:“AllPeers co-founder and CEO Cedric Maloux declined to disclose the amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures, but said it was less than $5 million,” says the story.

Maloux recently told p2pnet Allpeers will be open-source, and that the company would also release its own distinct end-user application built on the AllPeers platform.

“The service is and will remain free for sharing files in a private group,” promised Maloux. “Later, added-value services will be introduced. It’s like Skype: the VOIP service is free but SkypeOut, SkypeIn are not.”

Did that mean users can expect ads soon to be blotting the landscape?

Definitely not, Maloux continues, “there will be no advertising (banners or contextual text links or whatever) in the software.”

AllPeers is slated for beta-testing this month and Maloux, “maintained the software is to be used for the purposes of trading non-copyrighted material between friends and family. It will act as a BitTorrent client when multiple people want the same file by having them share pieces of it among each other.”

He also said the company, “would tell users they are not allowed to share copyrighted content but would not monitor their activities,” says Red Herring.

p2pnet.net

Source: BitTorrent extension for Firefox wins funding

Source: The BitTorrent Song

SXSWeek takes place March 10-19, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

Source: BitTorrent inc. supports free music and movie trailer downloads