Long-time members of the open source community no doubt remember iBiblio.org, which is one of the first and largest online archives of open source software. It doesn't see as much love as it used to due to how many open source project hosting sites there are out there (including the venerable Sourceforge, Github, and Google Code). Also, because cheap to free personal web hosting is so common, it's trivial to upload your projects these days. In recent years, however, the iBiblio team set up Terasaur, a BitTorrent tracker which makes it much easier to distribute large projects (such as …
During the non-skippable antipiracy warnings on a lot of DVDs and BluRay disks these days, the MPAA often has an MTV-style juxtaposed and jump-cut commercial that includes the admonition "You wouldn't download a car, would you?" which has spawned a response in the form of an image macro that seems to have gotten a few of us thinking. Earlier this week the notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay posted on their blog that they had created a new category of files that can be shared via their website, Physibles, or files that can be used to create actual, tangible objects …
For a bit over ten years now, the movie industry has been complaining that piracy has been running rampant (it has) and cutting into their profit margins (even though they've been reporting record earnings consistently). There are more means of getting hold of illegal copies of anything than you have fingers: public and private websites, BitTorrent, other peer-to-peer file sharing services, FTP sites, your friends handing you copies... the list goes on and on. To date, aside from grabbing the IP addresses of the downloaders, running them to ground, and launching lawsuits not a whole lot has been done to …
For those of you who are fans of the text-based BitTorrent client rtorrent, it is worth noting that you can run its tracker communication traffic (though not its block exchange traffic) over an HTTP proxy of some kind by setting an environment variable http_proxy=http://some host:port/ before you start rtorrent. This appears to work because rtorrent is linked against libcurl to implement HTTP. However, please note that some BitTorrent trackers specifically disallow the use of proxies, and might penalize or ban you outright for doing so. If you want to do this, just set the above environment variable …
I'm back from The Next HOPE in New York City with lots to write about and lots of pictures to put up. However, I'm also snowed under at work this week, so my writeup of the con is going to take a while to put together (a paragraph here and there), edit, check, and finally get posted. Suffice it to say, getting three hours of sleep the night I got back to DC didn't leave me in a state to really do anything coherent. What I will say is that TNH was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever …
I'll spare everyone my usual apology for not posting anything lately and jump right into a catch-up post as a warmup for a longer, hopefully more interesting entry later today.
First of all, earlier this week a cultural icon passed - Bettie Page, queen of the pin-up, died of pneumonia at the age of 85 following a heart attack suffered earlier this month. Page was well known for her line of 'naughty girl' photographs, which featured nudity, lingerie, implied lesbian trysts, and even light bondage (the latter two scandalous for their time). Page stopped modelling in 1957 and all but disappeared …
The BitTorrent tracker search engine Torrentspy, which has been coming under fire increasingly in the past few months has taken a shot broadside, leaving the future of the site uncertain. A federal judge in the state of California ruled that the admins of the site lied under oath and destroyed evidence demanded by the MPAA for their prosecution. It was asserted that the admins of the forum also run by the search engine edited posts to conceal the subject matter and set up hidden forums for the discussion of privacy once it became clear that they were under scrutiny. The …
Notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay somehow came into possession of the net.domain of an organization called the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), which is said to be one of the Net's foremost anti-piracy organizations. The IFPI's been a thorn in the side of Pirate Bay for years, even going so far as to try to get hold of files on the 'tracker held by the Swedish police force, with no success. Supposedly, black hat tricks weren't needed to get hold of the domain (somebody probably sniped the domain the moment its registration expired), and as result …
If you've been following the saga of Torrentspy, then you know that the Motion Picture Association of America has been trying to force the website's admins to start logging all of the activity on their site so that the MPAA can then subpoena the records and track down people who've been illegally downloading pirated movies. Per the prediction of the time, Torrentspy started blocking all access attempts that originate from the United States rather than a) shut down, or b) have to turn on web server logging. Well, things have gotten more interesting in the case because the magistrate of …
