Posted Jun 8th 2008 10:00AM by Brad Linder Filed under: P2P
It's no secret that people use peer to peer software like BitTorrent or Lime Wire to download copyrighted movies, music, and software. But that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate uses for the technology. Next time you need to explain to your ISP that while you've been using massive amounts of bandwidth, you haven't actually been doing anything illegal, you might want to check out this wiki listing legal uses of P2P software.
The wiki shows a rather impressive list of legitimate P2P applications, ranging from VoIP client Skype to FAROO, a search engine built using peer to peer technology. Of course, there are also plenty of sites offering legal music and movie downloads, including Joost, Babelgum, Miro, and the BBC iPlayer. And plenty of filmmakers and musicians including Trent Reznor and have decided to release free copies of their works over BitTorrent.
Since this site is a wiki, anyone can login and edit the list. So if you're aware of individuals or groups that are using P2P software in innovative ways, you can add to the list.
So in our last post about the P2P media sharing site CloudFire, y'all jumped in and answered our question about BitTorrent's Bram Cohen.
This time around, there are no questions to answer. It's first come, first serve.
We have 100 invites to the first lucky folks who use "downloadsquad" without quotes naturally to sign up here.
We've had a bit of a play with CloudFire and the things that jump right out to us is that it seriously is easy to share media files with people who might not be as geeky as a lot of us are. And you know what, us geeky people like easy things too, that's why a lot of us use Macs.
There are some random issues as expected, and you have to make sure that the person connecting to your media has the most updated version of Flash, but other than that it works nicely. A good amount of bandwidth on your end doesn't hurt either.
They're completely open to your feedback and have been asking us what we think.
It's still very pre-beta and stealthy so here's your chance to join in!
UPDATE: If the code doesn't work then you might not have gotten in on the 100 invites. If we get more, we'll pass along the word!
Just to refresh your memories, CloudFire aims to let you share photos, movies, music, from your desktop right to the web. And not just to the web, but in a very lovely and seamless way based on the screens we've seen. They really want to make P2P mainstream. This is quite a hurdle to jump.
Their "manifesto" states that media shouldn't be a chore. It should be easy to create and share everything that you make to show other people. They want to make the act of uploading media files to outside servers extinct.
Rock on!
But when will we get to see it and play around for ourselves?
Now's the time. We were able to sleuth some invites to their private beta. Ok, they emailed them to us.
Just for you guys, the DLS faithful.
"But what do we have to do to get such an invite" you ask?
Well it's quite simple. Be one of the first 5 people to correctly answer the following question and you get the invite.
Who wrote a parody of a manifesto in 2001 that also has their hand in P2P?
UPDATE: Wow, that was fast. All 5 invites gone. Correct answer? Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent! We'll let you know if we get some more invites.
Perhaps it's a blatant F.U. to content creators everywhere or maybe it's just an F.U. to Rockstar, but the Pirate Bay has gone out of its way to temporarily rename itself "Liberty Bay" in honor of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV.
The purpose for the publicity stunt is unclear, but -- considering the company's line of work -- it's likely to get the word out on the highly-rumored rumored Grand Theft Auto IV torrents that all the young kids blab about nowadays. Though we don't think the site's blog will address the gutsy move unless Rockstar starts throwing a fit, we'll let you know if things gets messy.
Deluge is an up-and-coming BitTorrent client for Mac, Windows, and Linux that looks strong enough to compete with the likes of Azureus, uTorrent, and Transmission.
Deluge supports the most common P2P features, including encryption, UPnP and NAT-PMP, Mainline DHT, proxy support, and more. The main strengths of Deluge, however, come from its design:
The program has a clean interface and is easy to look at, which makes for simple and unobtrusive torrent downloading.
The program was built to be extensible, with a rich plugin collection (many plugins are included in the software already)
The progam was designed to be lightweight; it doesn't tax your system like other BitTorrent clients.
Best of all, like previously stated, Deluge will run on Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you're willing to give Deluge the old college try, you can download it here – and be sure to report back what you like and don't like about it.
A while back, the EFF caught cable provider Comcast using basic hacking techniques to restrict the use of Bittorrent on their connection. This irritated a lot of people, not only illegal file sharers, but also the growing number of consumers who use the bittorrent technology for legitimate purposes, such as downloading Open Source software or getting quality, legal media from one of Bittorrent's many partners.
The EFF, ever vigilant, has created an excellent guide to "packet shaping", the technique that ISPs use to futz with your data. In a nutshell:
You the consumer have the ability to monitor your connection for suspicious packets using a tool called Wireshark.
People who catch their ISPs in the act can send evidence to the EFF, which will in turn help their case to take legal action against sneaky ISPs.
Check out the white paper at their site, complete with cute illustrations and explanations that just about anyone ought to be able to understand.
If you like yourself some BitTorrent downloading action, we recommend you help Azureus fight BitTorrent throttling ISPs like Comcast, Adelphia, SusCom, and others by installing the Network Status Monitor plug-in for Azureus / Vuze. The plug-in monitors your network traffic for anything that might prohibit your computer from utilizing its broadband connection to the fullest.
Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.
If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.
About half a year after announcing plans to open an online music store, LimeWire has followed through on its threat promise to go at least partially legit. The LimeWire store features about half a million tracks from a diverse set of mostly independent or minor label artists that you may or may not have heard of. There are a few big names featured on the front page, like Dolly Parton, Josh Rouse, Bell X1, and Gloria Gaynor. We really never thought we'd be writing a sentence with all four of those artists in it, but there you go. The site is currently in beta and the LimeWire team says it has plans to add "thousands of tracks daily."
All tracks are available as 256kbps MP3 files. Pricing is $.99 for a single track. Or you can get 25 downloads per month for $9.99, 50 for $14.99 or 75 for $19.99. At that last price, you essentially get 75 songs for $.27 each, assuming you actually download 75 tracks each month.
Currently the LimeWire store is completely separate from the LimeWire peer to peer file sharing application. There's no way to use the LimeWire client to speed up downloads, but the company does plan to offer some sort of integration in the future. How they plan to prevent users from buying songs and then sharing them with the world for free remains to be seen.
CloudFire, a soon-to-be-released offering from the maker of p2p sharing application BoxCloud, is looking to revolutionize the way you share media.
Before CloudFire, if you wanted to share a file with a friend or family member, or access that file on the go, you would have to upload the file to a media sharing site. CloudFire skips the laborious uploading process and allows you to share your media files directly from your desktop or media application (such as iTunes or iPhoto).
This kind of media sharing can be classified as peer-to-web, because the recipient of a file can view them anywhere a browser and internet connection is available, even on a mobile phone.
Details are scarce for now, because the service has yet to launch. The website has some screenshots and snippets of information; as for the prestige, we'll just have to wait.
Hopefully our invites are coming soon so we can provide a more in-depth look at CloudFire. Or do you think we just drop the name Download Squad and get all the invites, like some celebrity at an A-list nightclub?
The European Union has faith in BitTorrent. So much so that it's donating $22 Million to help us be able to steal share files. The BBC is one of the biggest investors, figuring that since people download TV shows now anyway, they should probably try to get in on it. Which makes sense. Nobody watches TV on TV's anymore; it's like listening to music on CDs. And when you see someone walking around with a Discman, you judge them. Don't pretend that you don't.
One of the main goals of this project, which they're calling P2P-Next, is to create an open source, BitTorrent-compatible client that can be used for live streaming. Which could be great for getting decent quality streaming TV. None of this watching poor quality out of sync episodes with strange asian subtitles. The team developing the core technology is the folks behind the BitTorrent client Tribler. With a cool $22 Million from the EU, along with another $6 Million from other partners, this project seems to have the backing it needs to succeed. They are hoping to create an environment that encourages sharing, but removing share ratio sanctions and letting the users moderate the content. All of this is great news. Since anything that will let us pirate share files quicker and easier is downright exciting.
If you're tired of online storage services that give you just a gigabyte or two of space for your files, you might want ot check out Wuala. It's a peer to peer storage solution, which means that you can store a near infinite amount of data online just by freeing up some space on your own hard drive to host other users' encrypted files. Wuala is currently in private alpha, but we've got 500 invites to give away. Read on to find out how to snag one.
When you first sign up for Wuala, you'll be able to upload up to 1GB. Once you've demonstrated that you've got a high speed internet connection and that your computer is on for more than 4 hours a day, Wuala will let you allocate free space on your hard drive for hosting other users files. If you make 10GB available, you'll be able to upload 10GB of your own files. Sharing 50GB will net you 50GB of online storage. And so on.
The program interface is familiar and easy to use. It looks a lot like Windows Explorer, with a system of folders and file icons. You can easily create or delete folders just by right-clicking to bring up a context menu. And you can either upload files by opening an "Add Files" window or just by dragging and dropping them from your desktop.
As you may have noticed, now might not exactly be the best time to get involved in the stock market. Sure, year over year, chances are you'll make money. But there's a good chance that if you throw a few thousand dollars into a mutual fund right now it might be worth less in 3 months than it is today. Fortunately, there's more than one way to turn your savings into more savings. And thanks to the internet, a couple of new opportunities have developed over the last few years.
First up, you might want to take a look at online savings accounts and CDs. Since banks like ING Direct don't have to spend a lot of money on bricks and mortar operations, they can offer higher interest rates than many traditional banks. And even many old school banks offer online accounts with higher interest rates than their traditional offerings.
But thanks to the recent economic downturn, many of these banks are lowering their interest rates. While you could easily open an account with a 5% interest rate a few months ago, you'll be lucky to find one over 3% now. If you're looking for another opportunity, albeit a riskier one, you might want to check out a new breed of financial transactions: social lending services like Prosper, Lending Club, or Zopa.
There are hundreds of ways to backup your important data. You can schedule automatic backups to a DVD-RW, spare hard drive, or use an offsite backup solution to save your data on a remote server in case anything ever happens to your PC. But while offsite services like Carbonite and Mozy provide a secure option for backing up your files online, neither is free (while Mozy offers a free service, account holders can only backup 2GB for free).
Zoogmo offers a novel approach to offsite backup. Instead of saving your files to a central server, this Windows application lets users create peer to peer networks to store files. So if you've got three or four friends with broadband connections and a few spare GB of disk space all you have to do is ask them to download and install Zoogmo and add you as a partner. When you initiate a backup, Zoogmo will check to see which of your partners are online and begin saving your files on their computers.
All your data will be encrypted so that nobody can access your files without your login information. So if you want to save your tax or medical documents offsite, there's little to no risk of your friends reading through them.
Zoogmo is currently in public beta, which means it's free for anyone to use. While in beta there's a file size limit of 50MB, so don't expect to backup your ripped DVD collection using Zoogmo.
The Pirate Bay, an epitome of copyright defiance in the P2P realm, has become something of a holy grail for prosecutors. Assuming that throwing more paperwork at them must eventually do the trick, Pirate Bay admin Peter Sunde tells Ars Technica that they have just received over 4,000 pages containing information regarding the prosecutors' current investigation.
But that doesn't bother Sunde, as he says that if him and the other admins are indeed convicted they will "just appeal all the way to the European Union court. So in five years time this might be settled."
Considering the amount of media attention these actions bring the Pirate Bay, it almost seems detrimental to the efforts of the prosecutors. Not to mention it doesn't make the copyright defenders look environmentally savvy when they dish out 4,000 pages more than anyone probably ever wants to see of investigative materials.
Judging from Sunde's reaction, it looks like all this paper might hope to achieve is providing a fully stocked emergency back up for when the toilet paper runs out over at the Pirate Bay. And maybe injure the back of the mailman who delivered them.
Windows only HFS (HTTP File Server) offers a super simple way to share files via the Internet. There is no install, simply an .exe file (550KB!) that provides an "easy" mode for most users and an "expert" mode that offers advanced preferences for the brave. To share files through HFS, either drag/drop the files to the HFS window, or use the Windows Explorer integration with a right-click. You can add user accounts to HFS so that you can access your own files while not at your computer, or let your friends download the latest killer track you recorded in Windows Sound Recorder.
Once you get HFS configured the way you want it and have configured a port forward in your firewall for port 80 (if your ISP lets you host on that port), just have your friends use their favorite web browser to go to your public IP address or dynamic DNS hostname like http://downloadsquad.no-ip.com and they can log in and download your shared files. You can customize the web page that your visitors see, and you can monitor connection information like what IP is connected, what is being downloaded, etc.
So in our last post about the P2P media sharing site 
A while back we wrote about a new 
