Gadgetopia

Lindows offers software for free over P2P: I wondered when this was going to happen for the first time. Robertson said Lindows.com would spend more than $100,000 in bandwidth charges to deliver software used to create installation CDs for LindowsOS. "By allowing people to download LindowsLive from P2P networks instead ...

Well, the **AA's crackdown on the BitTorrent network has apparently reduced the number of illegal BT users. Good job, Hollywood. Is it better somehow that they're all on eDonkey and Gnutella now? [A] recent study by Internet analysis firm CacheLogic reports that former BitTorrent users have simply switched to eDonkey, ...

P2P Taken to Task for Child Porn: "Senators turned a critical eye to file-trading networks Tuesday in a hearing the explored the use of peer-to-peer services for the exchange of illegal pornography. While no new legislation was introduced, the hearing, convened by the Senate Judiciary Committee, focused on increasing criminal ...

Wired article about BigChampagne; a new venture that tracks peer to peer music downloads and uses the data for market research. They match partial IP addresses to zip codes to determine what songs are hot in what markets. They're being used by major record labels, but in most cases not ...

I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. Record companies have started spamming bogus files onto P2P networks like Kazaa. The files, which appear to be a music file, are in fact a short excerpt with something else filling the remaining time information about the artist, an ...

Song swappers flock to invitation-only Internet: "Just as Prohibition drove drinkers underground in the roaring '20s, the music industry's crackdown is pushing many song swappers away from the open Internet and into what amount to cyberspace speakeasies. These high-tech Cotton Clubs usually require users to be trusted or at least ...

Florida Dorms Lock Out P2P Users: The University of Florida had a file sharing problem: "Last spring, the university received about 40 notices of copyright violations per month. At peak file-trading periods, 90 percent of the traffic on the housing network was peer-to-peer. In an average 24-hour period, 3,500 of ...

Security Through Begging: This is like something out of a sitcom. a contractor was allowed to connect his personal virus-infested computer to the network at a nuclear power plant. The contractor had a file sharing app on his laptop as well, and suddenly nuclear secrets were available to plenty of ...

Share That Photo: Hit Save: This seems pretty interesting. Seems P2P-ish. He's been testing a new service called ShareALot that tries to simplify sharing over the Internet. To send a picture, he drops a photo into a folder on his PC, and it automatically appears in folders on the PCs ...

I've downloaded and installed Skype, so someone call me. My user name us "deane_barker," or, if you have Skype associated with the "callto://" protocol, you can just click here. (Don't know what Skype is? It's P2P telephony. That explains a lot, I'm sure.)

In refugee camp, a P2P outpost: Someone has set up a file-sharing network in the Jenin refugeee camp in the West Bank. "'We're in Palestine, in a refugee camp,' said Ras Kabir, the service's co-founder. 'There aren't too many process servers that are going to be coming into the Jenin ...

Welcome to Grouper: P2P with a twist. When you "share" a music file, it just streams from one machine to the other, so you never really...release the track. No one "gets" the track, so is there a copyright problem? I imagine this is akin to me sticking big speakers in ...

Calendar - Standards Based Calendar Client Project: Want to switch to Mozilla but can't leave behind Outlook's calendar and task list? Follow this link, and you have one less excuse. I spent five minutes with it, and I think this is another nail in Outlook's coffin. A bonus is that ...

Time Warner Links Web Prices With Usage: Initially horrifying as it may seem, this was kind of an inevitably, given the revolution of P2P and BitTorrent. Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data ...

Following up on Torrent Shutdowns: Slashdot has posted a bit on SuprNova being shutdown. What I found interesting were the comments: they are generally very anti-SuprNova, very pro-copyright. An example: Furthermore, this is exactly what should be happening: the government attacks those who break the law, rather than those who ...

BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution: Here's on interesting look at combining P2P with RSS to provided distributed RSS feeds using BitTorrent. RSS consumers also become distributors, and future consumers simply grab the nearest available feed instead of taxing the source for it. ...the more popular the feed, the more ...

BitTorrent jumps into enterprise market with content delivery service: This is exciting. P2P is too cool of a technology to be burdened by the perception that it s just for pirates and punks. Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent is set to announce on Tuesday morning the availability of a new enterprise content delivery ...

Lowering the Boom on Copycats: This doesn't bode well for P2P. It strikes me that the combination of stiffer penalties and increased availability of legal alternatives are leading up to someone being made an example of. Unauthorized copies of movies often turn up in flea markets and online "peer to ...

Update: After reading this post, read the follow-up here. Let's say I have a meeting on Monday nights during the time that Fox's awesome guilty pleasure, "North Shore," is on. I don't have a VCR anymore, so I can't tape it. And I don't have a Tivo either. What am ...

Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks, Combining Talents to Create Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Products and Services: This is kind of a no-brainer. Micrsoft owned 25% of Groove, and it was only a matter of time until Groove got built into Windows. Microsoft Corp. announced today that it will acquire Groove Networks ...

How to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth: This guy was staying at a hotel, and someone was sucking up all the bandwidth on the network with a P2P app. He found an inventive way to get him off. I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into ...

Wired News: RIAA Hits Students Where It Hurts: The RIAA is suing four college students for billions. The four operated larger-than-normal P2P networks through their college networks, one of them offering 1 million files. The RIAA wants $150,000 for each file. "'This round of suits is intended to send a ...

TechNews.com's Grokster Case At a Glance: Big Supreme Court case today MGM v. Grokster. This is considered by many to be the showdown in the file sharing and P2P frontier. The ruling here will have huge reverberations on both the entertainment and Internet industries. This article has a good ...

We've talked before about some of the crazy search engine positioning we get on this site. The GoogleBot loves us. In particular, this page is second on Google for the term "bitlord," behind only BitLord's own site. I don't know how it happened, it just did. This weekend, we got ...

Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs: An interesting article about a plan that Big Media is warming up to. It was proposed a long time ago, but immediately dismissed. Griffin s idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers something like $5 per user per month ...

Open Source Applications Foundation - Our Product "Chandler" - Description: Chandler is the Big Thing that Mitch Kapor (the guy who brought us Lotus 1-2-3) has been working on for a year now. Version 0.1 is out. Here's his vision: "Recent open-source groupware products and projects (Evolution, Kroupware) use Outlook ...

SunnComm has announced their intention to file suit against the Princeton student who figured out how to disable their iron-clad software using the shift key. "Concludes Jacobs, 'This cat-and-mouse game that hackers and others like to play with owners of digital property is over. No matter what their credentials or ...

On the heels of my post about downloading TV shows, one of the editors of Gadgetopia has received a letter from his ISP and the MPAA advising him that this is bad. I've looked over the letter carefully, and they're really saying the same thing I said. My words were: ...