Monday, September 29, 2008

Coming October 1, 2008 - The Pirate City

Team member - B. Frost

And you thought Pirate Bay was HUGE. See what happens when the raiders get their own city - The Pirate City

Move over Pirate Bay

Team Member - Bill Frost
Pirate Bay is knocked from it’s pedestal as the largest torrent tracker in the world. According to Google, Mininova has surpassed Pirate Bay with an estimated 2 million unique visitors a day. Pirate Bay still garners a respectable 1.5 million. In third and fourth place are isoHunt and Torrentz, respectively. Torrentz, which is not as well known in the United States, is actually a site which searches other torrent tracker download sites. Torrentz is extremely popular in India. Pirate Bay is most popular in the U.S. and it’s native Sweden. isoHunt is largely used in Japan.

Even with the names and players being so widely known and recognized if any of these four sites were to disappear, the amount of illegal file sharing would continue to grow. New BitTorrent sites are being created faster than the court system is able to order them taken offline. In fact, in the span of a year Pirate Bay doubled its traffic.

Information gathered at http://www.webtvwire.com/

Thursday, September 25, 2008

RIAA filesharing mistrial


Team Member - J. Gorman - I came across this interesting story today via Engadget where apparently the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has lost an appeal against an alleged file-sharer who used Kazaa. Originally the file-sharer lost the trial and was fined $222,000 for having music files available to be shared on her computer. The interesting thing about the original trial was that the RIAA never had to prove that the user ever had Kazaa installed on her computer that she herself was sharing the files on the computer, or even what files she was sharing. In addition, a guilty verdict based on simply making song downloads "available" to be downloaded via P2P networks like Kazaa is apparently no longer a viable reason to award money to the RIAA. To win a ruling now the RIAA must prove each and every song that was downloaded by every user in order to collect damages on them. (Via Engadget article by Nilay Patel)

Friday, September 12, 2008

What is Peer-to-Peer Networking?


Team Member - J. Gorman - Peer-to-peer networking a.k.a P2P is a computer network set up to share files between individual computers over an area instead of distributing files throughout the network from a central server. In a P2P network the more users there are distributing the files the better, because it enables users to download files much faster. The file or files being downloaded are broken up into bits and the complete work of the download is shared by the entire network.

For more information about P2P networks click here for the Wikipedia article.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Colleges required to provide P2P network alternatives

Team Member - J. Gorman - I came across this news story via a Google news search. Basically the U.S. House of Representatives passed a law that would require college campuses to provide their students legal alternatives to p2p networks. According to the story most campuses now block all p2p network traffic including Morpheus and Limewire in an effort to battle illegal sharing of files between students.

Via The Daily Evergreen