Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Ahh... that made me smile.I was trawling through limewire (a p2p file sharing thing, for those who don't know) and found several of my tunes being shared on there.
For a band trying to make money by selling their stuff, that'd be bad news, but as a musician who just wants to get his stuff heard by as many people as possible, I'm quite chuffed.
Steve 6:51 AM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Ah, what beautiful hypocricy.Sharman Networks, the people who created and run Kazaa... one of the most popular pieces of software for exchaning pirated music, movies and software have shut down Kazaa Lite K++, claiming breach of copyright.
Hah!
From what I can tell when firing up Kazaa Lite, the software still works, but is cut off from the main Kazaa network, so only ties up with other Kazaa Lite users, thus reducing the chances of finding the files you want.
It does indeed appear to be pretty limiting... enough for me to try a couple of other systems. I went back to WinMX for a bit, but find it consistantly horrible, so eventually settled on LimeWire and was once again able to find everything I needed.
Labels: p2p
Steve 6:51 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Not much going on here at the moment, but I have noticed a couple of interetsing little snippets in online news recently.Typically, I didn't bookmark the news pages, but the basics of one of the stories goes like this...
An internet marketing company has recognised the value of weblogs as a source of realtime market evaluation. What they're doing is setting up a search/database facility that searches through hundreds of thousands of weblogs, looking for attitudes and market trends in what people write... the relevance of a particular blogger's views being ranked by how many links they have. This information is then sold on to marketing and advertising companies.
Now while I'm no great fan of advertising, and hate spam and popups as much as the next guy, I do find it interesting to know that blogging is being taken seriously in such fields. Who knows, one day maybe they'll try to sell us something we actually want, instead of something they want us to want.
The other news article that caught my eye was about my favourite peer to peer file sharing system.
Everyone's heard of kazaa (or kazaa lite if you know what you're doing), winmx and suchlike... and god knows, the RIAA and MPAA sure know about them... but there's another system that's hitting the headlines again, namely bittorrent in conjunction with the top torrent site suprnova.org. It would seem that this is now one of the most popular methods of getting video files of tv shows, especially in europe and the uk, where many shows are either broadcast several months later than in the usa, or aren't broadcast at all.
I have to admit to being a bit worried whenever suprnova and bittorrent get into the news, 'cause being somewhat centralised, based around a specific website, extra publicity usually heralds a mass of ddos attacks that knock the site offline for days on end. On the other hand, unlike other file sharing systems, the more people downloading a file, the faster it goes. Clever stuff indeed.
Steve 2:18 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, June 28, 2003
So the RIAA or whatever their name is are going after actual file sharers, now they're unable to get their mitts on the peer to peer networks.Duh!
These people are utterly stupid if they believe it'll do anything to improve CD sales.
The simple fact is, people aren't spending money on music because the manufactured boy/girl bands and flash in the pan puppet groups being churned out by the record companies are all crap.
Spending millions on taking a handfull of file sharers to court will do nothing to stop file sharers, it'll just prompt the p2p networks to create more secure software. What they should be doing is spending that money on developing and promoting real talent that people will actually care about.
If a band like U2 was to appear today, they would fail completely, because the record companies aren't prepared to invest in real talent, and allow the bands time to develop and mature... simply wanting to make a fast buck. How sad and misguided is that? They blame the p2p networks for falling sales, but when you look back, what's happening now is little different to everyone taping music from the radio a few years back. Anyone with half a brain can see where the real problem lies.
*Shakes head in utter bemusement at such stupidity*
Labels: p2p
Steve 2:23 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 26, 2003
Kazaa Lite UsersSo, all this messing around with file share systems over the past week or so has made me realise people are really stupid.
Well, yeah, we knew this already, but what's frustrating is how people don't understand how file sharing works... or rather, how it should and could work.
The theory is, one person starts sharing a file to say 3 people, then once they've downloaded it from the first person, they should stay online for a while allowing others to download it from them, so you get a snowball effect, till there should be thousand of people sharing the same file, creating great download speeds.
That's how it should happen.
What actually happens is, 2 of those 3 people downloading the original file either go offline once they've got it, or remove it from their shared folder, meaning no-one else can get it from them, and the 3rd does the most stupid thing and renames the file. This means you have 2 people sharing what is basicly the same file, but with different names, which completely negates the whole point of the system. They're back at square one.
Duh!
People, if you're p2p users, do everyone a favour, stay online an hour or so after you've completed your download, and don't rename the thing. It might look cool to have your name on a file that's going round, but it screws up the whole system.
Labels: p2p
Steve 4:31 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, May 23, 2003
The Benway Guide To Downloading Movies (If you're not interested in such stuff, skip this post, it'll bore you senseless.)The first port of call when looking for a movie is always going to be Kazaa Lite closeley followed by MinMX
These are both fairly typical file sharing systems where you'll often find movies in mpg and avi formats. However, the movies you'll find here have usually been reprocessed by various movie sharing groups, and the quality can often be questionable. The speed of downloads can often suck too, as very often people just grab the movie they want and then remove it form their shared folder, meaning there are only a few people sharing the file, with thousands trying to download it.
The solution to both of these problems is to go directly to the source, obtaining the movie in it's original form (or as near to it as possible) as it was distributed by the group who first obtained it.
The first port of call is usually an irc channel, the details of which I'm not going to go into, as usually these files are split into about 50 rar files, which then need to be decompressed, rejoined, and have numerous other conversions done to make them work. I know how to do it, but it's a pain in the arse and not really worth the hassle.
So... the next place these files will so up, and a much more useful system is on BitTorrent.
This is a very clever and (I suspect deliberately) confusing file sharing system. Unlike Kazaa Lite or WinMX, there is no search facility, and to make things more confusing, the first time you run the program it will give you nothing but an error message, and appear not to be working. Pretty good for putting those who'd like to shut it down off the trail.
So how does it work?
First, you go to the link above and download the program. Next, you need to go the a website that lists live torrent files, the most popular at the moment being www.suprnova.org. Here you'll find a list of links to various movies, tv shows, software, games and various other files. If you have the bittorrent program, you can click on those links, a small file will download onto the temp files folder of your system which will automatically run your bittorrent program and begin downloading the movie or whatever file you've clicked on. If you don't have bittorrent installed, all you'll get is a webpage or file filled with rubbish that appears to make no sense at all. (Also good for putting off those who don't know what they're doing.)
What happens next is, bittorrent will allocate a space on your drive for the file, making it look like you already have it (this confused the hell out of me at first), and only then will it begin downloading, while at the same time uploading the same file from you to other users. This is rather an elegant system, as it removes the need for large queues as seen on other systems. Also, the more data you upload, the faster your download will come through (usually), which is handy for preventing people from hacking the system so they can download without uploading, and makes the whole thing more usable for everyone.
Now, assuming you've downloaded a movie from bittorrent, chances are you won't have an mpg or avi, but a set of .cue and .bin files ammounting to 1 - 2 gigs, which don't appear to do anything. At this point you can either burn then to a writable CD using nero or similar (I've never done this so can't go into the details), or alternatively, you can use vcdgear to convert them into mpg files which you can view with media player.
Other Useful Sites:
www.vcdquality.com has up to the minute reviews of all the latest movies that have been made available by the various crews and groups.
AVIPreview allows you to preview movie files from Kazaa Lite, WinMX and similar before they've finished downloading... handy for checking that they're not fakes or broken files. (This doesn't work with bittorrent.)
GSpot is a handy tool for telling you what video codec a file needs to be viewed. Very often a file may appear to not be working, when in truth you simply don't have the required codec.
MovieCodec.com is a good starting point for finding info about codecs, and has a large (if sometimes obnoxious) forum which can sometimes be informative.
Steve 11:06 PM [+] (0) comments
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