Gizmodo Australia » p2p

Viacom Top Lawyer On Obliterating Peer-to-Peer Users

Jesus Diaz — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:36:24 +0000

Michael Fricklas is Viacom’s general counsel, the company’s top lawyer. I can’t tell if he actually felt bad when he said the above at a recent meeting with Yale Law students. I kind of feel an evil, dark smile inside.

Even as part of a big company, and as a consumer, and as a guy who loves technology and loves gadgets and all the interesting things that are happening on the Internet, I kind of agree with [the criticisms] I actually care a lot about fair use… What we’re really focused on in our business right now is the exact copy.

I really don’t get it. If he really thinks this, why doesn’t he advise another course of action? Señor Fricklas, no comprendo. [Ars Technica]

More Tips For Torrenting Your Brains Out

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:35:28 +0000

Just about every BitTorrent trick you need to know that we haven’t shown you, Maximum PC covers in their BitTorrent guide, like remote management, rolling your own torrents and even getting somebody else to do the dirty work for you.

The other major bit they’re missing — where to get torrents where the policies are a little, um, flexible — we’ve got you covered. If you’ve got more tips, shower the comments with ‘em. [Maximum PC]

µTorrent 2.0 Self Throttles So ISPs Don’t Have To…What?

Danny Allen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:15:00 +0000

This is weird: The next version of µTorrent, currently in beta, uses an updated version of the BitTorrent protocol that decreases your speed (usually uploads) when it detects network congestion. Will it slow downloads? Not necessarily…apparently.

“uTP measures the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory uTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.”

So won’t that affect seeding — the very concept torrenting is based on? What if you’re throttling yourself while everyone else is downloading like mad with a non-uTP client? TorrentFreak says that beta testers haven’t reported any significant issues, and suggests that a more efficient use of the network may actually boost download speeds. uTorrent has a massive user base, and if all those users switched over, maybe that could happen.

If you’re with an ISP who slows you down when you use too much bandwidth, or any provider that slows down when it’s congested, uTP could actually be a very positive thing.

These days, µTorrent is developed by BitTorrent itself, and they’ve been looking to extend an olive branch in the whole net neutrality debate for a while now:

This will have a huge impact on ISP networks according to Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “If uTP is successful it should result in a multi-billion dollar windfall in terms of savings for ISPs,” Morris told TorrentFreak

Cool…but I can’t really see this making ISPs who shape torrent traffic suddenly go changing their mind. But I’m all for something being tried, and I’d love to hear your impressions of the beta if you’ve been using it for a while. Detailed background at: [TorrentFreak]

Pirate Bay Unplugged By Swedish Court (Already Back Again, Sorta)

Danny Allen — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:15:00 +0000

Like a T-1000 that just won’t die, the Pirate Bay simply jumped servers after its ISP pulled the plug yesterday. Update: But the site bounced back (after some ups-and-downs overnight), and here’s an excerpt from their defiant (and funny) response.

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France…[Full version]

You can’t really blame the ISP. Yesterday’s rulings meant it faced $US70,600 in fines if it didn’t yank the cord.

And what of Swedish software outfit Global Gaming Factor? It votes this Thursday on whether or not to go ahead with its Pirate Bay buy out. But between all this, and its chairman stepping down, will it still go ahead with plans for a legal version?

If you’re looking for help to get your torrent on in the meantime, check out the Pirate Bay clone, or our favourite 5 Pirate Bay BitTorrent Alternatives.

Surprise! The Pirate Bay’s Buyers Are Extremely Shady

John Herrman — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Heroically snatched from near-death by a mysterious, benevolent gaming company, the Pirate Bay had a rosy future laid out ahead of it. But hey, that company? They’re turning out to be kind of rotten and possibly fraudulent.

A few days ago, amidst talk of how a new, improved, crowd-powered Pirate Bay would work should the sale go through, the trading of Global Gaming Factory shares on the Swedish Aktietorget exchange was frozen. Why? Its administrators found out that the CEO owes quite a few people quite of bit of money, including the government, for taxes. Today, the company’s chairman has stepped down for no obvious reason, and the stock exchange has said that they’re going to keep a freeze on stock trading until they figure out what on earth is going on. Something strange is a good guess!

What does this mean for the Pirate Bay? Well, GGF’s debt-ridden CEO has previously said that the deal to purchase the torrent site—which, remember, hasn’t actually happened yet—would be “rubber stamped” by shareholders by Thursday. That date is pretty much out of the question now and the whole plan is starting to look like it was doomed from the start. So what was the point? Was it some kind of weird share-inflating publicity stunt? An intentional distraction? An earnest bid to buy an illegal filesharing site, by idiots? As much as I like the last one, I don’t think that’s it. [TheLocal via Slashdot]

How To: Use The Heck Out Of Usenet

John Herrman — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Usenet: Everyone’s heard of it, nobody uses it. This is ridiculous. Not only is Usenet a fantastic way to download—it’s not that hard to use. Here’s how to kick your torrent habit once and for all, with Usenet

This point of this guide is to get people acquainted with the basics of Usenet, but if any of you old timers (I’m looking at you, Jesus) have any tips, tricks, advice or teary memories to share about your decades on the ‘Net, that parties in the comments. Anyway!

What is Usenet?

I’ll spare you a deep historical and technical explanation, because it’d bore you to death, and I’m not expert (read: old and bearded) enough to give it, so here are the basics: Usenet has been around since the late 70s as a sort of sister tech to the early bulletin board systems that the first generation of true nerds cut their teeth on. It was designed for discussion and lived across tons of decentralised servers. For most intents and purposes, it’s been replaced by the internet as we know it today, but it’s still very much alive, albeit with a different face.

You see, somewhere back in the 80s, someone started uploading binary content—files, not words—to Usenet. This was an awkward fit, and it some ways it still is. But it quickly became one of the main uses for the service. Why? Because nobody seemed to care much about regulating it—they still don’t, for whatever reason—and because, man, it was fast. Like, unbelievably connection-maxing fast. These factors made it a perfect refuge for for files of all types, and now the pure amount of stuff available on Usenet rivals—and in a lot of categories, exceeds—the best torrent trackers, many of which we don’t even have anymore.

For download junkies, Usenet is a wonderland. But it’s got a reputation for being a little tough to get into, so it’s mostly been populated by, shall we say, the nerdier types. This isn’t really fair, since Usenet isn’t at all hard to use. Here’s how to get started:

Hacking the Gibson (a.k.a. “Choosing a Usenet Service”)

There was a time when ISPs weren’t just cool with Usenet binaries—they actually hosted them. Some still do, but in those rare cases there are usually crippling bandwidth restrictions, throttling measures and all kind of missing content. To mine the Usenet gold you really care about—the alt.binaries content—you’re going to need to buy access. Sorry! Usenet isn’t a peer-to-peer service, so you’ve got to pay someone, somewhere for all that bandwidth and storage. The good news is, you can get away with spending about $US15 a month for unlimited, unthrottled access. If you’re not comfortable with this, get your feet wet with a free trial, like GigaNews‘, or just buy a one-off download pass, good for a few gigabytes.

There are a couple things to look out for in a Usenet provider, but most major, reputable services are roughly comparable. Retention is a word you’ll see a lot, and there’s good reason for that: Usenet servers, given the pure volume of content they get loaded with, have to clear themselves out every once in a while, meaning that files have a limited lifespan. Retention is just a term to describe how long a provider can afford to keep uploads; the longer they can hold onto uploads, the more files they have. Most of us expect 365-day retention nowadays, so don’t settle for much less.

You’ll also see connection numbers advertised, which is how many parallel connections you can have to the servers during downloads. More=faster, but past about 10 concurrent downloads, the numbers really stop meaning anything, unless you’re on some kind of insanely fast commercial connection, in which case WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWNLOADING FILEZ, HMM?

Lastly, there are download limits. This should be more obvious, but just just in case, this represents how much you can download from your provider in a given month. This one’s all you: If you really don’t think you’ll break 10GB a month, only buy 10GB a month. Once you really start to kick your torrent habit, though, you might be surprised at what you’re capable of.

I’ve been using Astraweb for years—they’re cheap and fast enough to saturate my connection—so the rest of the tutorial will assume you’ve chosen them. If you’ve gone with another provider, the only difference will be your server settings, which your provider will give you after you sign up. Remember: Usenet servers are all meshed together, so no matter who your provider is, the available downloads should be the same, at least for as long as your provider keeps them around.

Choosing a Client

As with torrents, there’s some pretty weird stuff going on behind the scenes with Usenet. As I mentioned earlier, adding binary files to Usenet was kind of an afterthought, which can make the procedure for downloading them kind of complicated. For example: Usenet binaries have relatively low size limits, so any large files (movies, software, etc.) need to be split up into lots of small piece. You know how sometimes a torrent comes in about about 40 .RAR files that have to be rejoined once they’re downloaded? That’s because it came from Usenet, where files can’t be much more than 20MB. So, your client’s got to be able to handle all these group downloads and preferably join them together for you. It’s complicated, but manageable, thanks to modern clients.

There a plenty of Usenet clients out there, but most of them are either don’t support the kind of file downloading we want—your email client falls into this category—are command-line-based or, you know, cost money. I’m done spending your dollars for today, so I’ll point everyone toward the only free, cross-platform Usenet binary client I know of, and one I’ve been using for quite a long time: It’s called SABnzb. The guide will be based on this, though you can try to follow along with some other free apps if you like. Mac OSers may want to try Hellanzb (GUI version linked) and Windows folks could go with Alt.binz. But SABnzb is, to put it bluntly, pretty great.

SABnzb runs a local web interface, so it’ll look the same no matter what OS you’re on. Here’s what you’ve got to do:

Download and install the client (For Windows, it’s an installer like any other app; for Mac OS, it’s a DMG)
Start it up. It should open a browser window with a control panel-esque page on it
Navigate to the “Config” Page and click “Servers”

Input the server settings your Usenet provider gave you after signup (Astraweb’s at left)
Staying in the “Config” page, click “Folders”

Choose where you want downloaded files to go, and where you want the temporary files to live before they’re finished downloading and joining together.
Choose a “Watched” folder. This how SABnzb will know what you want it to download. Make it a place that’s easy for you to save to, from a browser. Your default browser downloads folder is a safe bet here.

That’s it! Now just leave SABnzb running, and we’ll start to explore Usenet. Feel free to play around with more of SABnzb’s options, like the cool theme featured in the top image, but follow this general rule: if it’s not totally obvious to you what an option changes, you should probably ignore it. The only thing you might have to worry about outwith this list is enabling an SSL connection, if your ISP is throttling your download speeds. More on that here.

Finding Those Files

Now that you’ve got access to Usenet, and the right tools to draw those sweet, sweet files from it, it’s time to dive in. Since Usenet in the raw is an incomprehensible mess, something has emerged called the Newzbin, or NZB standard. NZBs are a lot like torrent files: They’re little pointers that contain information about all the little scattered pieces of a given download, and which give clients like SABnzb everything they need to make the downloading experience seamless to users. To explore Usenet is to explore NZBs—and to do that, you need a good NZB search engine. The best is the original from Newzbin, the people who invented the NZB format. Unfortunately, it too is paid, and currently invite-only. Instead, you can use one of the decent free alternatives, like NZBs.org, Binsearch or Newszleech. Searching takes some practice, but once you get a sense of how people name stuff ’round these parts, it’s a breeze.

Once you find your NZB, download it to the directory you marked “Watch” in SABnzb. Alternately, you can just download it to wherever you want, and add it to SABnzb at the program’s homepage, under “Add File”. Now check on your SABnzb queue, where you should see something like this:
It’s working! And yes, it’s really going that fast. If it’s not downloading, you may need to check your server settings: Sometimes ISPs block the default port (119) meaning you’ll have to use another one that your provider supports. A common one is 8080 and 1818.

SABnzb takes care of all that nasty RAR rejoining and extracting for you, so once the download is done, your designated download folder should have a fully-cooked, ready-to-watch/listen/run file. So, that’s Usenet!

Odd and Ends

As you’ve probably guessed by now, there are a lot of ways to make Usenet, and specifically SABnzb, more powerful. For that, have a look at this fantastic thread on SomethingAwful by one of the app’s developers and the SABnzb wiki, which answer just about any support question you might have.

Also, there’s a big subject we didn’t ever address here today, which is where all this content comes from. It comes from volunteer users like you and me, but the process can be a little involved, and hey, you’re brand new to the world of Usenet—let the rest of us worry about uploading for now. That said, when you’re finally ready, here’s a primer.

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments—your feedback is a huge benefit to our how-to guides. Happy ~~torrenting~~ Usenetting!

Five Pirate Bay BitTorrent Alternatives

Matt Buchanan — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:20:00 +0000

The Pirate Bay we know and love, though still harbouring torrents for now, is going away. But that doesn’t mean BitTorrent is dead. Far from it. Here are five places to get your torrent on after it closes for good.

Demonoid
Demonoid, besides having a solid community and good quality torrents—no porn, exceedingly few viruses—also operates the other major torrent tracker besides The Pirate Bay. (A tracker is what help makes the whole BitTorrent system work, since it makes sure every peer’s talking to each other properly.) It doesn’t have the best selection around, but what most of what you’ll find there is quality. The catch is that you need to snag an invitation from a member or when they periodically dole them out to the public.

Mininova.org
Mininova’s always one of our preferred torrent sites—tons of torrents from multiple trackers, not a lot of crap in the interface, and the search isn’t bad. Actually, it’s kind of the like The Pirate Bay, but with less crap and fewer headaches. The catch now is that they’re slowly implementing a new copyright filter to keep copyrighted torrents from being uploaded. But you should still be able to find True Blood on there, no problem.

ISOHunt
ISOHunt is a BitTorrent and P2P search engine that’s got what feels like the most sophisticated search engine of the bunch. But like the others, you just punch in what you’re looking for, and it pulls up results you can sort by seeds, date or whatever. It has one of the most massive indices of any site, so it’s a good thing the search engine is up to it. Still, with a lot of torrents, it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for.

BTJunkie
BTJunkie claims to be the largest torrent search engine of all, with around 5,000-25,000 new torrents added to the index daily. The quantity doesn’t seem noticeably better than the other sites listed above, however. Also, the interface is really ugly. But you know, it’s there if you need it.

EZTV
If you’ve downloaded a TV show, whatever site you snagged it from, chances are, it came from these guys. They’re the most prolific TV rippers around, and usually have solid quality rips of shows up within hours of airing. If you’re interested in TV, you might as well just go to the source—their site points to wherever their files are hosted, so you don’t have to search through a million different sites to find the right EZTV torrent.

The whole scene is admittedly a bit depressing now, after years of high profile closures—Suprnova, OiNK TorrentSpy and LokiTorrent—so these are what’s left of the big sites. And even they’re not guaranteed to survive. Demonoid went offline for several months back in 2007-2008, Mininova has a copyright filter attached to it, and really, any site is just a police raid away from possibly going down. So tread carefully, and don’t get too attached to any of them.

And of course, you should drop your own suggestions in the comments.

Download The Pirate Bay’s Complete Archive With One Torrent

Danny Allen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:30:41 +0000

With the Pirate Bay set to close in the next few days, one anonymous user has compiled a single massive archive of all 873,671 torrent files hosted on its servers.

The anonymous uploader who compiled this huge torrent told TorrentFreak that he wanted to have a backup of the site in case all torrents mysteriously disappear after the site is sold. “I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again,” he said.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is also hosting what it calls “the $US675,000 mixtape” — a collection of the 30 songs named after the amount that student Joel Tenenbaum was fined after being found guilty of file sharing.

[Pirate Bay via TorrentFreak — Thanks Mark!]

Court Orders File-Sharer To Pay $80,000 Per Song To RIAA

Dan Nosowitz — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

A delusional Minnesota court has ordered Jammie Thomas, wanton criminal Kazaa user, to pay a total of $US1.92 million for sharing 24 songs. As my own little protest, I’m going to illegally download Metallica’s entire discography. And I hate Metallica.

The decision has taken a ton of twists and turns—even after the jury had decided what Thomas had done was in fact illegal filesharing, the punishment wasn’t at all clear. Originally she was to be fined for over 1,700 songs, which was then whittled down to 24 “representative” songs, and the per song fine has shot up from the initial $US750 (the legal minimum) to the current $US80,000.

Apparently Thomas “gasped” when the number was read out loud. We don’t blame her, although our reaction was more fist-shaking and muttering about old white men in suits than sheer surprise.

The ordeal isn’t over, of course—Thomas will appeal the decision and it’ll probably be heard by a few more judicial levels before any final say is had. Jammie, we’re pulling for you. Stand tall. Or sit down, it’s easier to steal music that way. [Ars Technica]

The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator Provides Safe, Anonymous Protection From the Law for $US6

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:20:00 +0000

The Pirate Bay’s new IP-masking anonymity service for paranoid pirates—Ipredator, whose name also plays off Sweden’s new IPRED anti-piracy law—already has over 100,000 sign-ups.

Ipredator is a virtual private network that people connect to which hides their actual IP address, using a different one provided by Ipredator as their public internet face, making it harder to track who’s really uploading that Spanish-dubbed copy of Quantum of Solace.

Wired notes that feature that makes The Pirate Bay’s anonymising VPN service exceptional is that they supposedly won’t log any data at all, making it that much harder to pinpoint specific users. The few other details known about the service so far is that it’ll cost about $US6 and it’s expected to start up soon.

So far, 80 percent of the people who pre-registered are Swedish. Not surprising given that Sweden’s internet traffic dropped by a third after IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) went into effect, which lets copyrights holders sue alleged pirates willy-nilly without dealing with the police. I expect it won’t stay 80 percent Swede for long, though. [Wired]