Peerialism is a new, upcoming BitTorrent tracking software that is supposed to be released next month. The company promises to increase download speeds by 150% and to decrease the load on ISP networks by 20-50%. Peerialism’s software is based on OpenTracker software.
“In standard BitTorrent the tracker chooses a totally random number of peers for you. There are some good reasons for this since random actually gives some nice and robust network properties but in many cases this will force you to download for peers far away from you,” stated Andreas Dahlström, CTO and founder of Peerialism in an interview with TorrentFreak.
Peerialism supposedly selects peers to share files with more intelligently. The software picks peers based on geographical location. Based on geographical locations, download speeds can be faster.
“Is the Colonel’s underwear a matter of national security?” That is my favorite line from the movie, A Few Good Men. Tom Cruise’s wittiness in that movie reminds me of the wittiness used by the lawyer for The Pirate Bay during this potentially long and arduous trial. The third day of the trial ended early just like yesterday’s day of the trial. Yesterday 50% of the charges were dropped because of the prosecution’s lack of the ability to properly explain what BitTorrent was.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) used an argument that damages caused by The Pirate Bay offering The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” through a torrent should be 10 times the damage since the music is available anywhere else online. The Pirate Bay doesn’t have the funds and cannot pay the damages for offering that song even though Peter Danowsky stated that The Pirate Bay is “organized crime on a grand scale” and netted “significant revenus” from various sources of advertising.
“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me,” stated The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde on Twitter. Peter Danowsky said that even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t have all that money, they can pay a lot of it anyway.
“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” stated Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson. “According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.” Lundström’s company provides technical services to The Pirate Bay. After this statement the court adjourned.
Sunde later reported on Twitter that after the court was adjourned, “We had some pizza after todays episode of #spectrial. Met the whole oposing side and asked if they could pick up the check. They refused .”
Today is only the second day in the trial against The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is a search engine website that allows people to search for .torrent files. Torrent files contain a link to download all sorts of files including music, movies, and software. For the non-tech savvy, think of it as a modern day Napster, but its not just music. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall, did not adequately explain the function of DHT. DHT allows for trackerless torrents so it does not necessarily mean that the screenshots they have provided as evidence belongs to The Pirate Bay’s tracker.
Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) asked Roswall to explain how BitTorrent actually works. The prosecution misunderstood the technology and told the court that his evidence does not adequately show that The Pirate Bay’s trackers were used. Roswall had to drop all charges that relate to “assisting copyright infringement.” Now the remaining charges are simply “assisting making available.”
“EPIC WINNING LOL,”stated Peter Althin, a lawyer representing The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.
BitTorrent is now being used by Stanford University for distributing course materials. The courses that are being distributed revolve around Computer Engineering. Stanford distributes videos, syllabi, exams, homework, etc. on the BitTorrent protocol. Stanford also places lectures on YouTube, iTunes, and Vyew.
The course lectures that are being distributed include:
- Programming Methodology
- Programming Abstractions
- Programming Paradigms
- Introduction to Robotics
- Natural Language Processing
- Machine Learning
- The Fourier Transform and its Applications
- Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems
- Convex Optimization I and
- Convex Optimization II
So far about 200,000 people have visited the Stanford Engineering Everywhere. People have come from Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, and the U.K. All of the course materials are published and distributed under the Creative Commons license. Stanford uses Vuze’s DHT tracker and that means those who use BitTorrent clients without DHT support will not be able to download the materials.
Stanford punishes those that are caught using the BitTorrent protocol for copyright infringement. The cost is $100 fine for the first time, $500 for the second time, and $1,000 for the third time.
Elite Torrents was a group of users that seeded movies illegally using the BitTorrent platform. The Feds shut down Elite Torrents in 2005. An Duc Do, one of the members of the group was able to avoid jail-time, but still faces a $15,000 fine, 3 years probation, and 400 hours of community service. An Duc Do graduated magna cum laude from Drexel University in 2005 and lost his job with Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) in this process.
Elite Torrents caught the attention of the MPAA when they started sharing Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith about 6 hours after the movie had it’s first screening. The movie was downloaded 10,000 times within 24 hours.
An Duc Do pleaded guilty to conspiracy and copyright infringement. Duc Do shared movies like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Flight of the Phoenix, and King Arthur from a computer server where 133,000 users had access to it.
“They [other Elite Torrent members] threatened to kick him out of the organization because he wasn’t uploading as much as some of the other pirates were doing,” stated Floyd Miller, the prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.
Previous defendants and Elite Torrent members Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen, Daniel Dove face jail-time. All of these individual’s are in the early to mid-20’s.
Amit Chowdhry | September 16, 2008 | 498 views | Comments Categorized under BitTorrent
BitTorrent is a P2P content sharing protocol used to share large amounts of data. The protocol is maintained Bram Cohen’s company BitTorrent, Inc. Cohen designed the BitTorrent protocol in 2001. Cohen’s company has raised $17 million in a third round of funding according to PEHub. The investors include DAG Venture,s DCM and Accel Partners. This brings BitTorrent’s total funding to $46.4 million.
BitTorrent powers the high quality videos that run on Revision3.com. BitTorrent has also recently signed up 2 game development companies to stream online games to customers. The two game companies are Aeria and IAHGames. Many people use the BitTorrent protocol to share copyright music and movies.
Although BitTorrent Inc. had a recent staff cut at their San Francisco, Calif. office they are actively signing deals with Hollywood distributors for the selling of movies and music.
Amit Chowdhry | August 26, 2008 | 794 views | Comments Categorized under BitTorrent
BitTorrent, the P2P sharing technology has hired their first CFO. Mitchell Edwards, who previously worked as a lawyer at Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison was also hired as BitTorrent’s general counsel. Edward’s most recently employment was CFO and general counsel at Groxis Inc., creators of the Grokker Desktop Software.
Edwards received his J.D. from Stanford and worked in the White House and the Supreme Court. BitTorrent was founded by Ashwin Navin and Bram Cohen. Other BitTorrent Board members include Ping Li of Accel Partners, Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and David Chao of DCM.
Below is Mitch’s full from the BitTorrent Management Team page:
Mitchell Edwards is the CFO and GC of BitTorrent, Inc. Mitchell has over 20 years of high-tech executive management, finance, legal and transactional experience. Prior to joining BitTorrent, he has served as a senior executive and board member of numerous emerging growth high-tech companies, a private equity fund, and was a partner of a major international law firm. His experience includes serving as CFO and GC of Groxis, Inc., VFC Technologies, Ikano Communications, and Digital Courier Technologies. Mitchell was also a Partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in LA and SF where he specialized in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions for high-tech companies, and structured, negotiated and oversaw dozens of initial public offerings and venture capital financings. Other experience includes positions at Shearman & Sterling, at the White House and at the United States Supreme Court. Mitchell earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a B.A./M.A. from Oxford University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University in Economics.
Often times I am irked by policies and bills laid out by the government such as telecommunication company immunity for wire tapping, but today I was actually impressed by a government decision made. The FCC told the Associated Press that Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) was wrong for interfering with BitTorrent traffic.
“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” stated FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”
Comcast indicated that they block BitTorrent traffic when there were heavy periods of Internet traffic, but it turns out that this was a façade. Comcast blocked upstream BitTorrent traffic all the time.
Comcast denied the allegations. Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcastcast stated that the company “carefully limited measures that Comcast takes to manage traffic on its broadband network are a reasonable part” of making sure that customers get quality service.
Marvin Ammori, General Counsel at Free Press filed the complaint with the FCC. In response to the FCC decision, Ammori stated “The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money.”
The whole investigation started when Robb Topolski, a barbershop quartet singer attempted to share legal music files with others. Robb found that Comcast was blocking his uploads. Check out the video below to hear Robb speak about his evidence on Comcast.
YouTorrent is a .torrent file search engine that recently went legal. YouTorrent indexed results from The Pirate Bay, and btjunkie earlier. Basically, YouTorrent just pulled a Napster.
YouTorrent is like the Google of .torrent search. There aren’t any ads on the homepage, just the search engine box and the logo. Now that YouTorrent stopped aggregating content from all the other larger .torrent search engines, less people stayed using YouTorrent.
I did not really use YouTorrent much before because I’m not really into downloading .torrent files. As a matter of fact, today was the first time I actually tried out a search on YouTorrent. But now it seems like there are some interesting DJ mash-ups on here.
Since YouTorrent does not have any ads, the site most likely does not make much revenue (if any at all). But the platform works great. And YouTorrent receives around 10 million unique visitors per month.
“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,†stated Patrick, one of the founders of YouTorrent. YouTorrent may be a good acquisition for BitTorrent to make. BitTorrent acquired µTorrent, the software for downloading .torrent files in December 2006.
Information Sources:
[1] TorrentFreak: YouTorrent Goes Legal, and Up For Sale by Ernesto
[2] TechCrunch: YouTorrent On The Market, Switches To Legal Torrents by Duncan Riley
I found this on a forum via Digg. The amount was not disclosed. On the forum, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and Ludvig Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent announced that “BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.”
The forum also mentioned that µTorrent’s software will remain lightweight, but the acquisition had mainly taken place to for access to µTorrent’s user-base. Some of the Digg users that have commented on the post see the acquisition as a bad move, but others are hoping that through this acquisition, µTorrent will be compatible for Linux and the Mac.
Two Digg users, akarpo and ikonoclasm were talking about the possibilities of DRM clients being implemented into µTorrent. “BitTorrent Inc. signed a deal with the movie industry last week because the industry wants to stop piracy” stated Digg user, ikonoclasm.
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