December 20, 2004

BitTorrents under attack

New development in the War against Torrents.

Two of the largest Bit Torrent tracker sites have gone down, Supernova.org and TorrentsBits.com, with commentators suggesting that the Motion Picture Association of America is behind this. The end of file sharing as we know it?

Hardly. All that has happened is that file sharers have got to find a new way of doing business as usual. And once again media businesses demonstrate a total lack of imagination. People pay for convenience...

As much I love the idea of Bit Torrent, in practice I've never been that satisfied. BT works best for distributing the most popular files in the network. The files I've always been interested in are rarely these ones. Hence the appeal of subscription download services that provide good bandwidth to niche programs. One day the idiots will get it.

SuprNova.org ends, not with a bang but a whimper | The Register

Posted by .M. at 10:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2004

Open Source Television Tuner

Mark Pesce got Slashdot'ed after publishing this talk on how an open source TV tuner technology could be combined with DRM micropayment systems and P2P networks to open the floodgates on Internet distribution.

The idea of an egalitarian relationship between producer and consumer is well and truly under the spotlight.

http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle4565.html

Posted by .M. at 01:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 12, 2004

MTV2 Video MODs

Tony Shiff and Big Bear Entertainment have created a series of music video that recycle game assets and re-use characters.

http://www.mtv.com/onair/dyn/video_mods/videos.jhtml

Posted by .M. at 09:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack