pirate releases
Trillian 3 has been released. No more betas. So far, I'm just going ho-hum at the stuff that is new. It seems slick, certainly, but I don't use many of the features that the new version offers.
In other news, it seems that Suprnova and a few other sites have been shut down, or have voluntarily ceased operations (depending on who you ask). I'm not surprised at this, honestly. Suprnova was getting a lot of press attention, so much so that BBC news articles for piracy featured vidclips of people browsing the site. That sort of notoriety never pays when you allow swapping of copyrighted material. BT was never intended to be a serious P2P replacement for errant fileswappers, anyway. Download the tracker, and voila, you now know all the IPs of users, and some obliging sites even put up download/upload ratios. Aargh. Unfortunately, the tag of file sharing application isn't one easy to shake, even for BitTorrent, with perhaps more legitimate uses than most other P2P clients. I still download the odd Linux distro ISO via HTTP, because BT is banned where I work.
The really inspirational figure to emerge from the torrent phenomenon (for me, at least) is it's author, Bram Cohen. At least he profited from his creation, in that he was jobless and living on credit cards while writing BT, but soon after Valve Software hired him to work on Steam.
Viva coming up tomorrow. And I'm wasting time writing about BitTorrent and Bram Cohen. Aargh again.
In other news, it seems that Suprnova and a few other sites have been shut down, or have voluntarily ceased operations (depending on who you ask). I'm not surprised at this, honestly. Suprnova was getting a lot of press attention, so much so that BBC news articles for piracy featured vidclips of people browsing the site. That sort of notoriety never pays when you allow swapping of copyrighted material. BT was never intended to be a serious P2P replacement for errant fileswappers, anyway. Download the tracker, and voila, you now know all the IPs of users, and some obliging sites even put up download/upload ratios. Aargh. Unfortunately, the tag of file sharing application isn't one easy to shake, even for BitTorrent, with perhaps more legitimate uses than most other P2P clients. I still download the odd Linux distro ISO via HTTP, because BT is banned where I work.
The really inspirational figure to emerge from the torrent phenomenon (for me, at least) is it's author, Bram Cohen. At least he profited from his creation, in that he was jobless and living on credit cards while writing BT, but soon after Valve Software hired him to work on Steam.
Viva coming up tomorrow. And I'm wasting time writing about BitTorrent and Bram Cohen. Aargh again.
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