p2p sharing

The 404 1,289: Where Alex Winter gets us Downloaded (podcast)

Our guest on today's episode is Alex Winter. You might recognize him as Ted from "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," but you might not know that he's also a documentary filmmaker. His latest project is a story about the rise and fall of Napster called "Downloaded."

It traces the history of the file-sharing service but it also looks at the industry waves it caused in its aftermath, leading up to Spotify and iTunes as it exists today.

We'll talk with Alex about the road to making the movie, his introduction to Sean … Read more

Easy P2P

EasyMule is a free, open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client. It's built upon, and enhances, the original eMule P2P network, which was conceived in 2002 as the eMule Project in response to dissatisfaction with the prototype eDonkey network. The eMule Project added a graphical user interface and other improvements that made sharing large files over the Internet much easier and more reliable for the geek-challenged users among us. In much the same way, EasyMule builds on the success of the eMule client with an enhanced graphical interface, faster downloads using fewer system resources, disk buffering for safety, and, according to the … Read more

BitTorrent's game downloads: A big hoax

Update: BitTorrent's Games section is misleading. First of all, game downloads don't necessarily use BitTorrent. What you may get via the BitTorrent P2P network is a small (298K) installer program, which in turn runs a proprietary downloader application that gets the game code from a central server.

Second, although games are listed in the B.E.N. catalog as free, they are nothing of the sort. You get a free preview period to try the game. If you want to play it past that period, you have to pay up. Gangland, for example, is free only for 60 … Read more

BitTorrent Entertainment Network hands-on: 10 pros and cons [updated]

The new BitTorrent media store, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, has been live for a few hours. It's a mixed bag, and these are my hands-on impressions. I wanted to come up with five pros and five cons. But I think the cons outweigh the pros, and this list reflects that. Update: The section on games has been rewritten and moved from pros to cons.

Pros:

It's fast. BitTorrent.com has big pipes. This morning, even on files that no one else was hosting (no one else in the swarm), I got 1MB/sec download speeds. An episode of … Read more

BitTorrent goes legit: Paid P2P movie-sharing coming

BitTorrent is launching a legal, paid media distribution system, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BEN). [See News.com story.]

Essentially an online store that will compete other stories like iTunes, the new BitTorrent Network will have more than 5,000 titles. TV shows will be $1.99 an episode, and users will be able to watch them as much as they want. Movies will cost $2.99 or $3.99 and will time out 30 days after download, or 24 hours after the user begins playing them.

In other words, there will be heavy digital rights management (DRM) on BitTorrent files. … Read more