Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on August 10, 2008 – 5:43 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
TorrentFreak reports that the PirateBay has been blocked by all major Italian ISP’s who forced to do so due to a court order. The deputy public prosecutor who asked for the PirateBay block is on a mission, as this is his second success in two weeks. He managed to shut down the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, on July 29th.
The pirates fight back though, they want all Italians to have access to their torrent service. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they “are working on setting up a really annoying system for them to filter. “Some of the ISPs decided to nullroute - so we changed IP so it works for them now some other decided to block the domain name so we added labaia.org, which means “the bay” in Italian.”
In a blog post, Sunder calls Italy a “fascist state” predicts that they’ll win the fight: “We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.”
I hope you like that post!
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Written on August 8, 2008 – 11:02 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The French are quite of fond of torrents, shows a study of the leading French anti-piracy association. Every day, 450,000 illegal downloads of recent films find their way to computers in France. This puts illegal pirate copies close to the level of legitimate box-office sales.
The study of the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA) focuses on the 100 most sought-after foreign and French film downloads from November 2007 to June 2008. This made up for 90 percent of the total traffic. ALPA scrutinized Internet traffic originating from France to foreign networks permitting illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading.
The director of ALPA Frederic Delacroix admitted he was surprised by the results: “We did not expect such numbers. We are facing a major phenomenon that can endanger the film industry and (other) audiovisual industries.”
To makes things worse, even the study was pirated. It wasn’t supposed to be published officially till September. How ironic is that?
Written on July 20, 2008 – 2:25 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Do you have an event that you want to cover live, but you lack the budget to cover bandwidth costs? Researchers from 21 different European countries have developed software that can stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network, an open source initiative that might change the way we stream video on the Internet.
Broadcasters have little bandwidth costs
With the BitTorrent zero server approach, receipients supply pieces of the data to newer recipients. It allows everyone to broadcast a live stream to thousands of people with just little personal broadband usage. Broadcasters can save millions by using the technology, although someone has to pay for the bandwidth on the end, if the broadcaster sends their data out by torrent the ISP is covering the costs.
Improving the BitTorrent protocol
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on Peer-to-Peer technology at Delft University of Technology said to torrentfreak: “To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible… However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.” The Give-to-get protocol streams the video to users that also give broadband, rewarding “nice users”.
Try it for yourself
The live streaming technology is still work in progress. For now, the project has received a €19 million ($30 million) grant from the EU this year, and the BBC is currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, and you can try is out for yourself as well. Download the SwarmPlayer (Windows, Linux) and click on this Live Bittorrent Webcam Feed to tune the SwarmPlayer into Amsterdam.
Written on July 15, 2008 – 3:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Although some say television has become redundant - co-editor Boris doesn’t even have a TV subscription anymore -, I do believe that television series are here to stay. Why? They fascinate people. Because of the long time spans, extra complexities and layers are added to the series - persuading us to follow six plot lines at the same time. Apparently, most people are fond of that - as new monster hits keep popping up. And you know what? It even makes us smarter - says Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad is Good for You. London-based Paul Cleghorn has built a social media experience around these series with Tape it off the Internet (TIOTI).
UGC can be enlightening, if there is any
This social media aggregator for television allows users to browse through almost all successful TV series - each with a page containing wiki-like content, a link to a torrent, and loads of UGC. Spoofs, bloopers, alternative endings, mash-ups, and commentary from lovers and haters dominate the series’ profiles. At least, that was the idea when the service launched in October 2007. So far, there isn’t much going on.
When I’ve seen a movie that leaves me questioning “What the hell just happened?”, I browse to IMDB to see what other film freaks have to say about it. That’s always great fun - sometimes even enlightening -, and I’m glad to have found a potential similar experience for TV series. If only more users would leave their blunt comments.
The torrents might be responsible
The torrent links are a nice side-effect, making it possible to track down the episode you’ve missed. Or all of them, if you’re like me and refuse to stay at home for an episode. But I do think that the torrents are partly responsible for the lack of activity on TIOTI. Users just click through, eager to see the episode, and forget about the whole social aspect.
An aggregator after all
Although TIOTI has hardly any social activity on its site, it does link to other sources where discussion take place - like TV.com. Combined with the torrent links, YouTube clips, Flickr pictures, and official links, this makes TIOTI a good aggregator after all - handy for people who want to quickly see a show or learn more about it. But I guess Cleghorn isn’t satisfied with that. I’m sure he wants an active community. Of course he wants that, since it will give his social media aggregator for television soul.
Written on May 27, 2008 – 1:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In January 2005, three young Dutch guys started a new torrent site as an alternative to SuprNova, the former popular torrent service that couldn’t cope with the legal pressure. Yesterday, these guys celebrated the fifth billion download.
Mininova has been growing with an incredible speed. Last November they reached the third billion download, 78 days later they counted four billion downloads and now another billion milestone has been reached. TorrentFreak reported that when Mininova went offline due to hardware problems a couple of weeks ago, its competitors Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent almost went down as well. They couldn’t handle the traffic of the Mininova refugees. Impressive stuff..
But it isn’t all party hearty at Mininova’s HQ, as Eric, Matthijs, and Niek face a lawsuit by the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN. This organization wants Mininova to be history, since they think 90 percent of the files on Mininova are illegal. Mininova’s counter plead? We’re not afraid as we’re just like Google, only referring to other sites. This isn’t just youthful recklessness, since Bright reports Mininova has hired lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, the same guy who won the Dutch lawsuit against Kazaa. Exactly the track record Eric, Matthijs and Niek need.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
