Tag Archives: p2p

Be Kind, Reseed: Web-based BitTorrent video sharing

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I think initiatives like BitLet.org are interesting, at least in their attempt to take BitTorrent-in-the-browser to the most logical conclusion: BitTorrent-on-the-web. The ironic thing about BT-on-the-web (which, I think, is not the same as BitTorrent DNA) is that it practically relies more on external embedding of the player (and applet, unless your browser is HTML 5-capable) to further propogate its download speed in the browser, as opposed to the well-known bottleneck that such external embedding on third-party sites tends to exact upon server-based web video streams.

Of course, if P2P-distributed web video embeds do take off, then it seems like the new way to "be kind" (in the video rental sense) to other users is to leave our tabs and windows open for as long as possible to make other users’ viewing experiences a bit easier through seeding. But the prospect of such a method may make it quite a bit easier to distribute video over the web (and to lose less money on server bandwidth, which is a constant problem for any video sharing site); in fact, it somewhat democratizes video sharing by merely relegating a video sharing site to a glorified social networking service which links to torrents like any normal tracker or search engine (the user commentary, video responses, social bookmarking and annotations would remain a server-side feature to draw the users), and the resulting, P2P-enabled ubiquity of file availability and visibility (hence the moniker "viral video") would necessitate more liberal or copyleftist licensing schemes to maintain the IP safety of such content.

So I would embed one of BitLet,org’s videos into this post (which would cause an applet to load), but I can’t find an embed code. So in the meantime, here’s Mr. Cropperfield: the applet version and here’s the friendlier HTML5 appletless version (if you’re using Firefox 3.6 or a Chromium nightly build).

The silly, fickle morals of the (ex)pro-Pirate Bay populists

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Ever since TPB announced that buyout deal with GGF, the populists who exclaimed "ra ra ra!" for the TPB owners at the infamous trial in Stockholm are now seething with either anger or dismissiveness for the "new" TPB. They’re exclaiming "How could you do this to us, your loyal users?! Fuck you, I’m going to Demonoid!" because the prospect of TPB becoming a user-paid site (alot like Metafilter) rubs their offended ex-userbase as "going legit" or "kowtowing to the MAFIAA".

I rarely use TPB: I tend to use BT for downloading anime series and the occasional film, so I know that I’ll find far more of what I want on isoHunt and AnimeSuki than on TPB, which seems to be much more used for software (for which, since using Ubuntu and mostly free-software, I’ve hardly lacked) and film/documentary distribution. So it hardly affects me that TPB will go legit and user-paid to any length, but I know that they have legitimate reasons (both financial and political) for doing such, and I find much of the fury that is being directed in its way from commenters on Digg and TorrentFreak to be self-righteous and misdirected.

But as a user-driven site, TPB, like Digg and YouTube, is finding itself in the crosshairs of many active Internet users who have an active disdain for anything that is corporately-driven or monetarily-supported, including web advertisements or making user accounts dependent upon monetary subscriptions. True, money is always a hurdle for any site to cross, and corporations tend to have an arguably-heightened sense of entitlement to monetary payments for many of the most minute perks and features that they distribute, but the behavior of corporations doesn’t excuse the user from playing a role in the sustenance of a site for its services. That’s why the Pirate Bay had banner and text ads on every page of the website.

The sites which display the content, or at least links to the content, need money to drive revenue for their survival as autonomous units; otherwise, they will fall to the wayside, no matter how popular they may be to their userbases.

The most disturbing mentality of TPB’s proponents-turned-detractors ("I’m deleting you from my bookmarks. Good day, sir!"), however, shows when they comment on how TPB will be replaced by another new head of the BitTorrent hydra, followed by a "good riddance" to another old, expendable head. It’s like they expect to be perpetually able to switch out hydra heads (i.e., trackers and search engines) every 6-12 months like shoes or toothbrushes, every time that a hydra head either gets taken to the judicial abattoir to be bled and culled or gets a bit "uppity" and starts to consider more sophisticated, machiavellian methods of financial sustenance.

So I ask myself….how do you reserve any respect for these fickle, thin-skinned "pirates" who can’t even be counted on to dig into their own pockets to support their own captains and fix the severe damage to their own sinking ships BEFORE it comes to the captains forcing those pockets inside-out as a last-ditch effort? They’re hilarious in their churlish textual expressions of "Fuck the RIAA!" e-rage and claims of support to the "cause", but they’re truly impotent and unstable in the bladder and couldn’t be counted upon to support any single one of the many public torrent sites.

So I don’t think the Pirate Bay is in the wrong for going ahead with paid user subscriptions; actually, its been a long time coming for any major previously-non-corporate tracker of the TPB’s size or popularity, and that people didn’t see this coming as a feature is laughable. DRM on files may be a stretch, and may be signs of overreaching desperation to recoup legal costs (as DRM is seen as a "big no-no" for the free culture movement), but it’s not surprising that TPB went this route after the trial.

And as it has been said in the media, this may be the symbolic end of the "Pirate" era of the free culture movement (and of this decade), but the contributions made by the unaffiliated trifecta of TPB, the Pirate Party and the Swedish Piratbyran will make part of a sociopolitical foundation for the pro-copyreform movement in the European Union, and will also open new questions for the Western copyreform and copyleft movements to answer.

Finally, I think that this decade has shown the advance of what I call the "wikileft", or the current movement towards making the production of media more open, publicly-persistent, collaborative and human-readable (as in the case of wikis for encyclopedic articles, or even in Mozilla’s Bespin project for a web-based collaborative IDE). It is copyleftist by necessity (hence naturally allowing for P2P distribution), but it brings a greater focus upon the production of content, a focus which was never fully considered or exploited by the copyreform movement which cast its lot behind TPB and other distribution hubs. The wikileft, IMO, gives a far greater window of user involvement and responsibility than the copyleft or copyreformism ever did; users not only contribute their works to the wiki whiteboard, but take a role in the nurturing and development of the information contained on the whiteboard (including information posted by others) and ultimately "own" the responsibility and recognition for their own contributions.

If the wikileft can comprehensively outsource the production of prime, expert-level media to the lay public within the next decade, what would be the need for the statically-produced media that the copyreform movement fights for the right to non-commercially distribute under the protection of fair use? Who would care about the Encarta Encyclopedia client software being distributed on BitTorrent when one can point to any one of the nearly 3 million English Wikipedia articles created and edited by millions of users?

The copyleft, for its own sake, must morph into the wikileft to make user-generated, user-supported content more ubiquitous and prevalent throughout the Internet, thus squeezing out the demand for the proprietarily-licensed, statically-produced media which the TPB, isoHunt, LokiTorrent, OiNK and others past and present  fight for the right to distribute. The latter type must be dumped in the shortest order in order to render irrelevant the companies which claim intellectual monopolies over their distribution, and bring the nightmare of the MAFIAA to a blessed end.

New filesharing network idea

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Oggtella.

It will be Gnutella (the network that you use if you’re using Limewire) sans the proprietary file formats (.mov, .wma, .ra, and the ubiquitous .mp3 and .avi).

Thus, you can freely obtain music and video without the whole “royalties”/”codec-propriety” thing to worry about (often a concern for developers of FOSS-based operating systems and media players).

I’ll be listing this as one of my “top ten” reasons to move back to Ubuntu or Gobolinux if it’s ever created.

TV, the Final Frontier

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I was just thinking last night about technology, the Internet, and related things.

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Oh, btw, AWESOME NEWS: I called Wanda yesterday from the dorm room phone to see if it was working properly with outside lines (via Connie’s calling card), and she informed me of my mother’s granting of consent to that most inevitable of happenings:

Ladies and gentlemen, I’M WITHDRAWING FROM OGLETHORPE BY THE END OF THE WEEK!!!!!

I’ll be switching to a local tech school, particularly either Middle Georgia Tech or Macon State, until the end of the spring semester. YA’LL, I CAN’T WAIT! *squee*

And now back to the program in progress…..

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I’ve told you all already that the next great revolution that could happen in P2P communication will happen on the Mobile/telephone platform, particularly taking into account how the PSTN (y’know, phone numbers and related shit) will be phased out of existence over the next few decades because of the slow but sure movement to a universal VoIP platform by companies such as Vonage (half-hearted) to Skype (dead-on) to Yahoo (has tremendous potential).

We’ve already had the first great revolution in terms of “Text over IP”, which, of course, you’ve already seen with the average PC. The computer as we know it has always been, naturally, a text-generating device. Everything that you see on a PC – every graphic, every audio, every text, every program, anything that appears on your screen, regardless of operating platform – is text-based (or, as a friend of mine always puts it, “0’s and 1’s”).

So we already have two great advents on our hands at this point: the PC (ToIP) and the Mobile/telephone device (VoIP). Already, the former has shown exactly how disruptive it can be in regards to the status quo (same can be said for its most honorable predecesors: the telegraph and facsimile), and it will continue to do so for years to come. I look forward to the Mobile device becoming the next greatly disruptive P2P platform (audio-wise), although I do have a question: is there a Mobile device equivalent of the GNU Project in the works?

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Now we’re about to look even further into the future, possibly to the near end of the 21st century, for one more great revolution in P2P technology.

The television – that medium which has brought the graphics of the world and all that has resided in it since the 1950’s (although it was invented in the 1920’s….the Depression and WWII prevented it from being developed) – will be the last great platform to experience an IP-based P2P revolution.

Why do I say that?

Well, a couple of reasons:

1. Sure, the PC may have audio and video capabilities, and the mobile/telephone may have text and video capabilities as well (although the latter platform has to be developed further in those areas), but what are those two devices MOST prized or used for? PC for text, Phone for audio. Thus, the same could be said about the TV: it may have text and audio capabilities (as it most certainly should), but it is most primarily used for the graphic/visual content which it is made to display and provide. Thus, “TV for video, PC for text, Phone for audio.” Simply put.

2. Back when the Internet was just beginning to evolve (70’s and early-80’s), they were making use of IP connections over lines which were originally and especially meant to transfer basic text files, mostly email (and boy, were they expensive!). By the late-80’s and entire 90’s, with the arrival of the WWW (thanks, Sir Tim from MIT) they were making use of telephone lines for IP connections, and the telephone telcos became the main carriers of Internet provision. Now, with the 2000’s, the cable/satellite companies are emerging as the new main carriers of Internet service. Coincedence?

3. Taking into account the first aforementioned tip, they’re already finding ways by which a richer graphic multimedia experience can be gained from the cable box:

“You can take your bar and shove it up your ass! I’m watching TIVO!” (sorry, had to throw that Robot Chicken quote in there, lol.

Xbox Media Center

MythTV

And a few other stuff. Stay tuned….
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Anyway, what can indeed be said is that, with the parallel developments in television and digital graphics, one cannot help but to notice an evolution. Some establishments are getting old and/or dying off, while some innovations are about to be born. Thus, I cannot wait for a greater liberalization of the cable box, the game console, the DVR, and other such devices (including the ones which have yet to be invented). Plus, I’m certain that someone like Richard Stallman will launch a GNU-like Project which will allow for the freer flow and creation of visual content on the TV somewhere down the line.

Let’s just wait and see, ladies and gentlemen.