If you are not aware of it yet, it seems that The Pirate Bay (TPB) is up for sale, and as already acquired a potential buyer in the name of the Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF). The price tag was set up at $7.7 million. What now follows is my personal opinion on the matter.

I think that, if TPB is indeed sold, it’ll mark the death of a symbol in the fight against major labels, Hollywood and whoever wants to make the most money out of customers as it is possible. TPB was a major fighter, often disgracing the people who intended to bring it down. By TPB, I mean the collective running the site, including Peter Sunde. On its website, it often mocked their legal threats and did not take any actions to comply in any way whatsoever. People saw in TPB, a revolution, a rebellion. They took TPB’s side, and identified themselves with the tracker. They wanted content cheap or free, and TPB could provide it. TPB getting sold means that these folks lose their avatar.

However, TPB going down does not mark the end of piracy on the Internet. Torrents are small files, and as TorrentFreak says, one can simply move all the torrents to another tracker, and a clone of TPB would have been born. Technically yes, another TPB would have risen. However, the black-sails-pirate-ship symbol that many associate with piracy nowadays will be gone. I bet that the labels are already rejoicing and are eager to do business with GGF! Wherever there’s money to be made, you will find labels and the usual guys.

GGF wants to make TPB into a legal venture, which instantly defeats the philosophy of the site, that is promoting illegal file-sharing; an image that it has painstakingly preserved over the years. The ship was battered, but never sunk even in a deluge of legal threats. No label, no Hollywood firm could claim the head of the tracker. Seems GFF will be able to, soon.

As if this was not enough, GGF has even more plans for TPB. It plans on taking over the 20 million plus users of the tracker. How? By monetizing the uploads and downloads. Sounds familiar? This is exactly what “legal napster” tried to do, and if you don’t know how it ended, better check it out. In a few short words:no MP3s, DRM.

What will happen to TPB? I don’t know. It depends on how things turn out. There are a number of possible outcomes, the most prominent ones being that the site becomes even more popular with users. Seeders get paid to upload the content they just downloaded (the content they PAID to download). Artists and others get paid to put their content on the tracker. And the site makes money via advertising. Basically, it’s all about money. Think iTunes, but using Bittorrent technology. I guess that is what GFF wants to make TPB into.

The other, darker alternative is that the bulk of the faithful users of the sites move on to other trackers, or another tracker rises to claim the rank of TPB as No.1 notorious tracker, and acquires the users of TPB. This one seems most plausible to me. I don’t think that people who were used to get stuff for free at TPB will now want to pay to get it. They’d just prefer to move on to some other tracker. Not that there’s a scarcity of those anyway.

Also, this sale does not concern the by-products that TPB spawned, most notably, that Youtube alternative that TPB staff were talking about launching recently.

Now, the first part may have sounded a bit dark, but alternatively, there may be an upside to this story. It may be that the Industry has finally seen the light and have acknowledged the Bittorrent technology as the future of media distribution, and will adapt to it, instead of trying to fight it. This too, is a possible outcome of the sale. The problem in this is whether people will stick it it. But I guess that if the price is right, the service will manage to find customers.

Moreover, ISPs will probably want a role in this scheme too. Which ISP wouldn’t like to see Bittorrent traffic reduced on its network. If the content is legal, they may introduce local caching for the most accessed files, which in turn reduces international traffic and boosts speed for users.

I don’t want to sound negative, but I believe that the “darker” outcome is the one most probable. Already, a number of users are demanding that their accounts be closed at TPB, if the sale concludes. This shows that TPB users don’t actually want to buy content. They want it for free: they want it the way TPB has always provided it. And free cannot be beaten by any offer whatsoever.

For now, let’s just stand by and watch what happens. If TPB goes, it’s a symbol destroyed. It’s as if a general is killed in battle, but is in no way the end of the war. Others will replace it, just as Oink was replaced. Just like Kazaa was replaced by Torrents. If the sales is indeed concluded, the TPB war would have ended, but the people behind it would be $7.7 million richer to fight their legal battle, and possibly buy Sealand? Or some other small island and build their own pirate colony? Who knows where this matter is going.

Have your say! The comment box is below.

Sources: TorrentFreak, TorrentFreak, Wired

This article comes from GeekScribes

ThePirateBay for Sale: The death of a symbol?

To start with I am doing to make a showcase of some terminology related to the technology (basic level just to ready your mindset).

1. Tracker is the computer that is keeping track who has got the file(s) (pieces) you are interested in acquiring/sharing.
2. Client is normally you, the user who will be receiving bittorrent requests.
3. Encryption is scrambling the data so that middle users cannot see what you are sending, receiving.
4. IP Address is comparable to your identity. You own it.
5. Bittorrent Requests are the set of data that is needed for correct operation of communication between clients.
6. Peers are those clients who have not yet snatched a torrent (not completed).
7. Seeds are those clients who have the full file(s).
8. A Swarm is made up of peers and seeders.

To name a few, RIAA and Media Defender are the most actively tracking down users presumably infringing copyright. As far as I am aware, there are two methods known that are being used to track down the culprits. The direct and indirect method.

The Indirect Method relies solely on what the tracker will be reporting to the “tracking client”. Going a step ahead, normally the tracker reports a list of peers/seeds to those peers participating in a swarm. Is something ringing? You can guess what happens when the “tracking client” gets hold of the list of ips.

The direct method is the total inverse of the direct one. The monitoring agency downloads the file from the client(s) and verifies its content. That is a more solid way of determining culprits. On the other hand, it costs resources in terms of funds and bandwidth.

In all the cases the indirect method is being used. Personally, I believe the indirect method can be effective in deployed in a proper way. But this is not the case for all the “star” tracking agencies nowadays. Like reported by the University of Washington, 5 desktop machines, 9 ip printers and 4 wireless access points had recieved DMCA take down notice. This clearly shows its inefficiency.

These observations clearly demonstrate the ability to frame someone else. That is another ethical point to be considered.

IP Spoofing involves reporting someone else IP instead of ours to the tracker. Some clients and trackers support this kind of behaviour. So reporting the IP of a printer, wireless access point or an innocent pc will result is some catastrophic actions.

Misreporting client or tracker can also be responsible for DMCA notices. Normally the softwares are buggy and misreport IPS. This is one way that things may happen. But, we must know that the torrent files (meta data) are user generated. A malicious tracker can be inserted into the list of trackers and thus users made to infringe copyright.

The report also included mistimed reports. I am going to quote this part directly from the report.

A tracker need not be malicious to falsely implicate users. Consider the following scenario. Bob participates in an infringing BitTorrent swarm from a laptop via WiFi with an IP address assigned via DHCP, e.g., at a university or coffee shop. Bob then closes his laptop to leave, suspending his BitTorrent client with out an orderly notification to the tracker that he has left. Some time later, Alice joins the same WiFi network and, due to the DHCP timeout of Bob’s IP, Alice receives Bob’s former address. Simultaneously, a monitoring agent queries the tracker for the swarm Bob was downloading and the tracker reports Bob’s former IP. The monitoring agent then dispatches a DMCA notice to the ISP running the WiFi network naming Bob’s IP but with a timestamp that would attribute that IP to Alice, a false positive. Whether this is a problem in practice depends on the relative timeouts of BitTorrent trackers and DHCP leases, neither of which is fixed. In a university environment in 2007, DHCP lease times were set to 30 minutes. The interarrival time of tracker requests is typically 15 minutes at least, meaning that even a conservative tracker timeout policy of two missed requests coupled with a 30 minute DHCP lease time could result in this type of misidentification.

Open Access Point is another major problem. Anyone can connect to your open wifi network and leech from your connection. You as an innocent being you will bear all the issues that will be raised against you even though you have never used any p2p softwares. Mike Elegan wrote why it is ok to steal wi-fi. This will be helpful dear readers.

These contents that I have written cannot be a replacement of the report. This just gives you enough information what lies beneath this supposedly righteous action.

This article comes from GeekScribes

Why we are all liable to receive a DMCA notice?

Well, according to Ars Technica’s report, there has been a 25% increase in Bittorrent traffic from November 2007 to March 2008, with UTorrent being the application leader. Yep! Azureus and BitComet come after! This represents a big increase. Possibly millions of new users?

Regarding P2P, the Gnutella network is faring pretty well, being the #1 network in terms of traffic. Limewire must be thanked for this position in the list, being the leader in P2P applications.

Why did I post this article? I don’t really know. I found those facts pretty interesting, and thought I might share. In Mauritius, Orange is trying to limit the use of P2P and Bittorrent via its Fair Use Policy (FUP), whereas in the world, the use of these two services are growing rapidly, probably fueled by the megabit connections available abroad.

Although many use these services for piracy, P2P and Bittorrent have many “legit” uses such as sharing open-source distributions, and making lesser-known “garage band” artists and productions available to the public.

I personally think that many people opt for a high-speed connection because they download large files and want these faster. What’s the use of a high-speed connection if it cannot be used for downloading? I doubt you will use a megabit connection for plain browsing. Well, that’s the logic Orange is applying here. 1GB capping was just ridiculous. Now with FUP, even that limit is not known. It’s just weird. Just derive your own conclusions!

Anyways, comments awaited on this. Maybe they will help me rephrase my thoughts a bit better!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Bittorrent and P2P usage grow worldwide