Archive for the ‘Peer To Peer’ Category

California State Senator introduces Stupid Legislation

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

I know, I know, this should come as no real surprise. California legislators craft stupid, unconstitutional legislation every day. But Kevin Murray has introduced a law which would fine or imprison anyone who “sells, offers for sale, advertises, distributes, disseminates, provides or otherwise makes available” software that allows users to connect to networks that can share files, unless that person takes “reasonable care” that the software is not used illegally.

Goodbye, Betamax Decision.

You can read some commentary from Ed Felton at Freedom To Tinker.

Posted in Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, Peer To Peer | 1 Comment »

Slashdot | Following up on Torrent Shutdowns

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004

Slashdot has some followup on the weekend’s BitTorrent shutdowns. Apparently there were some arrests over the weekend, and many threats of arrest. Haven’t had time to go over them in any detail (off to Christmas shop) but check ‘em out.

Posted in Intellectual Property, Peer To Peer | 2 Comments »

Ugly python made better

Monday, December 20th, 2004

Here you can find a tidier p2p program inspired by tinyp2p. It seems to use the Set datatype, so is probably specific to python 2.4, and is not compatible with tinyp2p, but it is much easier to read.

Posted in Peer To Peer, Python | No Comments »

Black Sunday For BitTorrent

Sunday, December 19th, 2004

Slashdot is reporting that TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org have gone dark. There seems to be little really solid news as to the reason, but widespread speculation is some kind of crackdown on illegal copying.

When more details are available, I will likely have more to say about it, but for now I merely point out that BitTorrent relies on centralization, and as such is easily targetted both by the legal system as well as computer forensics. If you choose to illegally trade files on BitTorrent, you are on thin ice in both regards.

If you are a P2P developer, you should probably read Fred von Lohman’s piece so as to educate and arm yourself.

Posted in Intellectual Property, Peer To Peer | 3 Comments »