Tag: p2p

BitTorrent acquires uTorrent

Post ImageSome potentially bad news today for uTorrent fans such as myself. Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, announced that his company has aquired the popular client app. TechCrunch has the scoop:

The move will bring quite a few torrent users over to BitTorrent. News site TorrentFreak estimates that buying uTorrent, will bring BitTorrent nearly 50 percent of torrent users.

The acquisition price has not yet been disclosed.

You can read more comment on the deal here. You can also checkout the special uTorrent forum. And here is the BitTorrent press release.

I say potentially bad because BitTorrent has made massive efforts to go completely legit, and has inked deals with many content providers such as MTV and 20th Century Fox. There is some concern that they would add content filtering to uTorrent or backtrack on the protocol encryption work.

Most importantly, I hope that BitTorrent doesn’t add bloat to the wonderfully small and efficient uTorrent.

Read: TechCrunch

MoveDigital

Post ImageI had been looking at a service called Prodigem a couple weeks ago, but they informed me they would soon be relaunching. Well, now they have, and with a bang too! Prodigem was acquired by MoveDigital, and the new service they have launched is pretty sweet:

We’re unique, a file is only charged as delivered after the entire direct download is complete.

We also allow your audience to add bandwidth to your account, and we always roll over your bandwidth, so it’s never lost.

A free account will give you 30 days of use, 1 GB of storage space, and 10 GB of bandwidth. Paid accounts start at just $10 for an entire year. On top of that, they can create torrents for your files, and if you upload audio or video, they will even make it streamable for mobile phones.

I played around with the service a little today, and it works great. They show you download statistics for your files (but only if the entire file is downloaded). They even count a proper download for BitTorrent (though, presumably, only for files they seed). Users can also subscribe to your content using the RSS feeds that MoveDigital automatically generates, one for direct downloads, one for torrent downloads, and one for mobile streams.

Overall, it’s a pretty nicely done service. I have only two complaints really, one being that the link to their API does not work! The second is the price is pretty high. Even their Premium account (the highest one), which costs $10,100 for the entire year, is 5 times more expensive than comparable benefits (storage, bandwidth) using Amazon S3. The cost per additional GB of transfer is also 19 cents higher than Amazon S3 (and five times higher if you’re on the Basic plan).

I suppose if you had a high number of partial downloads it would even out, but you’d need a lot of those for it to work. Also note that MoveDigital does charge for partial downloads of data using BitTorrent or the mobile streams, only direct downloads can take advantage of the entire download charge feature.

Read: MoveDigital

Kazaa is Dead

Post ImageActually, Kazaa has been dead for a very long time in my eyes, but now it’s official:

An Australian court ruled on Monday that the popular file-sharing network Kazaa violated Australian music copyrights and ordered the company to modify its software to help prevent it.

Sharman issued a statement after the ruling saying: “In the judgment handed down today, both parties have had a win, although neither side has had a complete victory. Sharman Networks is obviously disappointed that we have not been completely successful. But we will appeal those parts of the decision where we were not successful and are confident of a win on appeal.”

Yeah, I don’t think so. Look what happened to Napster after it was ordered to modify it’s software to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted materials – dead quick. There’s no way Kazaa will recover from this.

Not that it matters! Thanks to BitTorrent, Kazaa has been waiting for that final nail in the coffin for quite some time. Goodbye Kazaa, I won’t miss you. In fact, I’d be super happy if users couldn’t download the crappy, adware-laden software any more, as it would save me the trouble of having to remove it when I do a consulting job.

Read: New York Times