I've added a screenshot to the site of Torrentocracy being used to join the bit torrent of the Induce Act proceedings. If it wasn't ironic enough before to relish in blog entries of people using p2p to download video of anti-p2p Senate hearings, now we've got pictures too. Someone once told me those are worth more words.

Forget politics for your ipod, what about politics for your television? With the pithy convention coverage and rushed speeches of the last week, let's not forget that "gadget" that's just somewhat more ubiquitous than those white earbuds. Sure, its content has always been as locked in as the ipod, but until they pass the Induce Act, television doesn't really have to be that way. Perhaps it's time for those who are part of the larger blogging enterprises (weblogs inc, gawker) to jump on this confluence of Bit Torrent and RSS before it's too late. By doing this, not only could they actually reach the next rung of media delivery services, but it would show quite the "potential for a substantial noninfringing use." Though, the picture below does quite the job of this already...

I've added a Torrents section to the site for easy tracking of the torrents I'll be hosting. I'll fix up the formatting and make it a bit more useful in a bit.

Working with Drazen Pantic of DV Guide (a site of miscellaneous torrents, including those Outfoxed clips I pointed to last week), they have updated their RSS feed to enable torrent enclosures. Their feed is at http://dv.open4all.info/rss.php. So you'll now be able to join DV Guide torrents directly from Torrentocracy now.

I've added them in the FeedsXML wiki entry and will do likewise in torrentocracy-feeds.xml for the next release of Torrentocracy. I've also added an enabled feeds category to this blog in order to more formally track the addition of enclosures into blogs.

This weekend at DefCon, Wendy Seltzer of the EFF will be demo-ing MythTV along with Torrentocracy as part of the EFF's Anti Broadcast Flag campaign. Someone check it out and let me know how it goes. If I hear back from Wendy I'll post an update on how it went.

Lessig Blog points to video of the hearings on the Induce Act (the act which intends to make p2p illegal). Ironically, the hearings are now being shared via P2P.

The torrent is here.

I've added a wiki to the Torrentocracy webspace. My only goal at the moment is to open up access to the torrentocracy-feeds.xml page which Torrentocracy uses to easily find blogs within the app. We'll see how this works out, but go add now as you see fit and from time to time, I'll pull down the latest revision into the project.

Mike is a good friend of mine (no, not the mayor of NYC). I've been hosting some of his acoustic mp3s on this site for a couple weeks, but decided to try my hand at hosting a torrent. You can find more info about him at michaelblumberg.com (check him out in the Chicago area), and the torrent is here.

Here's the second of two Outfoxed torrents. Here we see Fox newsman Carl Cameron hamming it up with Bush about Cameron's wife's participation in the Bush campaign right before Cameron does an interview with Bush. Conflict of interest?

Earlier this week, "The Center for American Growth" posted a couple clips from Outfoxed, the new anti Fox News movie (funny, Center for American Growth = democrat, Club for Growth = republican). Predictably, their bandwidth got slammed and they had to pull them, but not before DV Guide snapped them up and posted a couple torrents.

Here is the first torrent of the two. It's a discussion of Jeremy Glick, an antiwar son of a 911 victim, and his appearance on Bill OReilly's no spin zone.

From a link on Dan Gillmor's blog there's a pointer to an interesting article called How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News. With their need for a nice interface between RSS, bit torrent and television, it sounds just like Torrentocracy. Fundamentally, though, there just need to be more torrent/enclosure enabled blogs (with good content).

Along the same link chain, I also discovered DV Guide, a blog with a number of torrents with original content (though they don't have enclosure enabled RSS!). Here's a torrent to BrowseTV episode 2.09. From the description, they make a TV show out of "the various thoughts and ideas and memes and things just kinda floating around the web."

I've been thinking about setting up a wiki to enable public editing of the torrentocracy-feeds.xml file. This should take the responsibility of adding blogs to its list out of my hands. What do you think? Any good wiki software suggestions?

Ultimately, though, I guess torrentocracy should handle the user entering in a blog URL manually and then actually discover the RSS URL.

torrentocracy 0.0.7 is now available (tarball):

* RSS entries are now fully scrollable so all text can be seen. They also properly format HTML (it doesn't display images yet) with yellow anchor links (which aren't quite clickable yet).

* Disabled the hooks into MythBrowser as hitting select only currently causes a segfault.

* Added bt.etree.org's RSS feed to the list of torrent-enabled blogs

* Fixed bittorrent script to keep it from quickly spawning off multiple processes.

To go along with the link earlier today to the Counting Crows torrent, I've added another screenshot to the website in order to showcase some of the recent enhancements. I should be putting out the next official version shortly.

As seen on etree, here's a link to a Counting Crows concert from late last year. Keep the legal music coming...

The torrent is here.

CVS access to torrentocracy is now available. To access it:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/torrentocracy login (just hit enter when prompted for a password)

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/torrentocracy co torrentocracy

Currently in CVS you will see that I've switched the second page view to use QTextBrowser which means it parses and properly displays HTML. This will also enable me to allow full scrolling so that whole RSS entries can be seen. Though, I still don't have this working. I also need to figure out how to change the Link colors from dark blue to something else as it doesn't provide good contrast against the black background.

James Enck, of Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe, has included a blurb on torrentocracy on his EuroTelcoBlog. He examines the rise of bit torrent and goes more in depth examining the p2p statistics which were mentioned in the CNet article I linked to the other day. An interesting bit:

My main interest is in the fact that Torrentocracy and any subsequent similar developments are clearly an interesting step in decentralizing control of content creation and flow from the global media conglomerates, and may prove an additional source of pressure on commercial on-demand offerings, whether from the telcos or the established players in cable/satellite.

Pressure or not, it would be very cool to see anyone already established using bit torrent to give out samples of their media. There are all kinds of stealth marketing opportunities that exist if the big conglomerates would just open their eyes.

Outfoxed is a movie which takes direct aim at the Fox News channel and the tactics they use to advance their agenda. You can read more about the movie on Lawrence Lessig's blog. Unfortunately, this movie will not be distributed to theaters and is instead available now on DVD.

You can view the trailer directly at http://www.outfoxed.org/Clips.php

Update 7:05PM - had to remove the torrent link because the equal sign in its URL is not valid XML, but I added the direct link to the trailer.

So says this news.com article. Claims indicate that Bit Torrent now makes up 53% of peer to peer traffic and that 1 in 4 internet users has at least once downloaded a feature length film. I find the latter claim a little hard to believe.

Red Hat has released Fedora Core 3 Test 1. As seen on slashdot, the featureset includes kernel 2.6.7, GCC 3.4, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, and Evolution 2.0.

The torrent is here

Still struggling with QScrollView additions, but I should have CVS up in the next day or so...

I said I wouldn't link to the torrent, but since this time, there have been multiple articles pointing to Moore's okay, as well as the mpeg posting onto archive.org. So, here you go. This is a link to the mpeg of the torrent, no rars or CD burning required.

The torrent is here.

Any experienced QT developers out there willing to lend a hand? I'm trying to make the text area on the 2nd page up/down scrollable (using QScrollView) so you can see the whole RSS entry, but I'm running into some difficulties. You can see my post about this on the mythtv-dev list here.

Someone on a message board I frequent posted a link to this torrent saying its of crisp quality and worth a listen. I'm just impressed to hear that bands like GWAR have the sense enough to know that free trading of music is the right way to go. This whole show fits on 1 CD.

The torrent is here.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is starting its Digital Television Liberation Project. The project's aim is to subvert next year's adoption of the Broadcast Flag which will place complete control of your TV content into the hands of the entertainment industry. The goal of the EFF is to get as many people as possible invested in and adopting systems which don't support the broadcast flag before its support is mandated. They even discuss usage of MythTV and their aim to improve its usability to make it more accessible to the average person.

Hmm, sounds like I need to key them into our new public domain media distribution model to go along with their interest in public domain PVR software.

News.com.com.com.com is running a story on the emergence of a bit torrent for Michael Moore's new Bush bashing flick. I'm not going to link to the torrent here, but at issue is a previous interview by Moore where he stated "I don't agree with copyright laws, and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it...as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor".

This brings up an interesting conundrum. Though, I'm willing to bet Mr. Moore no longer has the right to let you steal his work given the financing he's accepted to make the movie.

Richard Stallman is the founder of GNU and the author of the GPL, the General Public License. It was his groundwork which led to Linux and torrentocracy itself is licensed under the GPL. Anyway, this is a short interview with Mr. Stallman where he waxes intellectual on being a hacker, the history of GNU and just why software patents are a bad idea. It's also a good opportunity to admire his beard.

The torrent is here.

I haven't seen much to any commentary on this blog so I thought I'd just open a generic thread to catch some comments. Are people using torrentocracy? Thoughts? Has anyone downloaded any of the torrents I've made available?