A couple days running without being ceased and desisted, vistatorrent.com, impressive. They're torrenting Microsoft Vista Beta 2 to cope with Microsoft's distribution inability.

Update, 7/15: they got a cease and desist letter.

With Judith Miller going to jail for refusing to disclose her source
in the Valerie Plame CIA leak, I've put together an audio mix of clips
from last week's McLaughlin Group. Fused with John McLaughlin's
supporting words are Lawrence O'Donnell's heavily quoted claims that
the leaker was Karl Rove. My mixing skills aren't all that great,
maybe someone else can do better.

more info, torrent

Checking the role-out today of torrent search on bittorrent.com, one thing that definitely got my interest was their torrent rating feature. I'm liking this alot. It would be very cool if Prodigem (and lots of other trackers) could hook into this both to send reviews and to query. Joi Ito has more.

Just got back from Star Wars, good flick. What do I find on slashdot? Trackerless torrents in mainline BitTorrent. Very nice. I'll have to dive in for more details, but from the sounds of everything, Prodigem now more than before will be a great place to come for aggregated content, information and statistics on torrents, and most of all, a place to use BitTorrent to sell content. The ways of the torrent more accessible have become.

The Creative Commons CC Mixter folks have posted a torrent on Prodigem of mashups from their Fine Art of Sampling Contests.

The torrent: mathowie-wiredremix.torrent.

And more info:

The entrants remixed songs licensed under sampling licenses, from the original WIRED CD that shipped in November of 2004 with every issue of WIRED. The winning tracks are all contained in this torrent, and they've also made it onto a free CD Creative Commons gives away at events and the winner of the Fine Arts Militia Mix ends up as a bonus track on their new album.

Very cool stuff. A band called Thermal and a Quarter has posted their latest album up on Prodigem. I always enjoy finding good new music. Somehow when it comes from bands that get the idea behind open distribution, it's even better.

Definitely check this out. Lot's of good energy. They're a "fusion-rock" band out of Bangalore, India and are apparently pretty popular out there (as one can tell from the constant flow of traffic on their torrent). You can learn more from this NPR interview.

The bayff.mp3 within this torrent is from last night's EFF event in celebration of innovation (in relation to what the Broadcast Flag will limit). The presentation is by Fred von Lohmann and includes a quiz on electronic rights issues (and Lord of the Rings trivia for the extra geeky). To round out the torrent, I've also included recent oral arguments from the MGM v. Grokster case where Fred argues the legality of P2P sharing.

Note to Panasonic: Your crummy SV-AV50 video camera continues to produce corrupted video that will only play on the camera. It's also quite terrible in low light. Buyer beware.

Reflecting on Bram Cohen's talk, I thought I'd take just a second to refresh some of my numbers on the bandwidth savings power of bit torrent. Between Prodigem and the old torrentocracy tracker there's been a lot of great public domain content posted and there is no further proof of that then through the willingness of random strangers on the internet to join in and donate their own bandwidth in order to spread and help distribute whatever they see fit. In fact, for the most popular of it all, there simply would have been no way for a single hosting provider to get this stuff out there via more traditional means without some serious $ expenditures. I'd really be interested to see others in the legal torrent hosting circles provide similar information (likely putting these to shame), but without further ado, here are my top 3:

1. Outfoxed (torrent). Robert Greenwald, the producer of the movie Outfoxed agreed to Creative Commons license the interviews from the movie and let me host the content. The interviews run just about 529MB and have been downloaded 2,465 times so far. This represents roughly 1.25 TeraBytes of traffic of which I only personally contributed around 5 GigaBytes (all within the first 2 days of launching the torrent). This ~$4 investment (for the 5GB) represents just 0.3% of the total amount of bandwidth consumed by this torrent. This even got me a mention in Wired magazine.

2. Tsunami Videos (torrent). Worldwide demand for videos of the tsunamis brought down even the largest traditional hosting providers. Prodigem user Chris Holland posted a torrent of some videos he collected (and certainly Prodigem was just a minor provider of tsunami videos via bit torrent), yet there still have been 3603 downloads of the 43MB. This represents about 151 GigaBytes of bandwidth of which Prodigem made up just 1.26 GigaBytes. This represents 0.8% of the total.

3. Uncovered: The War on Iraq (torrent). Again, Robert Greenwald licensed interviews from a movie of his under the Creative Commons. The 644MB of video have been downloaded 608 times. This represents roughly 382 GigaBytes of bandwidth. I only personally provided around 5 GigaBytes of this bandwidth which represents just 1.3% of the total.

Update: 3/7/2005, The torrent in this entry was just audio only, but Thomas Winningham has gotten permission from both Bram and Stanford ("Stanford holds copyright on the material but returns the copyright immediately to the speaker, that is, Bram. Get him to agree and go ahead.") to post their video as a torrent on Prodigem. Cool! Updated again since that video posted seems to only have the first 10 minutes. Anyway, the audio is below, or just check out my notes.

Bram Cohen gave a technical talk on Bit Torrent yesterday at Stanford. I had planned to make video from it available, but the video I captured somehow got corrupted (boo Panasonic). I salvaged the audio from the video and have released that via a torrent under a creative commons license (with Bram's approval). The audio is a bit low. It's okay, though, as I didn't realize that Stanford would be making it's video available to the general public (though in crummy windows streaming format). Here are some notes:

- Academic setting ... so how to benchmark/measure bit torrent
- benchmarking is hard because it needs to be like the internet (buy a bad router)
- key problem among swarming software is how to get everyone involved to maximize upload, people don't realize

- Single seeder problem
- must be careful not to at first trade with people who are likely to disappear

- Bit Torrent extremely non-cooperative
- each peer in it for himself
- tit for tat
- editorial note: isn't this cooperative? Peter Kollock: tit for tat as the optimal cooperative strategy

- How to deal with people behind and not behind NAT

- Centralized tracker is needed to produce randomized graph so as to avoid
network segmentation
- gossip (peers telling peers about other peers with content) very easily segments the network such that pieces of the content get isolated into islands

- Choking Algorithm
- sophistication
- people like to pretend it doesn't exit
- lots of use of made up magic numbers
- eg. how long to wait for reciprication?
- motivation opaque
- methodology (the traditional approach) is Bram firing up a client and observing behavior
- lots of room for study

- TCP does not look like RPC calls (BitTorrent treats TCP like a black box)
- don't avoid making a state machine, because no matter what you'll end up with a state machine anyway
- why threads are a bad idea

- Magic numbers
- makes them up based on what works
- pulls them from his "magic ass"
- if you need a magic number feel free to ask him for one

- Estimated Time Left Algorithm
- never gotten any fan mail on how well it works
- lots of effort and thought put into making this work sanely
- any time you see a computer telling you time left it is lieing
- research needs to be done on better algorithms
- would gladly place your better algorithm into bit torrent
- problem at end about going down 2 seconds per every 1 second
- tradeoff between smoothness now vs. smoothness later

- Current Transfer Rate Algorithm
- its a mess
- very important for tit-for-tat to work

- Bad idea to be downloading too many torrents at one time (e.g. 5)

- Peers at first never randomly tried new connections
- added optimistic unchoke to solve this
- if new person recipricates then continue
- otherwise move on to the next person
- may unchoke 4 or 7 clients depending
- it's voodoo
- nobody has seriously studied this

- Piece Selection Algorithm
- trade off between finishing the piece you are currently downloading vs going after a more valuable piece
- priority is currently finishing a piece you started even if many others have it
- downloading from the beginning of the content for everyone is a maximally bad strategy

Q: Who has what pieces is not centrally known?
A: Way too much overhead. Trackers currently put up 1/10,000th of all bandwidth used in torrents, yet people still complain.

Q: What if peers tell each other which magic numbers to use at the moment?
A: Way too clever. Peers don't trust each other.

Q: As for not trusting, do you have a specific model in mind? Stock market?
A: Want something that behaves like a commodity. Though bandwidth does not behave like a commodity at all.

- Bit Torrent is very much a reliability application
- how to deal with failures in the network
- google as a corp does this similarly to save cost

- Anyone who claims their app can scale to 100 times what they've tested is smoking crack
- 2nd order effects become 1st order effects
- torrents can handle 10,000s of peers before tracker gets overloaded
- need serious engineering to get to 1,000,000

Q: Exeem?
A: Totally irrelevant.

Q: Legal issues?
A: None. Develops for engineering not for avoiding legal liability.

- Gossip Algorithms
- each peer tells peers works terribly
- better strategy is to look for the least connected person within a peers of peers group and try to connect to them to get their peer list
- how to handle new peers with little content complicates things greatly

Q: Documented all of these anecdotal observations?
A: No, really bad at doing that. Just wade into the code base though some stuff is tricky. Implementation is well encapsulated. Maybe set up a FAQ.

On the eve of the end of Phish, the goal was just getting into Coventry. Constant rainstorms had turned the concert/camping area into a giant mudfield and traffic was hopelessly backed up. Along the way time became warped, weird mobs formed to guilt those who cut in traffic, cars were abandoned, people were turned away and friendly locals did what they could to help out. This 10 minute movie (my first) documents the trek in and the decisions to be made.

As hosted on Prodigem, the torrent is here.

As a part of Howard Rheingold's Towards a Literacy of Cooperation course, Jimmy Wales spoke this week on Wikipedia. I grabbed 40 minutes of video from it and more information is available on the torrent info page (or just grab the .torrent).

The Rheingold course itself has been a very interesting mix of speakers and discussion on cooperation-related topics. They should be making available edited versions of all the sessions some time after the course concludes (March) so everyone should look forward to that.

I heard some complaints that the Revenge of the COMMoNISTS video I posted last week wasn't playing audio for some. Some tinkering later, and I've now got the Lessig part of that video converted to an AVI which seems to play fine both on my Linux and Windows boxen (ironically, with respect to the contents of this video, I was forced to use the 'Microsoft MPEG-4 v2' video codec to get the video to play on Windows). Please try out the new torrent and let me know if you have any problems (I'm especially interested to hear from mac people, working or otherwise).

As for the process, and for anyone who has purchased a Panasonic Dsnap sv-av50 camera, here's the (linux) command to convert the asf to avi. Be sure to use the 'super fine' (15fps) mode as the 'extra fine' (30fps) can't be played except on Windows as of yet:

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2 -ofps 15 in.asf -o out.avi

This camera is all about convenience and size. It's lacking in recording quality (especially in dim light) and though you can record at 30 frames per second as said above, you'll be the only one able to watch the video (and only if you run Windows).

The outfoxed torrent that I'm hosting on Torrentocracy just passed the 1 Terabyte of total data transfer mark. Put another way, that's over 1,000 Gigabytes of traffic or yet another way, over 1,000,000 Megabytes of traffic. Simply put, this is much more bandwidth than one could reasonably afford and instead its all been contributed by the downloaders of Outfoxed through the magic of bit torrent. The future of the independent media distributor is a bright one.

A couple weeks back, I wrote about Phil Lesh sitting in at an Umphrey's McGee concert I was at. Quickly afterwards, a couple of short video clips popped up, but soon disappeared. I managed to snag them and have now set up a torrent (if the Umprheys people would prefer I not host this video, please get in touch and I'll take this down).

It's about a minute of total video which isn't all that much, but still cool just to see. The real reason I'm putting this up is that I was futzing around with creating torrents directly from Linux with btmakemetafile.py and wanted to make sure I've got everything set up right. Previously, I've been going through the extra hassle of making torrents using MakeTorrent in Windows, but when the files get large, transferring files to a windows machine just to spit out a torrent doesn't make sense.

Up until today, I couldn't get btmakemetafile.py to work correctly to create torrents, but it looks like this was caused by installing the Linux maketorrent-1.2.zip on top of the original bt python scripts. I went back to just the BitTorrent-3.4.2 source and no problems at all.

And for something completely random, here's a great picture from the same show which also happens to show my hands clapping in the bottom left corner. You might wonder how I know those are my hands, but trust me, I know my weird thumbs like .... well, like the back of my hand.

All rejoice, Firefox 1.0 has been released (they appear slashdotted at the moment). Travis Hardiman writes in to let us know of the Mozilla torrent tracker. In particular, for you Windows people, why directly slam Mozilla's bandwidth, when the following is available:

Firefox Setup 1.0.exe.torrent

Torrents for the tar.gz are also available for you saner Linux folk.

Here's a torrent to Eminem's new video taking on Bush for his Iraq actions. You can read more about it from TalkLeft who also points to direct download links. It looks like Eminem is wise to guerrilla marketing.

Thanks, Ben, for the link.

A friend of a friend of mine out here in the Bay Area, known by some as crackmc, has been generous enough to dig into his archives of music he's taped to provide some high quality unearthedness. This torrent is from the soundbouard of a Greyboy show from the Great American Music Hall in San Fran on 12/12/2001. Enjoy.

source: SBD > LunatecV2 > SonyD8 > SGI Indy(digi-in) >
SoundForge4.5[CDarchitect] > GoldWave > FLAC frontend > .flac

Recorded & Transfered from the master DATs by Vinny Palese
remastered, converted to FLAC, and seeded by crackmc

Folk hero of the internets, Jon Stewart alerts us to today's Bushism in this clip from the Daily Show from October 19th. Here we see Bush "plainly" declare that we will not have an all volunteer army. His adoring (will vote for you cuz you made me sign this contract first before you'd let me into your rally) supporters correct him and hilarity ensues.

Here's the torrent. This is my first attempt at hosting video that I captured myself. Thank you MythTV. Update: I switched the file from an avi to an mpeg since it looks like the avi doesnt play by default on Windows. Restarted the torrent.

Joe Halliwell provides an Ogg Vorbis Video capture (more info on Ogg here, Ogg codecs for windows here) from Cory Doctorow's talk from Edinburgh University this previous October 12th. The full title is "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited." The video is incomplete with some of the beginning and end missing, but as Joe puts it, "there's still a good hours worth of fascinating material".

Watch Cory wax on copyright, from Diebold to DRM (and other topics which don't start with the letter D). But download and pay attention now, before we're all F'd.

Thanks, Joe. The torrent is hosted on Torrentocracy here.

Here's the torrent to the mp3.

Gracias Tony once again. This time Kerry talks God this and God that and mentions Cheney's lesbian daughter. I hope Bush doesn't unleash his "budget man" on him now (update: or his armies of compassion).

And, cough, why no talk about the environment?

Also, Ben sends me links to torrents of video of the first two debates. Haven't looked at them myself, but thanks, Ben: first, second.

Once again Tony comes through and has provided an mp3 of the second Presidential Debate from Friday, October 8th in St. Louis, Missouri. The torrent is hosted on Torrentocracy here.

In this one, Kerry might be wonkish and wooden, but it is Bush who actually offers to sell you his wood. Not to be forgotten is Bush's resolve to only appoint anti-slavery judges to the Supreme Court, and also his firm understanding of the internets. Hmm, I wonder if that means he'll be joining this torrents.

CIA WMD Report + Forged Iraq Uranium docs

OutragedModerates.org is hosting a torrent which contains PDFs from the recently released CIA report on WMDs (or lack thereof) in Iraq. Also contained within the torrent are the forged Iraq uranium documents which President Bush alluded to in his prior State of the Union.

Tony has provided a 90MB mp3 of the first presidential debate as recorded from NPR. I'm hosting the torrent at torrentocracy.com/files/torrents/debate_2004_1.torrent. Hear all your favorites, "peninshula" and "nucular" along with the brand new "What about Poland?", "moo-lah" and the heady bustout "Vladumurr". Hear Kerry pledge to once again bring killing back into his life.

Update: I just came across this and had to share...

In a follow-up to the licensing of the Outfoxed movie under a Creative Commons license, Robert Greenwald has also agreed to release the interviews from his previous movie, Uncovered: The War on Iraq under the Creative Commons. The files can be downloaded directly (also available in higher quality format) from archive.org, or you can join the torrent hosted on Torrentocracy.com at uncovered_interviews.torrent.

Hopefully we can match the over 700 downloads of Outfoxed that its torrent has already generated. Either way, the truth is free.

(free as in beer AND as in freedom)

In working with Lawrence Lessig, Robert Greenwald has agreed to release the interviews within Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (press release). This means that among the rights now granted, interviews balancing out the fair journalism of Fox News can freely be used as anyone sees fit. To see the full movie, you can purchase the Outfoxed DVD or check it out in theaters.

Torrentocracy (along with archive.org) has exclusive initial access to distribute these interviews in their digital form due to the work undertaken to promote a TV-connected, public domain, internet based media distribution network. The torrent file to start your Outfoxed download can be found at outfoxed_interviews.torrent. For more information on how to use bit torrent peer-to-peer filesharing to download this, go here. If you were a Torrentocracy user, you could already be downloading Outfoxed to your television.

It is plainly obvious that this is quite a development not only for the furtherance of media projects that promote sharing and openness, but also as a validation of the legitimate use of peer-to-peer distribution (Induce Act, anyone?). With projects like Torrentocracy enabling any blog to become its own "TV channel" through use of bit torrent, perhaps we can begin to re-enable a plurality of media voices as Outfoxed calls upon us to do. Score this development right alongside MGM v. Grokster. Indeed, we are "dealing with something new."

Congress needs to see that this is not only true, but actually quite an understatement. And maybe, just maybe, we can paradigm shift ourselves to a place where all the established players don't own the turf.

Over on bt.etree.org, someone has posted a torrent to a previously unreleased studio session done by Phish in Wendell Studios in Boston on 6/17/1990. I've yet to grab this myself, but it certainly looks interesting. The torrent is here. More info available on etree.

Via BoingBoing, there is a link to a torrent of a fan made remake of Planet of the Apes as an episode of the Twilight Zone. Download and enjoy.

OutragedModerates.org is now hosting a bit torrent of their Download for Democracy project. It includes a slew of government documents relating to the current administration. Here's a wired article with more info on what's what. You can watch their traffic tracker here.

Induce Act - 0
The People - 8

(I made up the number 8, I mean example after example of legitimate uses for P2P emerge, but of course they do. How can they really consider passing the Induce Act?)

Anyway, I'll be away this weekend in Vermont after all to see Phish's last show. I'll be back with torrents from the festivities.

The People - 9

Here's a torrent to Stockholm Syndrome's concert the following night in Dallas.

Stockholm Syndrome is a band featuring Dave Schools from Widespread Panic and Jerry Joseph of the Jackmormons. This is a show the other night from Houston taped by a couple friends of mine. I saw them in Austin this weekend and they ripped up Stubbs.

Torrentocracy is proud to host this torrent which you can of course now see on our Torrents page.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.