As predicted by many (including me), there's a new P2P network on the block with built-in onionskin routing: OneSwarm.

Even better, it's backwards compatible with BitTorrent, and they tossed in always-on "web-of-trust" encryption just for fun.

In English: what little light we ever had into pirate activity just got dimmer. And if we push them really hard, they'll go entirely dark.

If you thought 20:1 was hard to prove (or disprove) today, just *wait* until everything is encrypted and decentralized.

Next step: widespread adoption of decentralized tracking, followed by decentralized indexing -- perhaps using my good friend Tom Jacob's brilliant Localhost.

Keep pushing, RIAA. You're giving birth to a very angry child. And if you think it's painful now, just wait until it grows up.


-David Barrett

It's stories like this that convince me we're on to something so much bigger than copyright.  The cost of producing extremely high-quality content has come down so low, I think we're on the cusp of a much more exciting world than Copyright could have ever dreamed.

-david

Saw this headline on Google New:

Hamas rules out setting up specific date for truce declaration

GAZA, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) officials Saturday ruled out setting up a specific date for declaring an 18-month Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel.

What caught my eye is the "18-month" timeline mentioned for the truce.  What's the point of a limited-duration truce?  Is the implication that upon the expiration of the truce, hostilities will resume?  After all, didn't the current spate of hostilities happen coincidentally as the last "Egyptian-brokered truce" expired?

A limited truce with an organization bent upon your destruction seems little more than a coordinated re-armament period. 

Of course, given the region's history, perhaps interspersing 18-month periods of peace with a couple weeks of intense violence (on both sides) is the best that can be hoped for.  Better that than the reverse.

- David Barrett

Interesting article on TorrentFreak:

http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-researchers-fear-bittorrent-meltdown-090212/

Basically predicting a widespread meltdown if ThePirateBay goes under,
because they track over 50% of torrents. If TPB's trackers go down,
users will "fail over" to a bunch of other trackers that probably can't
handle the load, which will likely trigger a cascading failure of pretty
much all the trackers out there.

But what it doesn't mention is that this will probably all be fixed by
the end of the week and it'll be back to business as normal before the
end of the month.

In other words, the ultimate culmination of a multi-year, international
legal process against TPB will probably result in... a week or two of
disrupted downloading.

On top of that, if trackers start to get taken down with any regularity,
the various torrent client authors will probably just take the time to
perfect their "trackerless torrent" technology (generally based on
DHTs), and then they'll be even more indestructible.

And if everyone's going to upgrade, I bet they'll slip in "always on"
encryption (there goes any chance of backbone sampling!), and maybe some
early experimentation with onionskin routing.

Piracy will never be killed, and fighting it only makes it stronger.
It's like a self-fulfilling, cyclical prophecy -- the only consequence
of passing bills in the (disingenuous) name of "fighting terrorism and
preventing child pornography" is to encourage the creation of tools that
enable more of it, at no reduction to piracy whatsoever. Which in turn
fuels calls for more disingenuous bills, fueling more technology
development, and so on.

Call me crazy, but I am far more concerned that these P2P tools are
creating an untraceable infrastructure for *real* crime than for
pseudo-crime. One of these days there's going to be a huge story about
Iran coordinating with Hezbollah using encrypted P2P VoIP routed through
a decentralized onionskin network, or Al Qaeda distributing terrorist
materials using BitTorrent 3.0 -- and how the worlds' nations are
fundamentally unable to stop it... unless you give up more of your
rights to privacy, free speech, and other crucial civil liberties.

The RIAA has done more to pave the way for future terrorist
infrastructure than Bin Laden could ever dream.

-david

Fantastic graph in there showing the breakdown by music, movies, etc.

- 28.7% movies
- 22.8% music (I'm guessing mostly whole albums and compilations)
- 16.9% tv-shows
- 8.1% games
- 7.3% software
- 5.8% anime (why is this separate than pictures and movies?)
- 5.6% books
- 4.0% other
- 0.9% pictures

Interestingly: "the Pirate Bay has 765,000 torrents on their site, although they track twice as many files."

So TPB is skewed toward the head, which I guess makes sense.

-david

PS: IsoHunt and TorrentZ are listed, but their numbers aren't quite as meaningful as they are indexes, not trackers.  Many of their torrents are actually hosted on TPB and MiniNova.