Since last week, I’ve been trying to get as much information about the hurricane Katrina disaster as possible. I’ve stumbled over a weblog that regularily publishes news snippets from CNN, FOX, MSNBC and others. Crooks and Liars by John Amato is very critical of the current U.S. government and the style of the postings might not be everybody’s taste, since they get explicit at times – but the weblog certainly raises a lot of valid questions about how the government responded to the disaster.
Seeing the number of videos they offer for download and the high number of visitors, I thought their server must have been under lots of stress lately. I emailed to the weblog’s author and suggested to use torrents for distribution. Bittorrent and similar clients are programs for easier distribution of huge files. Since many use them to download movies and songs, RIAA and MPAA are trying to sue operators of websites that host torrents, which are neccessary for clients like Azureus to “find” the file in question and download it. The websites that offer those torrents are quite easy to find, just google for it.
In spite of the entertainment industry opposition to the torrent technology itself, there are lots of legal uses, as can been seen at Legaltorrents, also, the beta version of World of Warcraft, Planetshift (a free, cross-platform MMORPG) and the fan-film Star Wars: Revelations have been made available through torrents. The basic idea this technology is founded on is great – everybody in the network shares his file with everybody else. In the end, everyone gets his file faster and supports others in doing so while the peers in the network with complete copies have a lower traffic load. Visiting Amato’s weblog again this morning, I found torrent files all over the place. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume the files offered there can be considered legal, at least in the U.S. (it might fall under fair use), but I’m curious about other countries, like Germany.
“Crooks and Liars” starts using torrent files
update: Why P2P is Here to Stay
update: NASA Blue Marble Project uses bittorrent
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