Archive for the 'P2P' category

The recent news lead me to talk again about digital music and its cohabitation (or lack of) with network technology. As a matter of fact, we learn this week that our new French President is in favor of a strong action against pirated music and downloads. This is not very new, indeed, but the confirmation came from Nicolas Sarkozy quite early after his election. Nearly simultaneously (I see nothing more than a coincidence), Amazon just announced that they would start a new service of online digital music sales that would do completely without copy-protection system (DRM or Digital Rights Management) and would go 100% MP3-only. This is supported by EMI that decided to provide tens of thousands of music titles out of its international catalog.

I admit easily that I am not surprised to see a politician posturing as is expected from his image and adopt an attitude that is based on perceptions but ignoring technical and commercial realities. Nicolas Sarkozy is playing his part in the show as a right wing leader decided to fight all kinds of illegal activities. Nobody should be surprised here. But I contend that this is already an echo from the past and he is missing the light of the future.

Exactly on the opposite, Amazon recognized the commercial reality: Customers do not want those technical anti-copy measures. They go against the legal user (the illegal one does not even see this in the illegal but free MP3 files, of course); They do not stop industrial copy and intense distribution on the P2P networks for example, but they stop the buyer from playing the music title on a player that is nto pre-aprpoved or on the PC of the son’s bedroom, or on the CD-player of Mom’s car, etc.

Amazon, understanding this reality -and certainly also aware that online stores without DRM have better sales/user figures than the others- decided to go and fight directly the current leader of eMusic, Apple iTunes.

Wish them luck! If there will always be poor teenagers ready to sacrifice quality, ease of use, ease of purchase, elegance of the package, etc. (didn’t we copy LPs on dirt cheap tapes when we were young?), a good product will always be a hit.

And if some people insist on telling that the competition of a free product (illegal downloads) can only kill paying products (online music stores), I invite them to consider the tough/relentless competition between a product with a (very very high) price as bottled water and a product (nearly) free like tap water available in nearly all homes (at least in the developed countries). As far as I know, Perrier, Dasani, San Pellegrino, Vittel, Volvic et al. do not petition for a law prohibiting tap water. Those companies and brands offer a product with very notables advantages and make a nice profit out of it.

When the movie director Ra’up McGee wanted to distribute his motion picture Automne, he did not find the reception he hoped for. In France, he was offered about 30 theaters (you can understand: Nearly nothing). Sure! His subject of a hit man tormented by his conscience would be attractive to a large audience but the director is totally unknown. Despite international awards, McGee decided that the movie was worth more than this furtive presentation. Now, it’s yours to judge since McGee is a real gambler: He launched the movie on Google Video where you can see it for free.

As I am ready to all sacrifices for the pleasure of my visitors you will find the movie itself at the bottom of this post, without even needing to click on a link to Google! But this is not the usual two minutes film. You’ll get one hour and a half of movie.

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Popular torrent client 脗碌Torrent released a new public beta earlier today. The beta is an early build of 脗碌Torrent version 1.7 and the most significant new feature is full support for Windows Vista.

Source: Wired.com.

A little bit of information I collected from the uTorrent FAQ.

The default firmware for Linksys (and all replacement firmwares except for the latest DD-WRT and HyperWRT Thibor) have a severe problem where they track old connections for FIVE days, which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.

You should upgrade the firmware of your router, if it has this kind of problem, using one of these:

• HyperWRT Thibor (14+) (54G/GL/GS only, excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G/GS)
• DD-WRT (v23+)(54G/GL/GS excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G)

But be sure to follow the instructions:

• Do not modify the firmware over the WiFi link (it may stop in the middle killing your router)
• Check what version should be used
• Follow the additional steps for the HyperWRT upgrade
• Follow the additional steps for the DD-WRT upgrade

Software programs to do anything you want with your PC if you are a bit more geeky than most but do not want to pay much. Freeware & shareware.

Today, I want to present a major movie, one of the world best films, a diamond from 1950. Rash么mon is one of the most important movies of its time, and it stays as a golden nugget for both its form and its contents. Akira Kurosawa is clearly not any movie maker, he is the author of Yojimbo (the bodyguard) which was the source of For a fistful of dollars with Clint Eastwood as well as Last man standing with Bruce Willis (the least interesting of the three). He also created Seven Samurais which will be done again in a western adaptation universally known as The Magnificent Seven.

But Akira Kurosawa is not only a Japanese movie maker and director, he also was at the origin of a true revolution of 20th Century Japanese cinema. He introduced techniques and ideas coming from the Western world (like Hokusai had integrated the impressionnists’ painting in his works), and he brought to light an exceptional cinema where everything is worth keeping. Rash么mon is of that quality. One single story, told from different points of view, grows to the size of four different mixed stories. Each camera angle brings distinct tint and perception. The picture-goer will be drawn into the camera moves and will perceive how much there is no perfect point of view, how much a motion-picture (and its director) tells a unique story merely by placing a camera here instead of there.

But it is also the dramas of three people stuck in their environment, their culture, their prejudices and those of their contemporaries. You will be deeply moved, but there is not even a hint of cheap sentimentality.

And we will remember that Rash么mon was the reason for the creation of the Best foreign film category of the Academy Awards. A motion-picture that breaks so many cinema rules, and still stays attractive to the largest public, that it appeared necessary to Hollywood to open a new category just for it.

Synopsis

Toshir么 Mifune plays a bandit accused of the heinous murder of a man. But didn’t he rape his wife too? Four witnesses (including the bandit and his victim) will tell the single sequence of events. Each one will slightly transform it according to his memories and the personnal additions. Where is the truth? Are memories real?

After that, you will be able to come back to Pulp Fiction (a movie I simply loved) and perceive how difficult it is to reproduce the strength of Rash么mon.

You were told repetitively so: It’s bad to download movies, this is really bad; Each time you donwload a movie a cute little kitten dies. But in reality, there are movies that you can download for free without going ilegal, without risking the ire of the MPAA. We presented several here. But it is now time to present a very recent movie: Elephants dream.

Neither Cary Grant, nor Ava Gardner. Neither Mel Gibson, nor Spike Lee. But enlightened amateurs, a few pros and a lot of passion to produce this short Open Source film (everything is available: the software programs to do it or redo it, the models, the scripts). Anyway, it is not a technological demonstration of prowess (which took 125 days of heavy computation on 240 dual-core servers to be created) but an art work with its own life and heart.

Synopsis

Should we really talk about synopsis? The scenario is a little troubling at first. But you can easily find your marks. The two characters, young Emo and wise Proog, seem to evolve in a kind of machine that recalls memeories of 1997 Cube of Vincenzo Natali. But there is also a dark fantasy side that may remind you of The Matrix. Proog tries to lead Emo among the dangers and the surprises of the machine. This is the occasion to meet images and environments that can only be described with superlatives even if the depth of characters is not the main argument of this movie.

In the world of P2P, Bittorrent is clearly the protocol of choice for big file transfers. This is true for videos (pirated or not), for GNU/Linux dsitribution CD-ROMs, for collections of photographic images, etc.

Among the Bittorrent-compatible P2P software applications, Azureus is clearly the one that receives the favors of the greatest public. It is proved by the participation to the networks. It quite certainly comes from the Azureus versatility, but also from its flexibility allowing it to be present on many different computing platforms (written in Java, it was ported to almost anything including a microprocessor: Apple, Linux, Windows PC, Unix workstations, etc.). But it comes with one hidden cost: Configuration nightmares, hundreds of options, some of them nearly impossible to understand at first. Azureus makes it a bit easier by breaking the configuration in several expertise levels, but it still is very complex.

When I wanted to install Azureus, even with my own computer experience, sometimes I was a little lost when lokoing for the best options to configure my machine. So, I decided to share this recently hard-earned expertise, with some of my own comments.

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The music industry is a large ship that moves slowly. But when they saw the arrival of the Internet, most of this industry decided to jump onto technical measures to close and protect the music they produce in order to protect their rights: Hence the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Today, things did not really change, but they could.

Two informations of today:

• Warner is loosing money (benefits reduced by 74% in the last quarter of 2006). Its CEO commenting on the recent call by Steve Jobs for dropping DRM, said that they do not intend to stop DRM. Ever. [1]
• According to the Wall Street Journal, EMI would be talking to music distributors about the possibility of removing all copy protections while publishing electronically the largest part of its catalogue. Since EMI was also the company that actually tried distribution without DRM in the recent months, they may have learned that it’s what the consumers want in order to by music online. [2]

The youngest of our readers may not know what this title is all about, but some of the dinosaurs here won’t need a music encyclopaedia to remember Sex Pistols’ “Never mind the bollocks” (1977) and their alternative music (well before they coined the word in for this context).

Today, the punk wave largely left the music ground and let itself be transformed. But there are some amateurs still. And some others will be interested in rediscovering freely these music groups that broke all rules.

Punk music is a web site that offers free download of punk music.

For those of you who want to know where technology-based content protection is naturally leading:

Thanks to XKCD.

We already talked about it here at length: Devices willing to handle High Definition (HD) video have to (or will have to) be all HDCP-compatible in order to be able to display anything. Recent Christmas holiday season sales will probably soon appear as somewhat lacking in this section (most of the HD-Ready TV sets don’t even include an HDMI connecteor that is a needed but definitely not sufficient pre-requirement).

Today, we start to hear about incidents for users of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console from Sony. When connected to TV-HD sets, some consoles see their display cut by some blacks and their sound dropping, etc. It is now confirmed that this is caused by a bug in the communication between the TV set and the console. Since the TV does not respond fast enough to the HDCP challenge from the console, this one decides that it is connected to a non-HDCP display peripheral and unilaterally cuts the outputs (sound and image).

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