Piracy

Besides P2P, the rise of sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the like have provided another avenue for pirates (and other legitimate users of course ...) to peddle their wares. Unlike P2P, there is no upload and related politics involved and matters are attended to with straightforward HTTP downloads (which are usually quite speedy). Most of these sites have a premium option as well as a hamstrung free option.

The latest fad going around is the host of MP3 search sites that are cropping up all over the place. Most of these are built off Google searches and can be hit-or-miss. But they're pretty useful for finding that rare track you always wanted, but couldn't find ...

I'm pretty sure most people are aware of the huge amount of content available on sites like YouTube, Megavideo etc., and of the existence of hangers-on sites such as Keepvid, Clip Nabber etc. as well that let you leech the FLV files directly. Furthermore, I'm also sure that you've noticed many of these leech sites not working more often than not nowadays.

Anyone else notice the rising popularity of live video / TV sites and applications all over the place? In the last year or so, what was just a niche service / application has exploded into the mainstream and I won't be surprised if established sites such as YouTube also manoeuvre to get a piece of this pie.

Presently available offerings can be segregated into two categories:

Apparently, there is this private torrent site named Funsharing where one of the rules is to only refer to it as FSC on the Inner net for "security reasons". Like seriously ... ha!

Google also returns 905 seemingly relevant results.

Three cheers for BT and piracy. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly CAMs, preview screeners etc. spread like wild-fire even before the movie has had its première. This has happened with Spiderman 3 as well and I am sure will happen with every movie that gets released regardless of all the security, DRM and all other TLAs that are heaped on.

Initial reviews are very exciting!

OiNK, which is one of the most popular torrent sites out there (primarily for music) is letting all its users download as much as they want over the holiday season. Normally, they'd have to maintain an download/upload ratio greater than or equal to 0.5 (else they'd get castrated, drawn, quartered and fed to the dogs), but it's a free for all at the moment. To quote:

Download! w00t

Between the 22nd of December and the 1st of January GMT (inclusive), downloading will not adversely affect your share ratio.

We will still be recording uploaded amounts, but ignoring downloaded.