Industria muzicală aproape că nu a dus-o niciodată mai rău ca în era digitală. Conform unei analize a RIAA, torrentele și programele de file sharing gen DC++ au adus industria muzicală la cifre comparabile cu perioada de dinainte 1985, anul în care apăreau CD-urile.

Astfel, de la cifra de 15 miliarde de dolari, vârful atins în perioada de glorie a CD-urilor, industria muzicală a ajuns spre 5 miliarde de dolari, nivel la care era în anii ’80.

Nici casele de discuri din România n-o duc mai bine.

Luați la întâmplare un computer și căutați fișierele de tip mp3. Veți găsi sute, dacă nu chiar mii de melodii. Câte dintre ele au fost convertite de pe un CD cumpărat sau descărcate contra cost de pe internet? Poate câteva procente. ­

Restul sunt downloadate gratuit sau copiate de la prieteni. Creșterea fără precedent a accesibilității muzicii s-a suprapus cu efectele crizei economice. Read more »

How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.

These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users.

Why connection speeds matter

Why would you be interested in knowing how Internet connection speeds are distributed among various countries? Here’s why:

• As an Internet user, you can get an idea of how your own Internet connection speed holds up against others in your country.
• As a Web service provider or website owner, you get an idea of what kind of Internet connection speeds your customers are likely to have in different countries. This is highly relevant if you want them to have a positive user experience. This naturally applies to web developers in general as well, who should be well aware of the capacity of people’s Internet connections.

Read more »

In a bizarre move, The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, is partnering with social dating site Meezoog to launch an online dating site PirateDate.com, to take on Match.com, Zoosk and others.

The Pirate Bay, which has had a tumultuous year, is launching a dating network around sharing. PirateDate will allow singles to share and assist their social connections in finding potential dates, while getting recommendations and referrals from their friends.

Pirate Date is utilizing Meezoog’s technology to provide users with “social proximity” measurements, that allow people to efficiently filter their cyber connections.

According to the site, personal information added by members is immediately visible to their friends (through Facebook connect), encouraging users to be honest with their information. Pirate Date’s ‘Social Radius’ technology exposes members to singles who are socially connected to them, as well as displays how they are connected.

The site will also share users’ ‘Trust Paths’ to every member, showing people’s social graph. And the site’s ‘Social Proximity Gauge’, calculates how close you are to people you find interesting on Pirate Date. Read more »

New data from Arbor Networks shows that global P2P traffic is continuing to decline. In fact, P2P apps are the fastest declining application group, according to a report presented at the 77th IETF meeting in Anaheim last week. Here’s a graph showing the rate of decline, in relationship to overall Internet traffic, from 2007 to 2009:

And here’s a list of apps and their weighted average grow and decline over the last two years: Read more »

A review of Movie ‘Streaming’ Websites, and why it works.

Websites that feature full-length movies shown as ’streaming’ video have taken great strides in becoming quite remarkable. Some even offer films & clips in High-Definition (HD). So how do they get away with it, you ask? Simple! They don’t host the movies – just the links to them. This lovable loophole even permits them to play the movies on their sites, while staying and inch or two out of the MPAA’s reach.

Very few ‘free’ online movie sites actually host the movies themselves – it requires an enormous amount of bandwidth, not to mention the legalities associated with hosting copyrighted content. The solution? They use inadvertent carriers such as youtube, megavideo, stage6, video.google, veoh.com etc. – all of which offer a staggering amount of video – but frown upon any copyrighted content submitted by their users. Uploaded content is heavily moderated – and promptly deleted – if and when something is found to be in direct violation of the sites’ policies on copyright infringement. Well, piracy is a wonderful weed – give it just a crack of sunlight and an iota of soil, and it will happily flourish. Movie piracy has found an opportunistic niche within the folds of the youtubes – almost the same way that pirates have inundated the 1-click file hosting sites with illegal content, as in the case of rapidshare and megaupload.com. The exact same ideology bodes true for youtube – copyrighted content gets uploaded; it becomes discovered and gets deleted; someone else re-uploads it under a different filename. It’s an infinite cat-and-mouse game in a world where there’s too many mice and not enough felines. Read more »

lindly searching the web for cracks & keygens is about as smart as using Limewire to search for antivirus software – something not well-advised. Undoubtedly and unfortunately, the number of crack sites with overtones of a malicious agenda heavily outweigh sites that just want to serve up the honest goods. Having said that, there actually are quite a few creditable ‘crack’ sites that won’t try to bombard you with full-screen popup ads, or commandeer your computer into a spam-loving Kraken or Srizbi Botnet army. We’ve done the hard work for you, and present a list of “clean” crack sites for all the latest warez.

Be aware that the site reviews herein only include information about each site, not the contents of the ‘cracks’ themselves. Always use a reputable antivirus and antispyware program on cracks & keygens before using them.

Our Recommendation: Due to security flaws and exploits, avoid using Internet Explorer when browsing potentially harmful websites (such as any of these on the list) – use Firefox instead. Better still, for added safety use these two Firefox add-ons: NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Sorry, but you’ll have to copy/paste the links into your Browser window – I don’t wish to be a “known associate” of most of these sites. Read more »

Here’s a ridiculously easy tip to squeeze out as many users as you can on a dead or dying torrent. It’s particularly handy when a torrent stops near the end, and/or the seed count is listed as zero. Having said that, I’ve also noticed that it helps to increase download speeds from healthy torrents, as well.

NOTE: Do not attempt this trick with private torrents – it’ll only get you banned from the tracker. Use this tip with torrents you find at mininova, thepiratebay, etc.

How it works:

Simple. Just copy/paste this list of public trackers into your torrent’s tracker list. Read more »

The six individuals who are arrested for allegedly sharing music on the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, are due to report to police at the start of July. The five men and one woman, who are suspected of conspiring to defraud the music industry, will have their bail extended. Unsurprisingly, the police need more time to make their case.

On Friday 23rd May, three people were arrested by police, followed by another three on Wednesday 28th May. All six – five men aged between 19 and 33 and a 28-year-old woman – were arrested in the UK on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses.

It is alleged that the individuals were users of OiNK who uploaded music to other users in advance of its commercial release date.

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

read more

Today, one of Mininova’s users will will have the honor to download the 5 billionth torrent, an impressive figure for a site that has only been around for little over three years.

If Mininova continues to grow at this rate, we might see the 10 billionth download before the year ends.

read more