Readers here at The Geekery might know how much we respect and envy our pals over at TorrentFreak. I read this story quite some time ago and it just blew my socks off. I have never seen actual figures for how mainstream P2P has become. So we wanted to give this story some more traffic, it’s a couple of months old but still worth the read. Engimax and Ernesto are genius’s. They are the hub that funnels information for the p2p community. We usually are not in the fashion of posting someone else’s story but this is just too good. Either go to there site and give them some more traffic or you can read it here. Actually do both. This story makes me feel like ZeroCool. Don’t forget something by Armin Van Buuren, I suggest episode 260. Enjoy this one.

BitTorrent Survival: The Way of the Hydra

Written by Enigmax from TorrentFreak

As more and more people hear about BitTorrent, each day the major sites get bigger, with more and more visitors, members, seeds and peers. Mainstream awareness of P2P is driving this new surge but with copyright and law enforcement agencies clamping down hard, some are considering tactics for survival.

The BitTorrent community is growing at an almost alarming rate, its popularity is surging and more people than ever before are discovering its wonders. The mighty Suprnova captured the imagination of millions around the world, giving huge momentum to this file-sharing phenomenon, collecting millions of daily hits before its demise.

Today, sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are enjoying unprecedented levels of interest. Mininova served up 1 billion torrents in their first 2 years of operations, then stormed to 2 billion in just a further 6 months whilst capturing almost double the daily traffic of Suprnova in its prime.

The Pirate Bay almost needs no introduction, such is its size and comparable infamy. A jaw-dropping BitTorrent behemoth, gathering thousands of visitors each day who between them download 4 million torrents. Its visitors make 86 searches per second, its servers handle 1150 requests in the same time-frame and it tracks 50% of the world’s torrents.

That’s 50% of ALL public torrents. That is a dangerously high number of eggs in a basket that’s frequently coming under an attack of one form or another.

With the authorities always looking to take the biggest scalps to grab the headlines, sites such as LokiTorrent and EliteTorrents stood no chance, especially considering the huge financial implications of residing in the USA. Major BitTorrent site admins realized this and mainly moved their operations to the Netherlands, a location which is now looking less of a safe haven. The Dutch situation is of particular concern - there are dozens of strategically important torrent sites hosted there.

So what is the solution? brokep of The Pirate Bay has some thoughts that I happen to completely agree with.

“There are too few sites and trackers right now” he said, “things have been to concentrated to the big sites and that really sucks!”

Although it’s great initially for the mainstream to have visible big ‘brands’ such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TorrentSpy, it’s a precarious situation to have such a top heavy structure to the BitTorrent community. It’s great having a ‘multi-headed hydra’ but not so great when just one of those heads carries half of all the public torrents. This situation must be addressed. Resources need to be spread around in a manner which ensures that a few ‘big bombs’ are unable to dismantle major parts of the infrastructure.

There is a solution, as brokep says, “I really love the small specialized sites, I hope to see more of them. I would love to help out with starting up more, but it’s also important that we who already run sites do not start more of them.”

He’s right. The more sites like The Pirate Bay provide what the BitTorrent community want, the less likely it is that people will venture out on their own to create their own sites. In the current environment, the hydra needs thousands of heads which are resource-hungry to target, not just a dozen juicy fat ones which stay nice and still, with the authorities just waiting for a subtle change in, or interpretation of, the law. A change which is inevitable, in both Sweden and the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak asked the admin of a US-based tracker how they manage to stay alive, despite having 20,000 members. “People are too hung up on MPAA and RIAA content. There’s an enormous library of material out there which you can track and no-one bothers you. We’ve got over 4000 torrents and we’ve had just two or three informal takedown requests in the last couple of years. If people want to start a tracker, indexing non-RIAA/MPAA content and specializing in something else is a great way to start building a community, even when you’re hosted in the States”

brokep gets the last words. Very wise words;

“So public message to people - start up your own torrent sites, make the internet the hydra it is and needs to be. If there’s hundreds of sites, they can’t all be shut down. And well, if they shut down the few that are today, there will be hundreds of sites, I’m sure, but let’s start them before so we can spread the word of them easier.”

Take that chimps!

Planning to dual-boot with your Intel based PCs with Apple’s OS X Leopard, or just want to install Leopard on your Intel PCs? Well here is how you do it: the crew at OSx86 scene managed to break the barrier with Leopard and found a way to install it in Intel-powered PCs, and just the day before the launch of the highly acclaimed OS. Installing Leopard on an Intel based pc requires the following items: burnable DVD and USB thumb drive.

OSx86 managed to work out two installation methods, first of which uses a DVD-RW to mount a DVD image of the OS, or just setting up a partition to load the install files from. The steps may look difficult at first glance, but the how-to steps are thoroughly outlined so there shouldn’t be any problems in trying it out.

Still want to make Windows walk the plank? Check out that list first before deciding to install Leopard first.

My experience is mixed, obviously their are some driver issues, but nothing a little hunting a pecking wont fix. But right now I am running Leopard pretty flawlessly, not really any huge issues that have came up. Most users have experienced a very long install time; I as well have experienced that same problem. It took close to 1 hour and 45 minutes to do the install. 

Overall I am pretty happy with the results; I am impressed with the tools that OSx86 crews have developed as well, kudos to them. I am currently living in a Windows based world, and it is sometimes is nice to venture out to something different, but Leopard really is not that different. Time machine is neat, but really that is about. You will never be able to knock Apple’s UI’s, but I personally don’t feel like anything is that different from other recent Mac builds. One thing I can say is that Apple is trying to make the switch easier for Windows users. I find myself eerily intrigued by the new finder, which some what resembles explorer.

Now the last question I face myself is if I would do this to my other machines? The answer is yes. Their are a lot of features that I absolutely love with OSX that I just cannot do with Vista, and vice versa. OSX is like that weekend vacation, its soothing, calm, and fun. But when it comes to the work week Windows is God, so I love them both, I will be doing this to most of my machines, but I think I might wait a little longer to do it though. OSx86 promises better builds that are a bit tighter in the code department.

Now all I have to do is get Ubuntu 7.10 back up and running again, anyone up for a tri-boot? 

I have a quick question for everyone that purchases Apple products, what the hell are you thinking?

Over the past couple of years Apple has had so many dangerous faulty products that harm you; I just don’t understand why people purchase their products anymore. I myself have fallen for Apple’s tricks numerous times. They get you with the sleek and stylish products, they advertise with actors and musicians, they make you think all is well in the world of Apple. But all is not well. We as consumers are blinded by actual good products these days. Yes the iPhone is an absolute marvel, this is undeniable, but over the years the iPod, iMac, and PowerBooks have just been a consumer nightmare. It’s a crap shoot now days to get a product from Apple that works to its full functionality as advertised.

I am not angered by the innovative UI’s or even ease of functionality. Apple’s UI’s are usually the best compared to other products in the sector they are in (except for this), what I am talking about are the actual devices, the hardware. Do you sacrifice health, safety and sanity just for something that is slick and stylish? Obviously the overwhelming rate of which these Apple products sell at are the end answer. So I ask myself why? I feel like since I purchased my faulty iPod touch I have seen more and more people bringing up the fact that Apple’s hardware simply blows, in more ways then one. So let’s take a journey into Apples sometime scary and shady past and present of hardware failure…….

2002: We will start with the past, with the eMac. The eMac was made essentially for public education purposes but was soon released later to the public. Well this gem had a ton of issues, we first start with a thing called raster shift. Raster shift can mean a lot of things, but in this case it meant only about half of the screen was viewable. Then we add the attraction to static because of lexan like plastic. Then later down the road owners discovered that the motherboards in the eMac were riddled with bad capacitors.

Raster shift at is finest moment. Don’t forget these piles were intended for our public schools.

2004: Nothing like a little MagSafe melting, lets add a little fire. Everyone that owns an Apple notebook knows about that MagSafe power adapter. It’s a neat little feature included in all Powerbook power adapters. It creates a magnetic connection to the power input. It’s a neat feature, but none the less it catches on fire.

2005: The macbook, what a disaster. This one would take just too long to describe. So click here to see a laundry list of problems it had. This device might be close to the worst.

2006: The start of something scary, the original iPods start to get their bloat on. Just like the macbooks, and PowerBooks, the batteries were starting to bloat up from the battery. What happened next was inevitable, iPod nano’s started to blow up and catch on fire while they were being charged. These issues are still happening to this day!

2006: Welcome to Judgment day, computers are finally trying to kill us. (I knew we should have listened to Sarah Conner) Now PowerBooks are trying to drive hot molten Lithium Ion into your body.

2007: Present day, we are now riddled with the same problems of the past, just with new devices. People are complaining of dead screens and tilted screens in about every version of the iPod, the new iMac screens are an utter disaster (raster shift again?). Just simply poor build quality with every device.

So why do we all still purchase their devices? I think we buy from them because Apple still makes us feel warm, fuzzy and unique. They have excellent customer service and great marketing. But overall Apple has fixes for these issues usually pretty quick. I have only listed a small fraction of the faulty products Apple has made, but for that list they have came out with a fix for each one. Frustration and anger overcome my thought process every time I purchase a DOA device. I will on longer purchase Apple products until I feel that Cupertino wants to make an effort in proper build quality. I have been burned to many times by Apple, no pun intended.

So I leave you with this question, why purchase a device that will leave you frustrated, stressed, burnt, and possibly blind?

We are happy to announce a new addition to our duo, now making us a trio. We welcome our new friend and colleague Maktar Rabin. Maktar recently graduated with a BS in MIS from Delhi University in India. Maktar will make a great addition to our team. He brings a wealth of knowledge and Zen like wisdom at his young age of 25. Look out for future posts from Maktar, he has a lot of bones to pick, and it will be interesting and probably very funny on how he picks them.

Maktar will specialize in Internet Security news, and he will continue to keep us all updated about new topics on online piracy. We ask everyone to welcome Maktar to The Geekery team!

We asked Maktar if he would allow us to put a picture of him up on the site, and he sent us the picture below. He said “this isn’t me, but this is what Americans think all Indians look like.”

With our self pro claimed “Geek Week in Piracy” officially over, we have come to a lot of conclusions. One conclusion is that we could not cover enough info about this topic in a week. That’s why we have decided to at least touch on this topic once a week. So many thoughts and ideas are running through my head on what I can write to summarize these topics of online piracy, but one stands out more then the rest. Maybe it is because this question is what online piracy boils down to, that simple question of “is it wrong?” We can all justify things in life on some level, so the answer to that question will be different for everyone. Some people will come to the conclusion that paying $1.00 a song is too much money, or paying $15-$16.00 for an album with 11 songs is in it self thievery. Every explanation can be justified, so we have taken a neutral ground on certain topics within the online piracy world. Some content we feel people should rightly pay for, some content we feel is overpriced and people should pirate the hell out of it until studios understand that we should not have to pay the inflated prices to see certain flicks.

One thing we do not stand for is the way the RIAA/MPAA go after people about downloading content. They are the new Gestapo; they are hypocritical entities that have blatant disregard for laws that have been set into place to protect people. They blackmail and extort money out of innocent people daily. These corporations need to be stopped.

Another main conclusion we have came to is that “pirating” or “sharing” content will never stop. No matter what, even if albums are 50 cents people will always download music, movies, and software. The internet is our sea, and where there is a sea their will always be pirates.