P2P

Bosco’s cross-platform screen-sharing software Screen Share has just been updated to version 3. This new releases adds Universal Binary for Mac users, significant performance improvements for both Mac and Windows users, and improvements to web screen sharing.

Though you might cringe when putting the Bosco Screen Share icon in your dock, we think the payoff is worth it (besides, you can always keep it hidden in your Apps folder). Bosco’s Screen Share uses a proprietary p2p protocol, which allows the software to skip the often difficult client/server setup procedure. Easy setup, cross-platform; what’s not to love?

Bosco’s Screen Share supports screen-sharing in webcast mode (your screen broadcast to a number of people) and a one-to-one mode. The developers have put together some helpful tutorials on their web site if you get stuck.

Bosco’s Screen Share is a free download for Mac and Windows, though advertisements will be displayed in the program interface beginning this month.

The crack of the bat, the smell of the grass and the pain of losing your purchased content to DRM deactivation. In what can only be called the biggest bonehead move since Bill Buckner’s error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Major League Baseball has deactivated a DRM license server used to verify your worthiness to play back video of games you purchased online.

Due to an earlier decision to switch DRM providers, MLB’s new content and old content are managed by different license authentication servers. After making the switch, MLB has arbitrarily decided it has no intention of honoring its earlier commitments to fans who purchased downloaded games under the old system, thereby rendering many fans shut-out.

Claiming the full-game downloads were “one-time sales”, MLB is completely unapologetic to fans who’ve lost their purchased content to the horrors of DRM death. Quoted on Boing Boing, baseball super-fan and author Alan Wood writes, “Just got off the phone with a MLB customer service supervisor. [who said] ‘MLB no longer supports the DDS system’ that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them ‘are no good. They will not work with the current system.’”

Shame on you Major League Baseball, this is fraud. We’ve warned Download Squad readers that buying DRM “protected” media is a crap-shoot, but when issuing those warnings we were mostly concerned about smaller media sales outlets going out-of-business in an ever evolving digital media landscape. This goes so far beyond those fears, with an active and profitable business making a clear and informed decision to yank the DRM rug out from under your purchased content.

Is it any wonder non-drm downloads via P2P are so popular? It’s not simply about “free” in the base, capitalist notion of how much money changed hands, it’s more pointedly about “freedom”, the freedom to do what you wish with the content you’ve collected. If consumers aren’t given options which allow them to get their content free as in freedom, they’ll take that content free as in beer.

When we first heard about the RIAA’s recent filesharing suit victory and the 220k dollar judgment against the user in question — we thought, “You’d have to be mad to share enough songs to rack up a judgment that large.”

Not so fast, jack. The offending copyright infringements totaled just 24–that’s right, twenty-four copyright protected files on the user’s drive. Breaking down to nearly 10 large per infringement; the defendant Jammie Thomas was hit square in the face with the book the court threw, wiping out her finances and sending her out of the courthouse literally in tears.

As an aside, we’re left to wonder if the artists infringed upon could have generated the kind of revenue which would make such an enormous judgment possible if it weren’t for the enthusiasm demonstrated by fans like Jammie. After all, a business needs its customers and, like it or not, rabid filesharers are also some of music’s biggest fans, and the recording industry’s bread and butter.

Nevertheless, Jammie, a MySpace user, has apparently raised nearly a thousand bucks to fund her appeal of the case, courtesy of her MySpace friends. She’s also receiving funds from her Native American tribe, but not nearly enough to match the might of the RIAA, whose pockets have grown deep through record sales and insanely lopsided settlement agreements.

Declan McCullough of CNET wrote that the jury instructions given before deliberation may have been slanted in favor of a heavy statutory damage claim, as high as a hundred grand per incident. Is it just us, or does this kind of onesie-twosie infringement seem like it should be covered by a different set of fines? You can get a DUI with children in the car and still get off cheaper than Jammie Thomas did.

After about two days of problems, Skype is back to normal. Skype’s Villu Arak promises to post a more detailed explanation of exactly what went wrong and how it was fixed on Skype’s blog Monday.

Incidentally, as Skype Journal points out, there’s a new Skype build available for download, although the update has nothing to do with the outage and just offers a few bug fixes.

The outage has raised an important question. Can are customers really able to place their trust relatively new technologies like Skype and VoIP in general? A number of individuals and small businesses have eliminated their traditional telephone lines, replacing them with low-cost SkypeIn and SkypeOut accounts, although we’d venture to guess most people still have a cellphone as a backup.

It’s not like old fashioned telcos never have outages, but two days is a long time to be without connectivity. During that time, a number of alternate VoIP services took advantage of the situation, promoting their technologies as resistant to Skype-type outages. That’s because Skype’s service wasn’t actually affected. It was the authentication process that failed, preventing most Skype users from logging in. If you have a peer to peer VoIP service without a centralized authorization server, you’re theoretically outage-proof. Theoretically.

It’s been argued before that the RIAA’s claim of $750 per song shared in damages — a standard figure used in all filesharing cases within the US — may be unconstitutional. According to Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People, the defendant in Atlantic vs. Boggs has not only challenged the constitutionality of the claim, but has entered a counterclaim based on the challenge. That means we’re playing for real dollars and the RIAA isn’t impressed.

The RIAA moved to dismiss the counterclaim and, in a somewhat unusual action, the US Department of Justice filed a motion with the court asking for a 60 day stay in which it will decide whether or not to intervene.

If the RIAA’s constitutionality claims can be set aside, it will take serious muscle out of the spamigation being perpetuated, and could force an extreme change of strategy.

With piracy enforcement becoming a major issue worldwide, and the focus being on frightening the living daylights out of anyone with a p2p client, a reasonable person might assume that the number of illegal downloads would be decreasing. Apparently the Brits aren’t reasonable people.

According to Torrent Freak, the British are downloading music at an unprecedented pace, and show no signs of slowing down. “Asked to look into the future to predict next year’s downloading habits, 18% of those asked said they were likely to download more often, up from 8% in 2006 and just 6% in 2005. 41% said they would download the same next year while an identical number said they would download less.”

During the last week, highly anticipated fall TV pilots have made their way on to Bittorrent trackers in record numbers. Shows like NBC’s “Bionic Woman,” ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” The CW’s “Reaper” are popping up like wildflowers, and network executives are tight-lipped about the matter.

According to TV Week, “Network representatives expressed surprise that the full-length pilots were on the Web and alerted their studio partners. Some said they were anticipating that critic and industry screener copies would leak eventually as smattering of fall pilots have found their way online during the past few years. All networks contacted declined official comment.”

[via Digg]

It seems like everything these days is some sort of threat to national security; Hair gel, shampoo, and now peer to peer networking.

That’s right, a handful of politicians are up in arms, claiming that peer to peer networks and filesharing apps are invading deep within secure government computers and allowing access to classified information by rouge nations and actors. Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman is threatening to proffer new legislation to end this dangerous P2P scourge, although we think it would probably be easier just to lock down secure workstations and prevent the installation of filesharing tools.

So remember, the next time you fire up BitTorrent, you’re not just putting yourself at risk, but risking the lives and liberty of your fellow US citizens. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to make a bunch of tin-foil hats.

Trey Harrison, a young independent software developer, was faced with a problem. The application he developed — an advanced video mixer used in live performance — showed up on warez sites, complete with a crack, before he’d secured his second customer. Many developers in his situation would have gotten mad, but Trey took a different stance.

He wrote the warez group who’d released his application into the wild and asked nicely that they stop. At the same time he also wrote the company from whom he’d purchased his copy-protection library used in his application. Who wrote back first? The warez group. Apparently appreciative of Trey’s direct approach, they replied within hours, complimented Trey and promised not to leak future versions of the software.

Granted, this might not be a solution that works for everyone but, we can’t help but wonder if the RIAA could have saved millions in legal fees by simply opening a dialog rather than filing thousands of lawsuits.

The LA Times ran a profile of The Pirate Bay this weekend. The BitTorrent indexing site sticks up its nose at the MPAA and copyright holders around the world.

The Stockholm-based site has garnered support in Sweden, and the state-registered Pirate Party has almost as many members as the Green Party in that country.

Probably the most interesting tidbit in the article though, is a quote from Pirate Bay software designer Peter Sunde, who says the group is working on a new file-sharing technology that will make file exchanges “untraceable.” No word on exactly how this technology will work, but it will be an open-source program.

[via Wired's Epicenter]