Published Date 3/29/16 1:22 PM
There are lots of sites down, lots of fake files etc.
A colleague Richard Hering has posted a number of music videos to YouTube. As these contain a synchronised score of complex music, they have unique educational value. Sony recently blocked a number of these in no less than 244 countries. “Sony have bought up a 50 year old recording they never made and now take it down wherever it is shared”.
He also uploads to torrent sites, where such very old culture (for instance the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) is popular, and should surely be treated as a common heritage.“People need to share, it’s a basic need I think”. He used to upload such videos to Piratebay, but this has not accepted registrations for a while now. He uploaded it to Kickass and and some people still find it there, but the Piratebay has not indexed it and and you cannot even find it on google. The crackdown on piracy has lead to the proxy universe being full of poorly indexed and fake sites. The proxy “copies” are not mirrors….
This is looking to me like we have a crisis in the client server side of P2P, which might be about morale and the burn out of the open generation. ISP blocking is probably driving down ad revenue… Google is now pushing down real torrents, which means it’s pushing up fake torrents. It’s a shadow or a corpse of a P2P network.
[Richard Hering adds a note here: it’s very important not to underestimate the problems which google is now causing. I searched my popular torrent on a number of search engines, just using its title plus the word “torrent”. The results:
1. Duckduckgo.com – first on page one.
2. Yahoo – first on page one
3. Bing – 4th on page one
4. Google – page 7! Despite tracking my activity and selecting what I see on that basis, which ought to push the result up.
So Google is suppressing torrents. In future I think I will use duckduckgo, as it does no tracking. I already use it on the phone, as it blocks ads.]
Without tech activism, I think this p2p world is ending. It will continue “submerged” inside the #dotcons. But another part of the open web fades. That was what true p2p applications such as RetroShare were about. Escaping from the silos of torrent sites. True p2p might still be an option but would need activism to push it into mainstream view. It’s a little harder to setup, but it’s not rocket science, use it or lose it is the mantra and we have lost lots. “I remember Peter Sunde from tpb saying that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if torrents got killed off – it would force innovation” But the question we beg “only if we innovate”.
RetroShare would solve these issues and it “innovates” human networks as a useful “side effect”. But a German court has tried to ban it. However RetroShare is just p2p encryption, which is basic to the web, so can’t be banned, with out huge clateral damage to the #dotcoms, especially if used for something legal.
https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-file-sharing-ruled-illegal-by-german-court-121123
“A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated.”
The issue here is human error: he added the promedia as a direct friend. To quote TorrentFreak “Promedia posed as a “friend” of the respondent. The decision of LG Hamburg is not compelling.”
We live in a world now where the younger people (early 20s) are possibly part of the post-P2P generation for whom the internet is facebook etc
What a thought.