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Better than Free (2008)

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21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#21
"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave."

Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#22
post #7

Immediacy -- who really needs it? I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it. If you don't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to come out, so it makes no difference really. To say it another way: no matter where you are in the pipeline, you still have to wait the same amount of time for new data to arrive.

Having seen a new, popular movie is a social experience.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#23

"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave." Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#24
This guy gets it. This is one of the reasons that the best way to sell product online is to create a cheap front-end product that delivers insane amounts of value to the Customer and then make profits with the back-end sales over and over, i.e. Repeat customers (because now you have their trust and good will).

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#25
post #23

"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave." Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

Ultimately we have to live somewhere in the physical world, and facing large fines or imprisonment is unattractive. The real surprise to me is that hard-line intellectual property protection has remained the political status-quo throughout the world. You'd think there'd be at least one or two countries willing to try alternatives, and give sites like Pirate Bay a place to operate in peace.

Edit: Legalize Marijuana, vote the likes of Trump into power, leave the EU, threaten to nuke the US, fine, but some things, like intellectual property, are sacred.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#26
post #23

"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave." Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right? Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities.

Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#27
post #18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Roman policy of "bread and circus" helped prevent rioting in the streets. I would much rather our resources go to entertainment than to more police and prisons. So, I am happy to put entertainment in the category of need.

You seem to have gotten the lesson of bread and circuses backwards. It's not meant to be understood as a good thing. It was meant maintain a docile public that's easily manipulated, taken advantage of and ordered around, as long as it was given enough food to eat and BS arena shows to distract it. Rioting against scum like Nero (and modern equivalents) would have been the good and democratic option.

Your view seems to be pretty shallow on why Nero was alive for so long while being a monster. One doesn't simply kill Nero and continue to rule TRE. Easy manipulation of "docile" public is an inseparable part of democracy, actually. Most people have little to no political education, not to mention the understanding of methods and processes. Most of us simply believe, because politics is boring, bread and circuses is fun. And today almost everyone can get fun without going into boring details.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#28
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right? Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities. Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.

I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent ;)

You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops.

There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

Ultimately we have to live somewhere in the physical world, and facing large fines or imprisonment is unattractive. The real surprise to me is that hard-line intellectual property protection has remained the political status-quo throughout the world. You'd think there'd be at least one or two countries willing to try alternatives, and give sites like Pirate Bay a place to operate in peace. Edit: Legalize Marijuana, v…

Those are simply much more important subjects for their votes than copyright.

Re: Better than Free (2008)

#30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right? Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities. Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.

I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent ;) You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops. There's always a price to pay when attempting…

I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every single node for no reason.

A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really.

I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc... https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico

The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity.

If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.

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