Darknet

$40,000 to fill an iPod?

Ars Technica: $40,000 to fill an iPod? One third of PCs use LimeWire instead.

CNET blogs: One-third of the people reading this are thieves.

RIAA pushes students to darknets

p2pnet.net: RIAA Pushes Students to Darknets.

As predicted here and by other industry experts, the harder the entertainment industry pushes consumers, the harder they will push back with more evasive technologies.

The renewed RIAA offensive on colleges is a perfect case in point. Students in particular are tech savvy, concentrated, and highly social, a recipe for a rise in darknets, or closed private networks, that cannot be monitored by RIAA and their agents. ...

Darknets live on after P2P ban at Ohio U

Ars Technica: Darknets live on after P2P ban at Ohio U.

Of darknets and mash-ups

I gave a talk Monday night at Malmö University in Sweden — the Shift Lecture series, it's called — on darknets and mashup culture. I expected perhaps 10 or 20 people to show up at the library along Malmö's scenic waterfront, but more than 100 turned out.

My talk and slide show explored the shift in media culture, darknets, Hollywood, the entertainment industry's business models, file sharing and even Sweden's Pirate Party (piratepartiet), which garnered 35,000 votes, though no seats, in national elections a week ago. One member of the Pirate Party was in the crowd, and he came up afterward and let me know about the Pirate Party's new U.S. outpost.

Also showed four videos of mash-ups, all of them illegal or infringing. Didn't encounter any pushback from the audience, which seemed inclined to allow this kind of experimentation, at least for noncommercial purposes. Afterward, I did an interview with Swedish Radio.

I also took a bunch of photos, but can't seem to get them off of my camera phone at the moment.

The future of darknets

Richard Hall, a professor in Missouri who attended the "Future of Darknets" panel I moderated at South by Southwest Interactive in March, has just posted a video of some of the session's highlights. He's using it in his classroom as well.

P2P steps into the Darknet

Linux Pipeline: P2P Steps Into The Darknet.

Freenet: The first scalable darknet

Slashdot:

The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely.

p2pnet.net: The first "pure darknet" alpha version of the completely re-written Freenet 0.7, a p2p network purpose-built to allow the free sharing of information online, is now ready for public testing.

SXSW videos

South by Southwest Interactive has posted videos of speakers and panels from last week, including Craig Newmark, Henry Rollins and the Darknets panel.

Ian Clarke on Freenet

I wrote about Ian Clarke and his Freenet Project extensively in Darknet — even have the $150 phone bill from the long-distance call from the US to Edinburgh to prove it (where were you, Skype?). Well, Ian has since moved back to LA, where he is guiding Freenet and working as chief scientist for Revver.

I had a great time at SXSW with Ian on my panel, and then hanging out with him and his girlfriend Janie at the EFF party there. Here he discusses Freenet, darknets, Revver and his move back to the States.

Formats: H.264 m4v for iPod; 44.2MB; 7:40; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: **** (out of 5)

MPEG-4; 30.9MB; 7:40; 320x240px; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: *** (out of 5)

Tags: Ian Clarke, videoblogging, video , journalism, SXSW, SXSW 2006, SXSWi, Freenet, Revver

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

Private torrent communities

Here's an interesting 4-minute video on one offshoot of darknets: Private Torrent Communities and Beyond.