Disqus - Friends of DaveLevy

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:45:58 -0000

I'm all in favour of switching to someone not-Google.

Bing? Are we talking about the same Bing, as in: developed and owned by Microsoft, the most exploitative, crypto-fascistic, pro-copyright software-developer in the history of computing? Yeah, we'll all use that, it makes perfect sense. :P

Anyone have a better suggestion? Please?

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:03:44 -0000

I'd buy a Pontiac Tits and I don't even drive. :D

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:30:06 -0000

Thank you, Tlajtoani!
Much obliged.
:D

... eee, this proper reply system really is the bees knees. :)

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 04:49:04 -0000

I think there's room enough for condemnation of Google for it's strategy of appeasement - but there must surely be lines Google can't really cross without getting into more trouble than if they simply stood up and fought.

What they've done here can be described as a minor gesture of goodwill towards content providers - if any court decides to regard such a gesture as an admission of guilt or culpability, it would logically open up a very big and nasty can of worms for any number of previously resolved cases.

Beyond this, there don't seem to be many more neutral steps Google can take to appease copyright holders. If they engage in direct intervention in the actual results of their own volition (rather than under legal obligation), then they would clearly be at grave risk of losing the 'mere conduit' status they rely on in order not to be sued for providing links to illegal or harmful sites. If they can censor one set of sites, why not all these others?

The law would then presumably require them to engage in wholesale censorship of all results - something that would undoubtedly cost a fortune (assuming it's even possible) and obliterate them as a credible search-provider.

Whatever else may be said about Google, I find it difficult to visualise them deliberately pushing the self-destruct button on behalf of their enemies.

Re: TorrentFreak Looks Different Today…

DocGerbil100 — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:02:53 -0000

(Huh. Someone's already registered 'dg100' on Disqus, so now I'm 'dg_100', instead. Cybersquatting? Why? What am I going to do, offer a reward of £10,000 for my old disposable username?! :D )

Now that I'm a little more used to it, the site definitely feels a lot fresher than it did and so far, I'm very happy with the new Disqus comment system. I'd still like ~~those other~~ the few remaining features I mentioned, but on the whole, I'm very pleased. Thanks a lot for doing it, TF! :D

Re: TorrentFreak Looks Different Today…

DocGerbil100 — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:12:08 -0000

An Edit button! Result! I imagine this will be a great relief for everybody after the next time I go into one, with another demented, insomnia-driven, unbelievably tl;dr post. My new comments can now be chopped down to something vaguely coherent and to the point, once I've had some sleep. Thank you very much indeed! :D:D:D

[Edit: This is an edit! Booargh!! :D]

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 07:26:48 -0000

It seems to me that it doesn't really matter where anybody goes: not private sites, not filehosts, not even to fully-legal free media-providers. Where there's competition against the established business models of easily-frightened rich people, there'll be snake-oil peddlers like the MAFIAA taking their money and following us to try and do as much harm as they can, by fair means or foul. :/

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 05:53:57 -0000

They don't need to appease anybody, as such, but they do need to be standing on the highest and most solid ground they can manage, if and when they do decide to fight. That's true whether the fight is for PR, for legislation or for the outcome of a court case.

By doing this, they can say "here is how we sacrificed of ourselves and our legitimate users, going above and beyond our legal obligations, purely as an act of goodwill towards content-providers". It's a very minor harm for most of us, but it undermines any suggestion that they're deliberately uncooperative on copyright matters.

We might prefer them to take a hardline stance and make the MAFIAA fight for every inch of ground, but auto-complete is a trivial issue, frankly. In all honesty, would more than a handful of us have even noticed the change if they hadn't announced it? I'm sure I wouldn't have cared enough to comment on it.

Fighting for auto-complete would have been a difficult thing to justify - they can't demonstrate any tangible harm, only abstract ones that look weak next to the supposed losses of content-providers. It's the demands for things that would affect their neutral-carrier status and cause real, demonstrable harm to their business that they can - and probably will - fight for.

We may not like what they've done, but it's almost certainly the right strategy.

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:21:34 -0000

Where have you been?! :D

Re: Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

DocGerbil100 — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:09:54 -0000

That's an amazingly long Trackbacks list. :D

Re: NSFW: Top PureTNA and Empornium Alternatives

DocGerbil100 — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:00:30 -0000

Seriously, how is this idiot actually getting traffic from these? His (or her) posts are off-topic, meaningless copypasta. If they contributed properly, posting real, well-thought-out comments, followed by an honest and clear link to services, it would be embraced (or at least accepted) by TF and it's readers as a good advertisement for the service provider.

As it is, it seems to me that this person is too disengaged, disinterested, inconsiderate, lazy and deceitful to bother. Who's gullible and stupid enough to risk their privacy, their money, even their bank-details on a link provided by someone spamming like this?

Re: aXXo’s ‘Home’ DarksideRG Disconnected by the MPAA

DocGerbil100 — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:41:27 -0000

I have a Darkside_RG forum-page in my bookmarks, but astonishingly, hadn't actually looked at it closely enough to realise it was a torrent site! Guhh! :P
I had absolutely no idea, although I do vaguely remember reading of some relationship to aXXo, somewhere.

I found the pages through Google when I was looking for solutions to some entirely legitimate transcoding and codec issues. The pages I looked at were extremely helpful. Thanks, Darkside, I'm much obliged to you. Hope the move goes well. :D

Regarding Brein's press release: "BREIN last week pulled down 12 more sites in the U.S.", I think it's clear that all "pulling down" really consists of, in most cases, is sending stroppy letters to hosts - I've yet to see anything that suggests a credible threat to anyone or anything, other than the bank-balances of those gullible enough to pay them.

Re: Extremists on Both Sides Means Piracy War Goes On Forever

DocGerbil100 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:28:35 -0000

... The only problem with this scenario is that most people's ideas are bat's-arse insane and letting them die with the individual is usually for the best. :P
(for more details, see the post you replied to - and have a think about it's implications)

Re: Extremists on Both Sides Means Piracy War Goes On Forever

DocGerbil100 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:33:35 -0000

"Ideas" is a term that covers an awful lot of things. I'm really not on board with any system that allows nutters in religious dictatorships access to formulae, blueprints, etc, for chemical weapons or nuclear-warheads. Not a good idea. At all.

Re: aXXo’s ‘Home’ DarksideRG Disconnected by the MPAA

DocGerbil100 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:11:59 -0000

I'm not a big movie watcher and I didn't know he was back until mentioned here, but I'm very pleased to see the name appear again on TD. :D

"He used to just grab scene releases and re-encode them in lower quality, what is so great about that?"

Try the fact that the Scene didn't do this. Higher quality equals higher bandwidth. That's not good at all for users in a lot of countries where internet services were (and often still are) very poor.

It's also not really compatible with the try-before-you-buy doctrine of the Scene itself - if you only want to sample a movie, why does it have to be a 2.5GB BRRip?

Re: U.S. Resume Controversial File-Sharing Domain Seizures (Updated)

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 09:17:49 -0000

This seems like a good idea, I'll try it. Ta. :)
... but am I the only one who finds it ironic that Telecomix is another .org? :P

Re: Megaupload Targeted In Multi Million Dollar Lawsuit

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:03:16 -0000

Except Perfect 10 owner Norm Zada doesn't send out valid DMCA notices.

From TF's article on the RapidShare case:
"RapidShare claims that Perfect 10 has failed to inform them of the location of the infringing material on their servers. If it knew where the material was, the file-hoster said it would willingly remove it. Zada shrugs off responsibility for that work."

In Zada's own words:
"It’s not my obligation or up to me to spend time finding those links. That’s not my problem."
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that it actually is his responsibility - if he hasn't changed his tune, he will fail again. :)

Re: Megaupload Targeted In Multi Million Dollar Lawsuit

DocGerbil100 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:07:42 -0000

Based on direct references to TF in the leaked emails, I think the original Reasoned Mind and Neostyles were ACS: Law employees, or close to them. They're a bit busy looking for work these days. :D

Re: ACS:Law and MediaCAT Completely Shut Down Both Their Businesses

DocGerbil100 — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:23:05 -0000

I remember that Downfall video - and you remember right, it was covered by TF, along with loads of other Downfall parodies. It was good fun! :D
I've looked for it since, but I think it got DMCA'd by the film company and deleted from YouTube. :/

Re: When Did We Become The Ones We Weren’t?

DocGerbil100 — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 11:11:10 -0000

"Try posting something politically incorrect here tf will remove it"
Not always. I've had a moan twice (not much of a sampling, admittedly) about a few of the more overtly offensive racist posters on threads - they seem to be removed if they're entirely off-topic, but not if they throw in something on-topic at the start. Offensive terms (such as the 'n-word') appear to be permitted, although I may simply not have noticed posts being removed.

Re: When Did We Become The Ones We Weren’t?

DocGerbil100 — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 11:44:25 -0000

Poster Ørjan might be a rude, pretentious little bitch, but he does have a point. If someone's going to make a point of commenting on someone else's post, the least they could do is try to make sure it's readable.

If we can't ask for punctuation in the interest of not excluding people, we canalsosaythatthespacebarisirrelevant - r tht nbdy shld hv t typ vwls - and widespread behaviour like that could make the entire comment section unreadable, which would be a shame.

Re: Arrr! The Music Pirates Are Still Here

DocGerbil100 — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 01:32:39 -0000

Based on Ernesto's words and your own comments here, I was all set to offer congratulations on work that at least attempts to be objective. Now I've actually read the report itself, I'm not quite as impressed.

In addition to the huge biases generated by only sampling leechers on just the one BT tracker, I note another, equally serious, issue.

Your data sample covers a grand total of one solitary day in mid-December. The run-up to Christmas, when there's more new, copyrighted content on the market than at any other time of the year - and arguably far more people who have spent all their money too soon and are facing a week on holiday, without new media content for themselves.

Or in other words, quite possibly the single busiest time of the year for media-piracy.

I'm quite prepared to believe that piracy is the dominant usage for these distribution-routes, but I think your data are a vast distance away from being any kind of genuine, representative example of that. :/

Re: Slammed By Judge, ACS:Law Not Allowed To Drop File-Sharing Cases

DocGerbil100 — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:03:16 -0000

@ The Internet: This is a reply to 'Autonomous', who replied to you - for some reason, I get no [reply] button on his post.

@ Autonomous: IIRC, ACS: Law took a lot longer than 6 months to actually go from IP-harvest to Norwich Pharmacal order to ISPs, although I might be wrong about that. Certainly, if ACS: Law's leaked emails are to be believed, the data they got back - from BSkyB, for example - was very patchy, containing significant numbers of 'unidentified' subscribers - and at least one person we know of has objected on the grounds that they weren't even a subscriber to the ISP's service.

The data retention practices of ISPs are designed purely for billing and customer services. The bill you cite is basically designed to ensure the authorities can identify, seize and examine a suspect's computer, not carry out an entire prosecution on the basis of one IP. The data is nowhere near accurate or reliable enough to support that.

Re: Slammed By Judge, ACS:Law Not Allowed To Drop File-Sharing Cases

DocGerbil100 — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:07:39 -0000

I'm never going to get tired of these - the best Famous Last Words ever! :D

Re: Makers of ‘The Expendables’ Sue 6,500 BitTorrent Users

DocGerbil100 — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:32:31 -0000

I got one of the DMCAs they originally sent out - fortunately, I'm in the UK, so I'm not worried. If it weren't for the fact that the movie was one of the biggest piles of shite I've ever seen, I'd be tempted to re-download the movie and seed it again, just out of spite. :D