The Interwebs are powerful with this one...

So folks might remember my last post which got a bit of traffic and kind of sort of weighed down estrip a bit. Sorry about that. Seriously. Paul and I did our best to alleviate the situation, but I know it was inconvenient for folks.

Well, it wasn't all for nothing. The traffic seems to have generated a lasting interest in elmwoodstrip which is cool, even if it's from non-locals. I kept hoping some Buffalo contingent would pick up on it.

But 1and1 actually changed their policies here. And so have some other companies. It looks like the posting on Boing Boing really started a movement of people to question their webhosting services here, and in the end, at least for 1and1 and me, we won. I'm totally amazed and impressed with the power of a bunch of people who give a damn. I have gotten so much email from cool people interested in keeping technologies for sharing media free and available to the public.

I won't go into the details here, but you can read more on my site (http://www.shawnrider.com/candd.php) and you can read an article about the incident at Slyck News (http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=820). And, of course, Boing Boing posted a final note about the whole thing, too (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/07/1and1_changes_its_tu.html).

I just got this new server software for my DSM320 Media Center (or Media Hub as the new server software calls it). The new software is called TVersity (http://www.tversity.com) and it's free to download from the site. It does this brilliant job of transcoding all diffferent formats using the MS Direct Show tech, which means it can view all different types of media. It transcodes the media, then shoots it to the DSM in a format it can understand. I love it. It is finally showing the power of internet based broadcasting.

So what does that mean? It means we spent way too much time last night watching a Russian Informercial for some kind of good posture device. I speak no Russian. I was impressed because the visual quality seemed decent (of course, this is streaming over the internet, so it's not exactly HD quality, but it was very good). This thing was like a curvy plastic stick that supposedly helps you maintain the perfect posture. Of course, it didn't look like this thing was adjustable or anything. You strapped it over each shoulder like a backpack, and the "straps" looked like shoestrings. There is another shoestring that goes around your waist, sort of a belt strap. The informercial pitch was intercut, of course, with images of Russians wearing the device under their clothing in their day-to-day activities. The thing was about as subtle as walking around with a broomstick in your back. And probably strapping yourself to a straight piece of wood would be more useful for enhancing posture than a crappy, flexible piece of plastic, no matter how scientistically calculated the curvature is.

So now I have crap TV in a million languages. I watched some Dutch community bulletin board TV. But I don't speak Dutch either. So I switched to Pasadena, CA and found a remarkably similar community bulletin board network. I was surprised at just how similar they looked. For all I knew, the Dutch station was just a design comp full of "lorem ipsum" placeholder text for the Pasadena version.

China has a remarkable number of internet broadcasters. I switched to some Chinese (American) Idol thing, which I think was better because I couldn't understand the words. I jumped to Cuban TV, which played the world's most extended remix of some song that I couldn't place (in my extensive knowledge of, I think 3 Cuban songs). But it went on for like 10 minutes. Then I switched to the UK to get a dose of English. I stayed away from BBC and whatnot, in favor of the Ministry of Sound channel, which was nothing but electro whatnot. I switched to UK MTV, which sucks, too.

Australian TV was dominated by religion and nightly news. There are lots of home shopping networks in all languages. I hope this thing gets Broadcast Machine and Winamp TV capabiliities.

Wow, what a difference a week in LA can make. I still get so giddy flying from sea to shining sea. Why isn't that our awesome Go USA song? Too commie, I guess...

Anyway, a lot has been up with GF! mostly and with some other things, too. I can't really talk too much about those things yet, but I'll drop links where there are links to link. As always. Mostly I've been trying to fill up (e:paul)'s schedule with more programming. haha!

Dig our moblog from E3 if you haven't already (http://moblog.gamesfirst.com). We stood in line for Star Wars a bit (http://moblog.gamesfirst.com/index.php?page=11). That was cool. I met Max Payne, or at least the guy who posed as him in the first game. He looked a lot less constipated. Other than that, there wasn't much in the way of celeb spottings. Well, I saw Ty from Extreme Home Makeover, but he was nowhere near me...

So after going to LA and spending how much ??? money on the trip for the umpteenth time (since 1999 we've been doing this), and making new deals to (hopefully) expand GF! in cool new ways, and meeting a whole new group of awesome writers who are some of the greatest folks around, I get this:

Dear Webmaster
>
>
>
> I am interested in buying your domain gamesfirst.com for $400. I'm only interested in the domain not in your content, so you can sell your domain and move your content to another domain. If you are interested please respond to this e-mail.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Bettina Jensen
>

So I sent this back to her:


Bettina,

GamesFirst.com is an established brand with a 10 year web legacy as
one of the foremost independent online gaming magazines. I'm afraid
your offer is not only misguided but completely insulting. Please
remove us from your spam list.

Shawn Rider,
Editor in Chief

The nerve! Geez, who do these people think they are. I now own GamesFirst.net and GamesFirst.org, so take that Bettina!

Adieu mes amis!

We're heading to LA for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (http://www.e3insider.com) We'll be moblogging our journey with some images here and as always you can check out GamesFirst! for much more stuff, if you're into the videogames and whatnot. It should be an exciitng year -- three new hardware platforms makes for some fierce display of corporate excess! haha

I'll try to post using the swanky WAP interface at least to say hello.

I can't believe the way people confuse Bit Torrent with movie piracy. Let me set the record straight here: Bit Torrent is a technology for distributing large files without incurring massive server loads. It's being used in all kinds of personal, professional, non-profit, and governmental applications. Videogame companies use Bit Torrent to distro patches and trailers. And if you're an independent video / multimedia creator, Bit Torrent means that it is now possible to share high quality versions of your work with others. That's how I use it.

I have an installation of Blog Torrent on my personal site (http://www.shawnrider.com/bt) that I use to distro needlessly large copies of my movies (made by me and my friends), and I had intended to experiment with Broadcast Machine (http://www.participatoryculture.org/bm). I hope to get some of my videomaking colleagues (http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu) to experiment with making their work available online. For some reason, though, the Broadcast Machine kept giving me errors and whenever I tried to access the .torrent files it made, I got a 403 Access Forbidden error. I was perplexed, and had pretty much resigned myself to checking in on a later version of Broadcast Machine since it sees pretty regular updates.

Then I received this letter:

Dear Shawn Rider,

It has come to our attention that you are hosting copyrighted and/or licensed
files and software (aka, 'warez')

/bt/btdownloadbg.py ./torrents/booth_babes.mp4.torrent --statusfile data/72eda5dcfb51164fd30cdd88a4d189a8953b96dd.status --display_interval 15 --save_in data/seedfiles/

Please note that the hosting of these files is strictly prohibited by our T&C


4.1.7.
You agree not to infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, or
other proprietary rights of any third party, including, but not limited to, the
unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, the digitization and distribution
of photographs from magazines, books, or other copyrighted sources, and the
unauthorized transmittal of copyrighted software;

Please remove the requested files from your webspace immediately and reply to
this email. Failure to do so will result in your account being locked and
possibly terminated.

Now, I'm all for keeping "warez" (wARR-ezzz, matey!) off the server. In fact, on my Blog Torrent RSS it specifically forbids posting warez to the tracker, and I'd happily remove any pirated movie, music, docs or soft. But this is my movie. I made it in 2001 with my wife, Sarah, and a few of my friends. I state as much very clearly on my website (http://www.shawnrider.com), and anyone who actually took the time to LOOK at my site would have quickly realized that these files are mine and free for me to share (and free for you to download and share, too).

But it's obvious that 1and1, which is a pretty large hosting company, is using some kind of algorithmic filter to block these files. It was "signed" by a tech support person, but the return address was just a generic admin address. I immediately responded to the letter:

Um, I made that movie. It's mine and I am trying to use Broadcast
Machine to host my video files. This is not a copyright infringement
at all. I've been hosting it on GamesFirst! (also my website) since we
made it in 2001. Please cease and desist these silly letters and allow
people to access my legitimate and completely legal personal
creations.

Thank you,
Shawn Rider

I don't want them to turn off my websites. And this is not any kind of civil disobedience, which would involve breaking a law. I'm just uploading my files to the Internet and trying out some technologies to facilitate this with the lowest demand on my webserver. If hosting companies apply some kind of blanket filter against .torrent files, that will seriously limit our ability to share media and content. It is completely unacceptable for web servers to do this kind of unmonitored regulation and threatening. What if I had been on vacation, couldn't respond, and they shut down my site in a week?

I see this kind of stuff all the time. On CNN they called EliteTorrents a "part of the Bit Torrent network." You see Bit Torrent referred to as a pirated materials provider all the time. Like in a blurb about Tivo execs retiring, Bit Torrent is blamed and is calld a free "filesharing service" (http://video.google.com/videopreview?q=%22bit+torrent%22&time=2480000&page=1&docid=-4341565409100833355&urlcreated=1117856294&chan=KTVU&prog=KTVU+Morning+News&date=Wed+Feb+2+2005+at+6%3A00+AM+PST).

Bit Torrent is a technology used to share files. The files that are shared could be of any type, including pirated media, but ALSO they could be family videos, poetry, homebrew videogames, podcasts recorded on portable media players... ANYTHING. Bit Torrent is like the Inernet itself -- which has been aptly compared to a highway. You can't fault the road for the things you find along the way.

The difference between Bit Torrent and actual filesharing "services" or "software" is that those systems keep track of files in some direct way. For example, if I were using Kazaa, then I am using the Kazaa software and will only find others plugged into the Kazaa network. Same with eDonkey, Warez, Limewire, Bearshare, Gnutella... all of these are systems where it is very difficult to configure your own little niche. What I mean is this: If I want to share my own videos on Kazaa, then they're just a hop away from pr0n and piracy.

Bit Torrent is different because it has no kind of centralized server at all; instead, one simply installs a little PHP software that creates a file on the server called a .torrent. The "torrent" file is then downloaded by somebody else using a Bit Torrent client (there are like a billion of them). The file itself, the video, song, whatever, that you have requested, is then sent directly from one machine to the other. If lots of people download, then it all goes much faster. That's the beauty of Bit Torrent -- you're rewarded if lots of people share. It's this kind of thing that makes Bit Torrent a much better way of sharing files.

On my website I share the files that I want to put out there, and if somebody wants to use Bit Torrent to go download some crappy pop song, they have to visit a different website. There is a Bit Torrent tracker for everyone, and it's pretty easy to make one yourself if you can't find one that fits. So go ahead and indict the pirates and thugs -- that's not my battle. But leave the Bit Torrent alone for those of us who just have some perverse desire to give our stuff away.

I want this on a t-shirt:

Bit Torrent doesn't pirate movies, people do.