TorrentFreak reports the availability of 6 GB of free music released for the 23 th edition of  The Outh by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival. It’s good to see the spread of free music. It’s another good sign after the failure of DRM.

SXSW 2009 on BitTorrent: 6 GB of Free Music | TorrentFreak

xkcd summarizes the problem with DRM: their lack of flexibility in time. And what happens when law makers don’t understand technology and follow Lobbyists.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Steal This Comic via kwout

Techdirt reports that Tent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails demonstrates creativity in the way he distributes his music. After releasing the last band album as free download, he’s offering to download for free an EP containing 5 tracks in MP3 DRM-Free format. Techdirt analyzes this tactic as a way to make the concert more valuable. [...]

Lifehacker blog published a very useful post, that lists the options available to protect privacy when using Bittorrent:

Use PeerGuardian IP-Blocking application: This is not a bullet proof solution, as people or organizations monitoring the network could use any IP address. Anyway it’s a first level of protection.
Use Tor or [...]

Wired published a very good introduction to Bittorrent. Everything that is important is packaged in this very short article:

Background introduction
Client softwares required: µTorrent (Windows) or Transmission (Mac)
Popular bittorrent tracker to find files: Mininova, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt
Basic Bittorrent jargon definition: .torrent file, seeders, Leechers, trackers
Advanced important topics: Selective download, Bandwidth control, port forwarding
Etiquette: Follow the Leech:seed [...]

Torrentfreak explains in this post why most music artists profit from piracy even if global CD sales decline:

25% most popular artists sell less records whereas the remaining 75% sell more
Music from most popular artist are available on p2p networks. It is easier for people to listen to those artist without buying their CD. Then they [...]

Slick published a interesting review of available practical solutions for online anonimity. I listed below the summary of the solutions, by usage type:

Web surfing: Tor  and Anonymizer. Tor uses a chain of onion router to transfer the data. Tor security is good but it’s rather slow. Anonymizer is a paid web surfing anonymizing program that routes [...]

Torrentfreak reports that The Corporation a documentary that received 20 awards at the Sundance film festival is available for download for free on bittorrent networks. The synopsis taken from film web site states:
THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, [...]

p2p blog reports that  Allofmp3 introduced a new offer called “Music for Masses“, allowing to download and listen their entire catalogue for free. The limits are:

You must register a user account
You download the songs encoded in a special format called mp3x at 128 kbs
You must use a special player to listen to the song
You must [...]

TorrentFreak published a review of Allpeers. Allpeers is a Firefox extension designed to share pictures, music and video within Firefox. There is also an interview of Matthew Gertner from Allpeers. Actually the sofware is a Beta but look promissing. In the current version, as reported, you can only share files with people in your buddy list [...]