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.

nin.com [download]- lights in the sky via kwout

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 SSH Proxy to hide P2P communication: This solution works only with public trackers. Admins of private trackers usually bans users with such configurations as a user is identified by its IP address and with Tor the IP address changes all the time and is not the true user IP address.
• Use BTGuard: It’s a proxy hosted in Canada. You just have to configure your bittorrent client to route all the communication to this proxy. This service costs about $7/month.

Feature: Protect Your Privacy When Downloading via kwout

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, Privacy, Download, Proxy, Security

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 1:1 ratio
• Privacy:  Use PeerGuardian2 to block blacklisted IP address

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 have more money to buy CD of less popular artist.
• Social service like Last.fm and Pandora allow to discover less popular artist.

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 one’s data via an encrypted SSL chanel.
• Access unsecure computers: Sandboxie and  “Live” Linux distributions. Sandboxie is a virtual sandbox. Data flows in both directions between programs and the sandbox. During read operations, data may flow from the hard disk into the sandbox. But data never flows back from the sandbox into the hard disk. The lived Linux distributions offers the same kind of security: Nothing is written on the host disk.
• Anonymous p2p:  Ants and Mute. The communication between peers is secure with those applications but they are much slower than open p2p applications. Another hybrid solution is Azureus (the bittorrent client) on top of the i2p network.  

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, illuminates the corporation’s grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a “person” to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics – including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

The download link is below:

Download The Corporation Filmmakers’ Official Download Edition (1.76GB)

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 have an internet connection to listen to the song

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 (friends and family). But in the future the extension will include a full featured Bittorrent client. You might register here to be notified of the public release. In the meantime, you may download the Beta here.