Via ZeroPaid

Cambridge, England – CacheLogic, Ltd. – a world leader in Peer-to-Peer traffic management and network intelligence solutions – today published a market study of file formats traversing the Peer-to-Peer Networks that identifies the formats of choice for audio and video files among file traders. This first-ever, truly definitive study is based not on estimates, but on actual packet data and traffic levels analyzed at Tier-One ISPs (Internet Service Providers) worldwide.

Using the advanced Layer-7 technology found in both its Peer-to-Peer Management Solution and Deep Packet Inspection products, CacheLogic analyzed terabytes of data to discover a number of surprising new facts regarding Peer-to-Peer audio and video trading across the entirety of the Internet.

The results

- Overall Mix of P2P traffic by volume, across the 4 major P2P networks:
Audio: 11.34%
Video: 61.44%
Other: 27.22%
- Microsoft video formats represent 46% of aggregate worldwide P2P traffic

- 65% of all audio files by volume of traffic are still traded in the MP3 format, but a surprising 12.3% are in the open-source OGG file format (almost all of which are exclusively traded on the BitTorrent network, particularly in Asia - this last *really* caught me by surprise, as I did not believe OGG had anywhere near this kind of market penetration!)

- BitTorrent is increasingly being used for the distribution of legitimate content

CacheLogic will be releasing a number of new studies over the next few weeks and months, including its most detailed analysis of Peer-to- Peer, expanding on the acclaimed 2004 study that first put BitTorrent into the news mainstream by identifying it as the largest Peer-to- Peer network, displacing FastTrack and Gnutella.

“CacheLogic is committed to keeping ahead of the field in our understanding of the dynamics of Internet traffic and how these changes impact upon Service Providers. This allows us to develop market leading products that enable Service Providers to manage the effects on their cost base from this type of traffic,” said Andrew Parker, Chief Technical Officer, CacheLogic. “This study also allows us to showcase the impressive capabilities of the Layer 7 protocol recognition and packet analysis technologies used in our Peer-to-Peer Management Solution and network intelligence products.”

Company Background CacheLogic is a technology company that provides a suite of complementary products that deliver traffic management and network intelligence solutions to the Internet Service Provider and Telecommunications sectors. In January 2004 CacheLogic set up its analysis network to provide traffic analysis from within ISP networks across the Globe. The network ensures CacheLogic maintains leadership in understanding the changing nature of traffic across the Internet and, in particular, its impact upon Service Provider networks. Today through its proven track record, market-leading P2P management solution and its commitment to research and development, CacheLogic is considered the leading authority in its field. CacheLogic provides regular analysis and expert opinion to leading press and analyst organisations. Further information can be found at www.cachelogic.com

Via ZeroPaid
Despite the recent court victories by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and others against Grokster and the targeting of users who distribute music files, it seems the peer-to-peer (p2p) business is not about to give up without a fight yet.

A group of developers say they are on target to produce a system of anonymous file sharing by the end of the year. If true, this will severely limit the efforts of the authorities in their attempts to stamp out illegal file sharing by prosecuting offenders. Organisations like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America’s) and MPAA and our own BPI (British Phonographic Institution) rely on ISPs handing over the names of the file sharers.

The Freenet project aims to make p2p file sharing and communication more secure by making the parties involved in the communication totally anonymous. Freenet’s stated aim is to allow two or more people who wish to share information, to do so.

Via www.digitalmusicnews.com

Volume on peer-to-peer networks continued to increase for the month of July, according to monitoring firm BigChampagne. The latest monthly data shows an average simultaneous user base of nearly 9.5 million users globally, and 6.9 million in the US. The global figure represents a 6.8 percent jump over the previous month, and a 25.1 percent increase over monthly figures from one year ago. In the US, the year-over-year increase is more substantial, at 33.3 percent. Average simultaneous users provide the most accurate measure of P2P activity, with other measurements like total number of files often erroneous indicators of volume. The increase is notable during a summer month, a time when computer and internet usage often dips. According the BigChampagne figures from last year, overall simultaneous user totals remained level during the summer, part of a multi-month plateau that started in May and did not increase until September.

That could be a tough one to explain, though an increase in broadband connections may be keeping more people inside. That also appears to be powering an increase in paid music downloads, with total units now approaching 200 million in the US.

Via www.filesharingblog.com
Over the past 3 years I have watched the portable device community thrive, as more people engage in file sharing & distributed content networks, the greater the demand for portable playback.

At first you saw people buying CD’s so they can jam in the car, next you saw an explosion in home audio/video systems, you needed an awesome system to bump the tunes you just copped, and last, a high capacity portable media player to play the music wherever you are!

I purchased a JVC car stereo a few months back that came with an input jack on the front panel, allowing me to plug my MP3 player to the dash and listen to music stored on my PSP. O yea, you can virtually plug any device to this auxiliary input (just connect a audio cable from your headphone jack on your player). J So why waste media to listen to music? Today, I took my PSP with me to a client’s office where I jammed in the car, unplugged and ran inside, where 5 minutes later I was listening to the track I left off at. This is why portable technology is so hot.

PSP

The latest Play Station Portable firmware includes a web browser, which allows you to surf the web using your wireless internet connection. But just web browsing isn’t good enough for more users, there has been a growing number of PSP owners that demand more out of the PSP’s Wi-Fi capabilities. For instance, there is no way to reach a local computer to access files to be transferred to the Sony Duo memory stick, the media player in the PSP is rather simple and there is no way of creating play lists or advanced sorting features in the PSP.

PSP Streaming & P2P

Imagine that if you could access remote files using an advanced PSP media player, you could stream audio over the network to thousands of users at a computer convention, or Comic Con for example. Users could listen to different broadcasts or listen in on panel discussions; all while cruzing the convention center floor talking to vendors. The same idea could be used in the house.

By Dawn C. Chmielewski, Mercury News
Bram Cohen arrives in San Francisco’s Mission District, his hair disheveled, his face stubbled with a day’s growth of beard and his black BitTorrent T-shirt proclaiming him for what he is — the poster boy for a popular and disruptive Internet file-swapping technology.

Time was, guys like this would be found hunched over a computer keyboard in a distant Baltic republic, working anonymously for some offshore corporation.

But now that the Supreme Court has clarified the do’s and don’ts of file-sharing, the creator of BitTorrent — which allows video and other large files to be quickly downloaded — has no reason to hide. Indeed, Cohen, 29, recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, and he and his chief operating officer are making the rounds on Sand Hill Road looking for venture capital for their new company, BitTorrent. They’ve forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America.

BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology.
(more…)

By Scott Fulton
Austin (TX) - The heroic engineers at the Foundation for Decentralization Research — s the students in the Media Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin have come to be known — are well on their way to fulfilling their mission of building ACTLab TV to give individuals the means to become content channel providers.

The first demo streams–both audio+video and audio only–are being made available now through ACTLab’s servers. They’re relatively short, and may be slightly more entertaining than the rotating pictures of Felix the Cat that characterized the first demo TV broadcasts of the 1920s. Still, their main purpose is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Swarmcast, Onion Networks’ P2P stream downloading system. Unlike conventional P2P, which focuses on the transmission of files, Swarmcast enables the throughput of data streams, allowing videos and audiocasts to be seen and heard during the decentralized download process.

Today, as ACTLab’s director, Brandon Wiley told Tom’s Hardware Guide, his group is preparing to release the first draft of ACTLab’s radio station guide, which instructs individuals as to how they can acquire–without expense–the equipment and some of the content necessary for them to produce a recorded, fully-licensed Internet “broadcast.” “It’s a pretty good guide,” said Wiley, “not just because it tells the technical aspect of how to encode your stuff, but it talks about the various net labels and free content that’s out on the Internet, to find content for your station.” So-called “net labels” provide MP3s–some for free, to promote the others they sell commercially. Magnatune is one such net label that will be providing content for ACTLab TV, Wiley told us.
(more…)

By Paul Shread
A new Global Grid Forum paper examines ways to make grid computing and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications work together.

The paper, by Karan Bhatia of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Per Brand of Sweden’s SICS, Sergio Mendiola of Oracle Corp., Microsoft’s Alex Mallet and Karlo Berket of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was published to the grid standards group’s Document Series last month.

The paper, Peer-To-Peer Requirements On The Open Grid Services Architecture Framework, is the work of the grid forum’s OGSAP2P research group that looked at ways to use the open-source grid framework for P2P applications.

“As the next generation of grid computing protocols centered on Web services and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) are developed, the peer-to-peer community must determine how these protocols can be used for building peer-to-peer applications,” the authors wrote.
(more…)

Via ZeroPaid
Briefly buoyed by their Supreme Court victory on file sharing, Hollywood and the recording industry are on the verge of confronting more technically sophisticated opponents.

At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.
(more…)

Via www.limewire.com
In the face of rumors saying LimeWire is closing down, they are announcing the release of LimeWire 4.9:

New York (July 29, 2005) Lime Wire LLC (www.limewire.com), the leading designer and developer of advanced P2P software, announced today the release of LimeWire 4.9. This latest version of LimeWire continues Lime Wire’s tradition of leaving its competition lime-green with envy over LimeWire’s superior capabilities. Users will experience file-sharing in revolutionary new ways with these incredible new features and improvements:

Downloading:
In a nutshell, downloads just work better. They’re faster, they’re smarter, and they use fewer resources. LimeWire now has vastly improved support for large files due to a highly optimized swarming algorithm. As more users upgrade, downloads will continue to surpass lightning speed.

Sharing:
We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you don’t accidentally share files you didn’t mean to. LimeWire will now detect directories that are potentially “sensitive”, prompting the user to confirm that they really do want to share them. You can also now choose to share or not to share any individual file within any folder. Shared individual files can be found easily in a special “Individually Shared Files” folder in the LimeWire Library. All this, and we’ve still maintained LimeWire’s famous easy to use user interface.

Searching:
LimeWire now recognizes more types of licenses in the search results. Users are able to view and verify Creative Commons licenses, WeedShare files, and arbitrary licenses in WMA and WMV files. A new “Search More” submenu allows users to find similar results. And as if that wasn’t enough, you can now right-click on any search result and choose to ‘Download As’, saving the file to any location!

Network Messaging:
The entire messaging architecture has been redesigned and rearchitected to use less resources and less memory. Ultrapeers will notice a significant speed and memory improvement when connected to many hosts, with faster results and more hosts reached.

Please visit www.limewire.com for more information and to download LimeWire 4.9.

Via ZeroPaid
WASHINGTON–Congress remains reluctant to rewrite copyright law in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision on file-swapping–but Internet pornography on peer-to-peer networks is likely to be a legislative target this fall.

At a hearing convened Thursday by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said that she and a bipartisan group of senators were “very concerned” that peer-to-peer software makers were not taking “active steps” to stop copyright infringement by filtering pornography from minors using the software.

“If you don’t move to protect copyright, if you don’t move to protect our children, it’s not going to sit well,” Boxer said.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who chairs the committee, said he would be holding a hearing this fall geared toward illegal access to pornography through peer-to-peer software.

“We’re going to get specific about this, pornography over the Internet,” Stevens said. “People tell me we can’t do anything about it. I don’t believe that.”

Both Boxer and Stevens indicated that they would continue to seek legislation related to requiring filters on peer-to-peer software clients.

But Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, told the senators that any claim of a “technological magic bullet” to filter out illicit content “is simply false.”

Via ZeroPaid
As a professional computer programmer I get access to certain resources before most others. In this case it would be Microsoft™ Windows™ Vista™ aka “Longhorn”. Vista™ Beta 1 was released yesterday to MSDN subscribers in the form of a 2.42 GB iso image. I started downloading around 2PM EST, started installing by 6PM, poked around and got comfortable with it till about 8PM then started a series of tests that lasted a total of 4 hours, until 12:00PM EST. What were these tests I was going to perform? Well I wanted to see; as a computer programmer, how various P2P applications held up on this new operating system. I picked by network as well as the programming language they were written in. In my 7 tests I have covered the following P2P networks:Gnutella, OpenFT, Ares, Edonkey2k/Overnet, eXeem, BitTorrent, and FastTrack(well not really, see results) and the following programming languages/runtimes: Java, C, C++, Delphi, Python, QT/C++, Visual Basic, Boost libraries and MFC/C++. In the end I am exhausted but this experiment was well worth the knowledge of what Vista™ has to offer. The following are the results in no particular order. I have listed the programming language, installation notes, top speed seen in KB/s, any runtime issues experienced and the pros and cons of the entire test for that client.
(more…)

By David Utter

The creator of the large-file sharing utility has moved from Seattle to San Francisco, hired a COO, and will try to beat Microsoft to the legal P2P movie sharing market. The Mercury News has reported that Bram Cohen, creator of the popular file-sharing BitTorrent technology, wants to take his company into the mainstream.

He and COO Ashwin Navin visited Burbank, California, for what the article describes as “high-level” talks with the Motion Picture Association of America. Considering that some BitTorrent users have indulged in sharing movies online, many in the tech world will be surprised that the MPAA received their visitors with courtesy instead of with a hail of automatic weapons fire.
(more…)

Via donga.com
Controversy surrounding P2P (peer-to-peer) music exchange internet services and their related companies is heating up.

A total of 68 record companies charged some 3,000 netizens who distributed or shared music files through online user blogs to the supreme prosecutor뭩 office through the copyright protecting agency 밡oFree on July 29.

Prior to this accusation, the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers (KAPP) submitted a plea for cessation of service to a court in December 2004 regarding the top Korean P2P service 밪oribada.

In response, operator of Soribada, Yang Jung-hwan, held a press conference on August 1 at the Korea Press Center located in Jung-gu, Seoul, and claimed, 밒n a situation where voluminous e-mail services handling over 100MB are being sustained, netizens will find other ways to share music files even with Soribada out of the market, and expressed plans for the service to continue.

Yang added, 밠usic companies should not insist that we all buy CDs regardless of the development of technology, but strike a deal with record producers and internet services instead, like charging fees for MP3 files.

Soribada revealed that a total of 4,800,000 songs had been sold through Soribada from December 2004 to June 2005.

A source at KAPP, however, said, 밪oribada뭩 claim that they are not setting up copyright breaches is shying away from responsibility and will result in hundreds of netizens becoming law violators.

Regarding this affair, a committee member of the copyrights department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Chae Myeong-gi, admitted, 밇ven if Soribada wins in court, it will be difficult to discharge netizens who post the illegal files

BitTorrent gears up for online distribution of large files such as movies and games
By Dawn C. Chmielewski Mercury News
Bram Cohen arrives in San Francisco’s Mission District, his hair disheveled, his face stubbled with a day’s growth of beard and his black BitTorrent T-shirt proclaiming him for what he is — the poster boy for a popular and disruptive Internet file-swapping technology.

Time was, guys like this would be found hunched over a computer keyboard in a distant Baltic republic, working anonymously for some offshore corporation.

But now that the Supreme Court has clarified the do’s and don’ts of file-sharing, the creator of BitTorrent — which allows video and other large files to be quickly downloaded — has no reason to hide. Indeed, Cohen, 29, recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, and he and his chief operating officer are making the rounds on Sand Hill Road looking for venture capital for their new company, BitTorrent. They’ve forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America.

BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology.
(more…)

Via p2pnet.net
Music fans who “break piracy laws” are actually “highly valuable customers”.
That’s one of the not at all surprising findings from a UK study.

Another is that music lovers would rather get their fixes from dedicated music players then mp3-empowered mobile phones.

People who illegally’ share music online are also big spenders on ‘legal’ downloads, says UK digital music research firm The Leading Question, as quoted by the BBC. Therefore, “Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives,” says the report, which says file sharers, “spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans”.
(more…)