Archive for December, 2004

New Years Eve Today! NZ will be the first (along with the little pacific islands to travel into 2005). Happy New Year.

But there is bigger and better news (from Neowin.net):

SuprNova

The evening of the 30th of December, Sloncek (the Suprnova Admin), made an announcement that the Suprnova team (along with another currently unknown partner) are creating a p2p based application based on a modification of the BitTorrent protocol called eXeem. Sloncek has said that the company backing the project would remain anonymous for the present time. The announcement was made on Novastream, a radio station loosely affiliated to Suprnova.

He described eXeem as a file sharing program – “Kazaa and bit-torrent altogether”. eXeem uses a modified version of the bit-torrent protocol. The program is still in beta testing, and will be available for public beta in the coming weeks. The program will be separate from Suprnova on eXeem.com (not currently online). Sloncek conceded that eXeem, although offered for free, will come with some adverts to help pay development costs.

eXeem will allow users to rate and add comments to files. This system is an attempt to pre-empt the system being flooded with poor quality/fake files, something that plagues tradition p2p networks like Kazaa. He said that users would be able to tell if files were of poor quality or fakes, and consequentially be able to weed out poor torrents from the system. He announced there were no current plans for the suprnova.org website. Interestingly, the administrator failed to comment on the use of the network for pirated and illegal software, and made no comment as to how, if at all, the system would prevent users from sharing pirated software and media.

LokiTorrent

In other news, bit-torrent hub LokiTorrent has announced that it will not bow to MPAA / Legal pressure to close. The MPAA launched a series of legal actions against ‘Jon Doe’ defendants running bit-torrent hubs before Christmas. The theory goes that in shutting down the centres of piracy (the hubs) it cuts out the ability for users to easily access pirated material. Although clear statistics are not known, the furore and size of donations made to LokiTorrent would suggest that removing the hubs has done serious damage to piracy.

LokiTorrent has launched a p2p-defence fund to help in a future case against MPAA lawyers; they’ve currently raised an incredible ~$17,000 out of a targeted $30,000. Click read more to check out the Interview with one of the LokiTorrent administrators to see whats happening with their future plans.

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First, the obvious : why are you doing this?

There are many reasons why I am doing this, but the primary reason is that I run a completely legal website that the MPAA or anyone else has no right to force me to close. In just the past few weeks, the MPAA has forced the shutdown of many other bittorrent sites which were setup to do nothing more than allow people to share what they wished. It will be a dark day when we roll over to let organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA make our freedom of speech laws for us. I’m sure you have heard of the bill the RIAA is currently trying to pass here in the US making ALL reproduction and recording devices illegal? If that bill passes, even our telephone answering machines will be considered illegal. As I cannot lobby government to prevent such self-serving bills from passing, I will fight the battles I am able to. When I was given this lawsuit, I simply made a conscience decision that if it has already gone this far, it is time I took action to stop it for myself. The astounding support from the community is simply reinforcement of my position.

Do you think that piracy is acceptable?

Piracy is a byproduct of peer sharing. When peer-to-peer software is being written, there aren’t 10 developers wringing their hands together over how much software and music people can steal from those who make a living selling it. Peer sharing is used to allow people who don’t have the financial funding of the MPAA and RIAA to share there works, for free, to a worldwide audience without the massive costs of bandwidth punishing them for being popular.

The MPAA are a massive organization with large backing for funds; do you think you can stand up to them where so many sites (like suprnova) have fallen by the way-side?

You can be as frightening as you wish, make all the threat you want, but in the end an invalid argument is just as invalid. We run a legal site for use by those who wish to share their own creative works, and as much as I realize the MPAA is a huge organization with deep pockets, I have the law, common sense and millions of people behind me.

Looking forward- what is your legal road ahead?

I can’t say I have much of a legal road ahead. Yes, I don’t doubt there are people who abuse the policies of peer-sharing sites such as mine by sharing illegal files, but suing me is tantamount to suing the highway department for drug smugglers using their roads. And like the highway system, the benefits of such a system unmistakably outweigh the side-effects.

Have you received any sizable donations so far?

I have received a few donations from average people that are most likely giving 1/2 of their weekly paycheck, so yes, I have. These are not large amounts of money, as legal council is very expensive, but it clearly shows the peer-sharing community is behind us 100% and is willing to invest a little to save a lot.
Lowkee

Dang, NZ is somewhat extremely boring.

We even tried to get a flight back earlier but failed

Currently, were in Queenstown (supposedly the adventure capitol of NZ) but goddamn its still incredibly boring. Tomorrow we head to the jetboats aka “overshoot” and then we head over to Tean Au (sp?) and Milford Sound. THEN can we finally head back to Christchurch.

31st is tomorrow…New Years Eve yay! but unfortnuatly I don’t think I’ll be doing too much

Happy New Year people, if I can’t grab access to the internet before then.

There ain’t been much tech news lately due to holidays. The only things that have caught my eye are:

-A v6 revision to the 9800Pro to XT mod
-Bink makes a list of what to expect from Microsoft in 2005

Enough for now.
-DJ

Finally, I have found internet once again. Also I lost mobile reception while I was over at Fox Glacier

In recent days we took a helicopter ride up around to Fox Glacier and to the top of Mt. Cook. Views were somewhat spectacular and for the first time I touched snow, because we were able to land on a flat patch on the mountain.

Otherwise, not much has actually happened, we seem to be mostly driving around place to place. There ain’t much at Wanaka but its a little town with a small city, were only here overnight until we head over to Queenstown tomorrow.

In Tech News:

Warp2Search have news (link to some other place) for an AMD FX-55 OCed to 3.17GHz with a Vapochill LS. They achieve 10771 3DMark 05 and 22948 3DMark 03, which is pretty amazing.

WinRAR 3.42 has gone final and Adobe Acrobat 7 Profressional is out now.

Anywho, enough blog for now.
-DJ

Overseas once again…

Arrived yesterday around 3pm in Christchruch, however I was damn tired so I slept from around 4pm till 8am the next day. Next day we headed off to the west coast for an overnight then down the coast to the glaciers.

So far, pretty boring but I was able to score this free 6.2Mbps ADSL, so that’ll do for now

Not much news on the tech side because of XMas, but…TorrentBits will return. TorrentSyndrome (www.torrentsyndrome.com) says:

For those of you wondering about uploads being disabled, we are currently working on merging with the NEW torrentbits site being brought up from some of the admins of the old torrentbits that closed down. The new site will be, www.xtorrentbits.org , it is currently inactive as of right now, but the servers are being established and prepared for loads, all members of torrentsyndrome will be transferred so if your not yet a member you better register now, beause the new torrentbits site will have a max of 40,000 users from what im being told.
also: they are looking for release groups or independent releasers.

So anyway, enough blog, more news checking.

Its 4 AM and I’m heading off soon…(to New Zealand)

I will be taking my laptop, and supposedly there are some places with internet over there in the places were staying in so hopefully I can keep up-to-date.

If not, Ill be back on January 5th 2005.

Cyas.
-DJ

The Inquirer has some information about the upcoming ATi Video Card core

“Our well informed Spanish lady nicknamed Informationa Digitala told us that ATI’s next generation chip codenamed R520 is taped out. She confirmed that the chip is 90 nanometres. As far as we know it works well, but it’s early days yet.

Nvidia changed its plans to compete with the Fudo R520, indicating that the R520 chip is definitely going to be a good one. ATI still have to live with the fear that the new Nvidia chip might be better.

We have to add that R520 will finally include 32 bit colour precision. Saying that R520 is Shader Model 3.0+ compatible naturally means that this chip actually uses 128 bit colour. Nvidia’s NV40 generation supports 32 bit colour per channel (red green nlue and alpha) and so will the R520. That’s a Shader Model 3.0 requirement.”

I just got invited to Microsoft’s Wallop “alpha”. Thanks to b0m8er.

Wallop is way of connecting friends, family and collegues into a network of people. Allowing people to share comments, thaughts, blog posts, pictures and music (Probally a lot more!)

Heres a screenshot: Link

Creamhackered from Neowin holds an interesting picture of http://winweb (inside the MS internal network) in his Wallop Blog.

Link

Thats right folks…

eXeem BETA 0.16 has leaked to the web, with a nice new user interface. It just shows that the Suprnova team ARE working on eXeem.

I will post a link up for it soon.

As I said – heres the link: (Unfortunatly I have no serial, so you can’t really use it ).

http://digitaldj.net/rrtn/eXeem BETA 0.16.zip

-DJ

NewTorrents.info have just put up an interview with Sloncek about Suprnova which was aired on SuprnovaRadio.

Download the Torrent (33MB, 45 Mins)

Winamp, the player we all love has been updated to v5.08

Latest Changes:
- Created new eMusic bundles

Lite | Full | Pro

Counter Strike: Source and Half Life 2 also get a small update:

Half-Life 2
- Fixed sound stuttering problems caused by thread contention in sound system

Counter-Strike: Source
- Fixed missing models when running the Video Stress Test

Restart Steam to get this update.