ee fe 8 saiiindeaseaTi ent a Seo ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT File Sharing is Alive and Well Brady Ehler, Internet Pirate ~ Remember Napster? You know, the primitive centralized file sharing engine that distrib- uted MP3 data for anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet? I do. I remember waiting excitedly as my computer and its 56k modem downloaded one or even two songs at a steady 5 kilobytes per second. I remember how mischievously elated I felt as I listened to my slowly growing collection of random punk-rock MP3s. I remember feeling guilt for a little while, until I realized that the people I was downloading from all had more money then me. And besides I didn’t have the money to bay theit music any- way. I have éfjoyed free music, unburdened by a nagging conscience ever since. Through file sharing...you know, Lars was right, it’s not “file sharing,” it’s file duplication. Anyways, through file duplication, I have had the opportunity to expose myself to hun- dreds of artists that I never would have been exposed to otherwise, from rock to jazz to hip-hop. I have been given the opportunity to enrich my life with free music of distin- guished quality in a capitalist society, whose only meager /ega/ offering of free music comes in the form of pop-garbage, or 100 infinitely repeated rock classics sandwiched between annoying commercials. Sadly, Napster’s reign as a free source for MP3s ended in July of 2001, when it was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and found guilty of copyright infringement, and was ordered to pay $36 million in reparations. In order to pay the reparations, Napster converted to a legal subscription-based system. It’s still around today. Most of you probably know what happened to the state of popular file duplicating after Napster shut down, but for those of you who don’t, here is a quick recap. People continued to trade files on IRC, which was being done even before Napster, but most people download from one of the slew of Napster clones. The most popular of these Napster knock-offs was Kazaa. By the time I got savvy to Kazaa, my parents had gotten a cable modem, and a com- puter with a bigger hard drive. I was now able to download ten or more songs at once, and sometimes at speeds in excess of 1,000 kilobytes per second. If that wasn’t enough, I now had the ability to download other types of files: gifs, jpegs, and “gasp” even the odd mpeg. Unfortunately, the bulk of files were still MP3s, but this was fine for me. Unlike most of my peers, I never had a huge appetite for internet porn. Kazaa never really got shut down, not yet, anyway, (though it is now illegal to use it in Australia) but became increasingly full of advertisements and spyware, it also became the target for sev- eral lawsuits. Once individuals in the US started getting sued for file duplication, there was a sharp drop in available files. This was the greatest blow struck upon Kazaa and its peers. It marked the end of file duplication for many. It just wasn’t worth the hassle anymore, and for many people, this still holds. Not for me, Internet piracy has never been better for those who known where to go. The next generation of file sharing has arrived...actually it has been around since the downfall of Napster, but is just now becoming known to the masses. For those of you who have been living under a rock, the best way to download files these days is with Bit Torrent. Bit Torrent is a simple program (available for free at www.bittorrent.com), which allows clients to connect to one another through torrent files. Torrents are small files, (about 8kb) which connect the user to peers. The user then downloads fragments of the file they want from peers, while simultaneously uploading the information they have received. Since Bit Torrent is not a file-searching program itself, one must find a bit tor- rent tracker first. I know, I know, it sounds complicated, but it’s really not that bad. It takes about 30 seconds to download Bit Torrent itself, and there are some very good trackers out there. When I first discovered Bit Torrent, I thought I was going to soil myself; I could now download whole albums (or packs of albums). But it didn’t stop there; through torrent files, people had begun duplicating movies in earnest, as well as large software programs and games. I was especially happy to discover that I could download entire seasons of HBO series. But here is the best part: through Bit Torrent, (as with many P2P programs) you can start and stop your downloads anytime you want. If you decide to download with torrent files, remember to seed, (keep the torrent active, so you can upload the entire file after you’ve finished downloading) or the tracker will deign yours a low priority IP address, which means your downloads will be slow (don’t be a lecher). Well, now none of you have an excuse to be using those archaic file-sharing pro- grams like Morpheus or Kazza, except perhaps for want of a good tracker. Yep it’s an old story, the king in the land of P2P invariably gets knocked off the mountain, as was the case with www.supernova.org, the former lord of all torrent trackers, fortunately for us, there is always and new king to succeed the old one, and today the king is The Pirate Bay, (www.thepiratebay.org) which is based in Sweden, where it is perfectly legal to track torrents. Perhaps the second best tracker is Isohunt, (www.isohunt.com.). A slew or trackers vie for third place. Now that you’re wise to the cutting edge, go forth and down- load! Take advantage of free media while you can, because nothing this good lasts forev- er. For more info, check, out www.p2pforums.com PESe TO-PEER FILE-SHARING