Evan-- have you seen Vista’s defragmenter? It’s even more minimalistic than the one in XP, it provides nothing other than a spinning circle to indicate progress!
Torrent is my favorite BitTorrent client as well.
There’s only one thing that annoys the hell out of me : the ETA.
Estimated Time of Arrival is a point in time not a duration.
If you need a duration it should be ETE : Estimated Time En route.
Hey Now Jeff,
I’ve never tried uTorrent only BitComet Azureus. Since it’s what you recommend, I’m looking forward to trying it. Everyone sure does love bitTorrent.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
"What’s a poor, law-abiding citizen of the United States of America to do?
BitTorrent to the rescue. I was able to locate a torrent of all the Boomtown episodes, and I’m downloading it now."
Um, those two statements are mutually exclusive. As Xepol, above, noted, you might not want to admit things like this in a blog.
Wow dude, repeating what the other guy said… you’re blogging about committing a Federal crime and unlike say the rest of us, wouldn’t your status as a A/B list blogger make you even more likely to be sued by the MPAA?
I really like the majority of what you blog about, so maybe could you fuzz out the images a little and say your using uTorrent to download, say Ubuntu or gparted?
Also, I don’t think that your peers (screenshot #3) appreciate that you made a static snapshot of their illegal download/upload activity and distributed said activity to the public via this blog.
Did you get their consent beforehand?
I think the Wikipedia link you meant is this one:
I have to agree with the people above. CodingHorror is a pretty popular blog, and this constitutes a crime, AFAIK. I remember you made a similar post about the Torrent WebUI ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000815.html ) which showed you were downloading episodes of Rome and The Chronicles of Riddick. It might be a good idea to just have some Linux ISO’s in your screenshots or something.
Why in God’s name do you get sued for downloading something that could have been recorded off the airwaves with a capture card, for free? There’s little chance he’ll be sued, although it’s copyright infringement. All this post proves is that there’s something wrong with the way TV stations work.
And another thing Xepol, specifically, what do you think uTorrent was used for before it was bought by BitTorrent?
for all the people worrying about the legality of Jeffs post and the details. It’s not like the powers that be, couldn’t do the same thing to get seed peoples information from their own bittorrent downloads.
Take off the tin foil hat. They don’t want to go after someone downloading a trashed, canceled show episode. They want the people that have this weeks movies releases, AND 2000+ songs available to anyone.
Why in God’s name do you get sued for downloading something that could have been recorded off the airwaves with a capture card, for free?
That’s obvious. Home taping is killing music, downloading is killing TV.
Stick it to the man Jeff!
If you need shelter from the feds, rent a ship in the Swedish archipelago, aka the pirate bay. 
I used to use Azureus, but with version 3 included so much crap so I went for uTorrent instead. I do miss the various plugins tough…
Welcome to the RIAA, MPAA the rest of the MafiAA’s hate list.
Great article, but please censor the net addresses of the rest of your peers in that torrent!
Jeff, you should check out Azureus’ “Swarm” view, aka The Big Eye. That’s my favorite visualization of the state of the torrent.
Correction for a couple of folks: Torrenting copyrighted material is not a “federal crime”. It’s not even a crime. It is, however, prosecutable in civil court.
Rob Janssen:
That’s obvious. Home taping is killing music, downloading is killing TV.
That is a separate debate… and you are wrong.
Hey, maybe bloggig about crimes isnt such a good idea, we wont blame you if you change some words around to make it a third person type of story. “a buddy of mine…” and just hope that all the caches were purged within a reasonable timeframe…
At the same time, i have to agree, torrent is great, when i used to get linux distributions and other open source software via torrents, i was an Azureus user. The moment i found out about torrent, instantly switched, and boy, did it teach me some lessons. I replaced a lot of my software with less bloaty things in the following months and extended life of quite a few of my machines. Also the simplicity and design quality are something all software designers should aspire to.
Very brave to post this on a public blog
Btw, you posted an image with IP numbers of fellow partners in crime. You might want to blurr these.
Does anyone else see the irony that just last week Jeff was decrying the evils of YouTube (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000972.html) and now he’s proud he could find a TV show in breach of copyright using BitTorrent?
I think people are missing the point in the “What’s a poor, law-abiding citizen of the United States of America to do? BitTorrent to the rescue.” sentence.
The point is, there is no “legal” way to get that episode. But, with Bittorrent:
- You can get pretty much any episode you like, of any show made ever made (almost).
- There’s no annoying, unnecessary warnings along the line of “You were not allow to have downloaded this DVD over the internet, by the way… Even though the downloaded copies don’t have these warnings, so only the legal-owners of this disc will ever see this…”
- No unskippable company-logos/copyright notices you’ve seen hundereds of times and have never read.
- With something like a modified Xbox, one of those Media Extender devices, or a Windows Media Center or MythTV box, or a Mac Mini/Front Row - you can watch any episode you want without finding and changing discs, on your normal TV (Espically easy with LCD/Plamsa, which have VGA or DVI ports)
- You can easily make backups (Something that is basically illegal with DVDs…), and if you do lose it, just download it again. Not like with DVDs, where you need to break the law to back them up. Or buy the entire thing again, just because of that small scratch…
Seriously, aside from a legal-aspect, the “piracy” way of watching films is FAR superior for consumers, in every way. You get the material as soon as it’s released. You can watch it on any device you want (desktop, laptop, phone, MP3 players like the iPod), as many times as you like. You have far more freedom with the content (to back it up. Or to recompress it for a portable device)
As for the Author getting sued for posting screenshots of him downloading this TV show - It will never happen. The chances of any anti-piracy organization caring enough even if they do see this post is about zero. The fact the show was canceled, and the DVD was never created, reduces the chances of that even more… And the chances of anyone being sued on the basis of a few screenshots is fairly ridiculous.
/fairly rambling post
- Ben
@ drukus : I should use the sarcasm tags ;).
On the other hand, the dropping incomes from commercials cause more and more blatant product placement, so one could argue that it’d be possible that the quality of the series suffers because of it.