Hey Jeff, if you like boomtown, I highly recommend you check out “Deadwood” if you haven’t seen it already. It’s a great series. Only ran for 2 seasons but all episodes are available to rent, probably on netflix.
If I were you I would remove this post immediately.
Oy, I don’t like seeing all that useless info in my face. Just tell me how fast it’s going, how much progress has been made, and when it will be finished. I use Transmission.
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 don’t think he was blasting YouTube as much about it was ignoring copyright as he was commenting about how they are profiting from copyright infringement.
Moving on: I love uTorrent as my client of choice, and have been pushing it to my friends and family. However, what’s been really annoying me for the past 2 years now has been the fact that all BT clients have all been coded to work in single user environments. However, now that we live in the day of house LANs, with 2 or 3 (or more computers), with each user wanting BT access at the same time. Having 3 clients all siting behind a router, running at the same time is a bad idea. It’ll either leave your outbound pipe underutilized, or over utilized. Plus, by default, you must always have someone logged in to run these clients.
Why hasn’t anyone developed a client/server BT app yet. One where the BT protocol is running on a central server, managing the torrents of several users, running as a service/daemon not requiring anyone logged in. Then the users have their own client that they can access the server with, and get a full featured experience.
I know you can use srvany.exe and the WebUI to get a pseudo experience, but I like my full statistical information.
Honestly man, blur out people’s IP addresses.
I use BitTorrent as a testing ground for something i want to purchase… Spending $20 to get the latest CD from a band only to find out there is 1 good song and 10-13 fillers is a terrible thing… So, I will DL the cd and if I like it, go to iTunes and purchase the CD for $10… If i don’t like it, I will go to iTunes and buy the one song for $0.99.
Everybody wins. I don’t feel raped by the record label and develop a bad taste for the artist, and they get their money in the end. I am sure Jeff will rent Season 2 of Boomtown when it’s available…
Did you get their consent beforehand?
Honestly man, blur out people’s IP addresses.
If they didn’t want their IP addresses known, then shouldn’t be participating in a P2P swarm. I think it’s the best part of the article.
Privacy is one thing, but when you head out to the local GlobalMart, expect people to take notice.
How’s this for fitting,
After I closed the tab for this article I had one for a daily meditation open:
Buddha: If you do not tend to one another then who is there to tend to you? …
The rest didn’t fit in with the article… but this part made me go ha!
@ Xepol:
"There is another lesson to be learned from uTorrent. You can start a trend with a good idea and lousy software and eventually BUY your way to quality. I don’t think anyone can argue that Bram’s python client was lousy - it did the job, almost, but there were variants available immediately to address shortcomings and the original bit torrent client continually changed with features coming and going version by version (stability in features was part of the reason to use anything BUT the original author’s version).
“Fortunately, Bram was recently able to buy uTorrent, and in doing so stepped from a quality idea to a quality implementation. I sincerely hope that this does not become a lesson about how to destroy great software.”
No, I’d say this is a lesson about how to use Free Software (i.e. open-source) to make your project succeed.
Charles Petzold hates you now, Jeff. He really does.
If the episodes were never released on DVD and not shown on tele. Is it still illegal to download 
Can I ask if the dreaded “Event 4226” an issue with this client? ( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/transform.aspx?ProdName=Windows%20Operating%20SystemProdVer=5.2EvtID=4226EvtSrc=TcpipLCID=1033 )
Still an issue. All I could find were shady kernel patches to get around it.
iAs 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./i
I agree. You are not even factoring in the blowback associated with the bad PR of them trying to. The essence of this post is talking about how great of a show it was. It makes me want to watch it now.
Legal issues aside, I want to pick on your comment relating to disk caching. On the write side of things, the fastest I’ve ever had a set of torrents go is at around 1MB/sec, and I’m sure all the other disk activity I was doing at the time easily dwarfed that figure. On the read side of things, usually you’d be sending blocks non-sequentially anyway, depending on your peer’s request, and also at a far slower rate. I hardly think having an optimized disk would make any difference at all.
The music industry don’t seem too bothered about getting bad PR.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7029229.stm
24 songs shared, fined $222,000. The punishment doen’t exactly match the crime but I’d imagine the TV industry may well decide to work along the same lines. This post could give them a pretty good prosecution case I reckon (although IANAL)
I think there’s at least one other thing we can learn from uTorrent. Guess what language it is written in?
Blurring IPs, hiding data. Oh please. Do you really think the RIAA can’t get a copy of [insert favorite torrent client here] and get exactly the same information posted on this blog?
They know what’s out there. There is absolutely, totally nothing that’s news to any of the frantic ranters at the RIAA/MPAA mafia.
Honestly though, they are not a large risk, and they are as doomed as dinosaurs. The internet will eventually choke off their air supply. Money itself will put an end to their censorship nonsense more effectively than any legislation.
I have to side with Charles Petzold on this one (though I’m no fan of how the industry operates). I just dont think this is right at all. But I’m guessing I’m probably the minority opinion here 
/me is another uTorrent fan
The greatest thing (imho) about uTorrent is that the program is entirely portable.
Well, about this being a crime – I am no lawyer, but I believe that equating ____ piracy and stealing is not accurate. Here’s why: when you steal X, then not only do you now have X, but whoever you stole it from does not. Piracy, then is only half as bad in that you now have (a copy of) X, but the only thing you have done is hindered the right of the copyright holder to make money from selling it.
Now, by similar reasoning, it would seem that DISSEMINATING copyrighted material is as bad as N x (stealing/2), where N is the number of people that you disseminated the copies to. That’s the amount of hurt you dealt to the copyright holder (who may be a millionaire, a starving artist, or a corporation with lots of mouths to feed).
Of course, the content markets are changing. Look at music. When I was growing up, it was super-lucrative to release an album. Now, artists are moving more toward live concerts, because of developments like the iPod and YouTube. But guess what, things like the iPod are great for making people impulsively buy songs, and with DRM may be bringing in a lot more money than and overall than CDs, and with more convenience o the user. Similarly, small clips on YouTube entice many people watch TV shows and movies and a lot of them would probably qualify as fair use.
All I can say is, the landscape is changing. I don’t think going after ostensibly upright, honest citizens like Jeff who spend hundreds (if not more) of dollars each year on media, when they download an unavailable episode, is in the RIAA’s best interests. Doesn’t mean they won’t do it, but that’s my opinion. The RIAA should focus its attention on bigger things. And why aren’t we indignant about all the lobbying going on in congress by companies with lots of money to extend the copyright to a ridiculous amount of time (vs. say patents) ?
All I can say is
www.dontdownloadthissong.com
Greg