I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled “Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites” which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.

Peter Anaman, a senior internet investigator for legal firm Covington and Burling has admitted that his organisation has infiltrated unnamed private BitTorrent tracker sites and shares their method of gaining access; Anaman added, “Once you’re in, you never take action. You just listen�

continue reading "Private Torrent Sites are being infiltrated"

Giganews (aff) which is in my opinion the best Usenet provider on the planet did it once again and upgraded their storage capacities to increase the retention of the Usenet files to 120 days. If you compare that to the retention level of other Usenet providers who sometimes offer a binary retention of 5-7 days you know the difference. If you never heard about the Usenet before let me give you a rough understanding of what it actually is.

A Usenet provider like Giganews gives you access to the Usenet which is basically a discussion platform where users can also post binaries. The binaries make the Usenet so attractive to everyone who feels that P2P is not safe anymore. Giganews offers SSL encryption which means that your Internet Service Provider does not know what you are exchanging with Giganews. If you want to get an impression of what the Usenet generally has to offer you might want to take a look at Newzbin and Binsearch. Those two sites are Usenet indexing sites that have records on many files that get posted day in day out on the Usenet.

continue reading "Giganews updates storage and offers 120 days retention"

The Tunecore online service offers an incredible opportunity for everyone who is creating music. You can use Tunecore to upload your music to their site and publish it at well known online music stores such as Apple iTunes, eMusic, Sony Connect or Rhapsody. It is possible to upload single songs, albums, cover art and everything else that is related to the music. Tunecore gets non exclusive rights to submit the songs and albums to the stores that you selected and to collect the money from the music sales earnings. They have no other rights on the songs such as merchandise rights or master recording copyrights.

You are probably asking how Tunecore is making any money with their service ? This is easy to answer, Tunecore charges fees for certain actions. You do pay a $0.99 per song per album delivery charge and $0.99 a per store/service per album delivery fee. Both are one time fees. There is furthermore a annual $9.98 per album maintenance and service fee. So you can expect to pay $20-$30 for an album in the first year and $10 for all the other years after the first. Not that much if you consider the possibilities.

continue reading "Selling music on iTunes"

Many novice users use the software that comes preinstalled with their purchased computer and rely on these to be safe from the dangers that lurk on every corner in the Internet. Trojans, Malware, Spyware, Phishing and worse are threats that every user should know about and be able to deal with. It is pretty easy to detail my security concept, it is not the most secure on earth but even those are not secure at all. If you want security do not connect to the Internet at all, that is my advise.

Let me explain my security concept and ask some questions about yours afterwards. The most important part in my security concept is my knowledge. I know what I should do and what I should not do on the Internet. I know how phishing emails look like, I know when I should be doubtful of files that I want to execute and I do know how to select passwords that can not be bruteforced in a short period of time.

continue reading "What is your Security Concept ?"

My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.

If you are looking for high rated TV shows like Lost, 24 or Prison Break you’ve come to the wrong place. I was fortunate enough to get a temporary invite for Zattoo which is live TV on your computer. This is a different and probably the better working method for now to stream TV content over the Internet. Zattoo is a European company which already has more than 300000 subscribers to their service and will soon become available in many European countries including Germany, Great Britain and France.

continue reading "Say Goodbye to Joost and Bablegum, here comes Zattoo"