The ISPs in question, those that are better avoided like the plague from now on are: BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse. I really do not care as much for the reason why they signed the agreement as to that they did sign it at all. The Register thinks that they agreed to the “voluntary” code to avoid or even mute further legislation of the matter which might have forced them to invest in monitoring and storage equipment.

There is no word on punishment yet but it is interesting that the ISPs, Ofcom and the music industry have a few month to agree on a punishment. And I thought it would be the law that would determine the punishment, boy was I wrong.

The Music Industry is favoring the three strikes and you are out punishment which means that if your name, sorry IP, turns up three times you will be kicked out of your contract with the broadband company. No word yet on how they are going to manage false positives and identify offenders in first place and if the user has the right to appeal against the offending letter.

One of the Internet Service Providers (TalkTalk) published a FAQ already on their website that is answering some of the most pressing questions that their customers might have.

It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds.

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Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

The interesting question will be how they will pick the customers that will receive the warnings. Will they actively monitor P2P networks, will they only react when the BPI sends them a list, will they verify those lists ? What about false positives ? Someone who is download music from Jamendo using the Bittorrent protocol. Will he receive a warning as well ? What about secure Usenet connections ? IRC, FTP, file hosts. How the hell will they be able to determine that a file that is being transferred is indeed a copyright violation ? Filenames alone are without doubt not the safest way of determining that. So, how will they do that ?

My second assumption would be that Virgin Media could have some ties with the BPI or a company that is a member of the BPI. I really do not have enough time to research this so if anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

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Today, downloading has changed radically. There are innumerable peer-to-peer applications to transfer files. In addition, you can now download not only music but movies, TV shows, games, software, etc. On the downside, downloading has pretty much divided the online world into two camps: those who think it’s stealing and those who think it’s alright to download files.

I’m kind of on the fence with this subject. When you download something, you are not paying for it so technically, it is stealing. On the other hand, there are some situations where I don’t fault people for downloading. Let me list two of them. If I live in a country where the latest season of my favorite show is aired a year after it is aired in its home country. A second one is if a movie, music album or TV show I really want to watch is not being released where I live and will not be available even to purchase.

So my question is this. How do you feel about the downloading scenario? Do you think it is okay to download files under some conditions? What alternatives do you have to downloads?

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Files and Folders that you want to share can be simply added in the Gigatribe software with some additional features that are offered in the premium version. Gigatribe supports file resumes and a graphical presentation of which files are currently and have been transferred in the session.

Gigatribe offers chat functionality which runs over the secure connection as well. It is possible to send public or private messages and select the users that you want to chat with. You invite users to your network by searching for their username in the Gigatribe network, or by using sending them an email invitation through the same invite function. Only users invited this way will be able to join your network. And just the same, you can also accept or decline invitations from other GigaTribe users.

The Gigatribe software can be installed in a LAN as well as long as the computers in the network have their own IP address and own TCP ports.

The developers came up with an interesting solution to firewall and router configuration problems. Instead of fiddling around with router configurations you simply use the Easy Connect service which routes incoming traffic through the Gigatribe servers. Easy Connect is free for the 30 days and costs $17.99 per year if you want to continue using it. Well worth it in my opinion compared to all the testing and stress of making that damn router / firewall work with it. (It did work out of the box on my computer though which means I was able to connect without Easy Connect.)

Users with problems, connection wise or other difficulties, can email support directly who are very responsive and up to the point in their answers or use the forum to get help from other users and moderators.

The standard version of Gigatribe is free to use but has some limitations. The Premium version makes use of user groups (home, work for example) who have access to specific files. The standard version supports user groups as well but makes use of them only in the chat.

The premium version supports password protected files, choosing an authorization level (read only, read and write, all file operations) for your files and multi-source downloads if the file is available from other contacts as well.

A really nice feature is also limited to Premium users. You can access all of your shared files through a web interface and download them even if you do not have the Gigatribe software installed on this computer.

The offer has been completed. 27 users have received a free premium upgrade from the nice guys at Gigatribe. I suggest you take a look at the free version of Gigatribe and decided if you want to purchase the Premium version as well. It does has some advantages as outlined above and costs only $24.95 for a lifetime license.

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I would like to know if the affiliation is a concern to you ? Do you refuse to use uTorrent because of it or is it fine for now ? Every use who is downloading the beta client now should be aware that this is a beta version which could lead to some nasty problems. If you are inexperienced I suggest you keep on using the stable client for now and switch to the new version once a stable version will be released.

I have written an article that detailed some possible uTorrent alternatives. If you do not like to use uTorrent anymore you could take a look there and test the alternative bittorrent clients mentioned there.

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They offer a site search where you can search the site for images and videos (adult content optional). I don´t know if your uploaded files are automatically added to their site search or if you have to enable it seperately.

Nevertheless the site search yields some nice results, try it out and head to badongo.com

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According to the German news portal Heise the files will be DRM protected and a centralized licensing-system will ensure that no copyright violations occur.

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