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Feb. 11th, 2005 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickWired has a story on Firefox, which is damn nice of them. However, regular readers of thishyar LJ are aware of Firefox and have been since mid-October. Now would be a good time to see what we may see. Has there really been an explosion? Return with us now to those thrilling days of Yesteryear...
Well, that was kind of interesting, wasn't it? Looks like there is probably *some* growth in Firefox. As for HanziSmatter, I think their stats were fucked up the first time -- they were in the middle of migrating from one server to another and I think that's what screwed things up. The political blogs, o'course, are seeing slightly fewer hits now that we're not a month before a presidential election. Question: Is the increase in apparent Firefox percentage because the casual users are all gone from the political sandbox and the only folks left are the hardcore?
In point of fact, is this useful for what it tells us about how NORMAL PEOPLE use the internet? Probably not all *that* useful. Normal people still use the blue E, the poor bastards.
In other news, the MPAA has hammered a guy who ran a tracker site for bittorrent. He settled for a million dollars and the turning over of his server logs for the site, lokitorrent.com. LA Times has the story. Bittorrent, so that you know, is where I get the delightful tennis cartoon. The viability of BitTorrent as afilesharing application mechanism for piracy is an area of interest for me. Thus far, the MPAA has been playing Hercules with the hydra (ya'll at least saw the Disney movie, right? I hate it when people don't get cultural stuff. It irritates me no end that I have to explain why they're called Trojan downloaders at work all the fucking time because even with the horrible movie where Brad Pitt is in a leather skirt, people still don't understand how a Trojan attacker might work.) and cutting off the heads (like SuprNova and Youceff) and waiting for new heads to pop up (like lokitorrent and torrentstop, both of which got hit in this most-recent round) and then cutting them off.
This is not particularly a viable long-term solution for the MPAA -- it's too easy and too inexpensive to start a server and too much damn work to be chasing after the new ones all the time. That's probably why they bargained for (and got) the logs from lokitorrent. It'll be interesting to see what they do with them... my guess is that they'll wring them for every drop of intimidation they can possibly get, but they're probably also going to chase after individuals.
I seem to recall, and it may have also been in Wired (Yep. It was.) that the bulk of stuff like movies hits torrent sites through the efforts of not-very-many people. It's not joe average going to see The Incredibles with his pocket video camera, taking that footage home, and encoding it. Video capture, encoding, and compression is a bit of a bitch... it's not rocket science, but getting a not-on-DVD live movie into internet distro format is a lot more involved than stuffing a CD in the drive, hitting MusicMatch, and selecting "rip to .mp3"... and even so, digital "geneaology-like" studies of even fucking .mp3s put online show that there aren't THAT many different rips of a given song floating around online. MOST people, even most users of these filesharing networks, are leeches and not seeds -- they take stuff and (usually) share stuff they've taken elsewhere, but they don't contribute much original content themselves.
Anyway, it's something to watch with interest. I don't understand why people think prime time television is more interesting than the dramas we get in real life. This is pretty damned interesting, in my book.
Well, that was kind of interesting, wasn't it? Looks like there is probably *some* growth in Firefox. As for HanziSmatter, I think their stats were fucked up the first time -- they were in the middle of migrating from one server to another and I think that's what screwed things up. The political blogs, o'course, are seeing slightly fewer hits now that we're not a month before a presidential election. Question: Is the increase in apparent Firefox percentage because the casual users are all gone from the political sandbox and the only folks left are the hardcore?
In point of fact, is this useful for what it tells us about how NORMAL PEOPLE use the internet? Probably not all *that* useful. Normal people still use the blue E, the poor bastards.
In other news, the MPAA has hammered a guy who ran a tracker site for bittorrent. He settled for a million dollars and the turning over of his server logs for the site, lokitorrent.com. LA Times has the story. Bittorrent, so that you know, is where I get the delightful tennis cartoon. The viability of BitTorrent as a
This is not particularly a viable long-term solution for the MPAA -- it's too easy and too inexpensive to start a server and too much damn work to be chasing after the new ones all the time. That's probably why they bargained for (and got) the logs from lokitorrent. It'll be interesting to see what they do with them... my guess is that they'll wring them for every drop of intimidation they can possibly get, but they're probably also going to chase after individuals.
I seem to recall, and it may have also been in Wired (Yep. It was.) that the bulk of stuff like movies hits torrent sites through the efforts of not-very-many people. It's not joe average going to see The Incredibles with his pocket video camera, taking that footage home, and encoding it. Video capture, encoding, and compression is a bit of a bitch... it's not rocket science, but getting a not-on-DVD live movie into internet distro format is a lot more involved than stuffing a CD in the drive, hitting MusicMatch, and selecting "rip to .mp3"... and even so, digital "geneaology-like" studies of even fucking .mp3s put online show that there aren't THAT many different rips of a given song floating around online. MOST people, even most users of these filesharing networks, are leeches and not seeds -- they take stuff and (usually) share stuff they've taken elsewhere, but they don't contribute much original content themselves.
Anyway, it's something to watch with interest. I don't understand why people think prime time television is more interesting than the dramas we get in real life. This is pretty damned interesting, in my book.
