The place João Bordalo calls home: Tag p2p

Bye bye TV, hello Joost

bordalix — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:06:00 -0600

I got an invitation for Joost 10 minutes ago. It took me 60 seconds for a 16 MB download, another 30 seconds for extraction and installation, 30 seconds to get the first Joost channel ('Joost Suggests') up and running in full-screen mode, no flicks, good quality, and watch some crazy surfers riding big waves in Hawaii. An additional 3 minutes to see the channel list (pretty impressive, NatGeo, MTV and others) and try and watch other channels. Everything is working smoothly. Now the bad news: my MacBook remote controller didn't work (yes, I know, it isn't supported, but I needed something bad to say). The rest 5 minutes were to write this post.

And the winner is...

bordalix — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:20:00 -0600

Nopes, it's not about Hollywood oscars (elected by some guys nobody cares) but about the free initiative named Oscar torrents. I really don't know who is behind this, but I really don't care: 133378 voters is a pretty good number for the first edition.

The film which won more oscartorrent was Pan's labyrinth, and the oscartorrent for the best picture was to The departed.

See the list movies and access the torrent files here.

The site disclaimer is also a pearl:

OSCARTORRENTS®, and the OSCAR THE PIRATE® statuette design mark are the unregistered marks of no one in particular. No ©2007. Nothing to do with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences & ABC, Inc. All Rights Reversed. The Official Oscars is a sham produced by villiains in partnership with the cult of celebrity. By accessing this site you're probably comitting a felony somewhere -- but let your own idea of what is right and wrong be your guide.

Enjoy your movies.

Obfuscating Bittorrent traffic

bordalix — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 09:22:00 -0600

Azureus and uTorrent (the two most popular bittorrent clients) had included in their latest beta new forms of encryption, which will provide a completely random-looking header and (optionally) payload to avoid passive protocol identification and traffic shaping. The technical details are a bit hairy, but if have the guts you can always take a peek here.

But Bram Cohen, the guy who invented the Bittorrent protocol, does not agree with this decision, since he believes that ISP's will be able to still detect Bittorrent traffic, and that this could harms the Internet performance as a whole, as stated in his blog.

What's next, an encrypted Skype?