Last Straw

A couple of mates have recently hit me up about acquir­ing soft­ware the Black­beard way so I star­ted writ­ing this big speel about the cul­ture clash tak­ing place on the net between an emer­ging cul­ture of technology-enabled shar­ing, ope­ness and per­sonal pri­vacy, and an entrenched cap­it­al­ist cul­ture of selfish­ness, secrets and Big Brother, and how you can help the emer­ging cul­ture by pir­at­ing cer­tain soft­ware and other media. But I’ve decided to save you the speel and cut to the chase. I’m also going to show you a fant­astic way to share pho­tos online and down­load Beethoven’s sym­phon­ies, so read on .…

Down­load­ing soft­ware and other media
There’re many ways to down­load big files over the inter­net but the fast­est way, cur­rently, is to use a tech­no­logy called Bit­Tor­rent, which spreads the upload band­width among all the down­load­ers, mak­ing the whole pro­cess fast and scal­able (i.e. the more people down­load­ing the faster it goes, instead of the usual other way round).

You’ll need two things: soft­ware for down­load­ing and a tracker for find­ing the tor­rents. My biggest con­cern here is to get product into hand so I’m gonna keep it simple. If you’ve got any quer­ies be sure to leave a com­ment below.

Soft­ware: your best bet here is to head over to BitTorrent.com and down­load the cli­ent that cor­res­ponds to your oper­at­ing sys­tem, mostly likely Win­dows. Once you’ve installed the soft­ware you can go look­ing for some­thing to download.

Tor­rents: your best bet here is to head over to The Pir­ate Bay, the world’s largest Bit­Tor­rent tracker, a Swedish web­site I’ve blogged about before, and they’ve recently updated their lovely site so it’s pretty self-explanatory.

And here’s where the dif­fer­ence lies between tra­di­tional down­loads and Bit­Tor­rent down­loads. The file that you down­load from The Pir­ate Bay (once you’ve found what you’re look­ing for) is only a pointer to the actual file you want. Open this file in your Bit­Tor­rent soft­ware to start down­load­ing the goods.

The only stum­bling block might be your fire­wall. Bit­Tor­rent likes to have a open high­way on port 6881 to be at its most effi­cient. If it doesn’t open it auto­mat­ic­ally and you’re not sure how to open this port add a com­ment and I’ll explain how. (for Mac OS X users, you open the port in the File Shar­ing panel of the Sys­tem Preferences).

Down­load­ing Beethoven’s sym­phon­ies
You can down­load Beethhoven’s sym­phon­ies the tra­di­tional way by head­ing over to BBC’s web­site. I see they’ve taken down the first five down and won’t make the last four avail­able until the end of June. Of course you could always try down­load­ing them another way or another way, but I found a mir­ror.

Shar­ing pho­tos on flickr.com
I’ve been mean­ing to use flickr.com for about as long as I’ve been mean­ing to cre­ate this web­log. The cool thing about this site and the reason it’s been get­ting so much press is its rel­at­ive ope­ness (alway easy to move your busi­ness else­where) and the abil­ity to tag your images with metadata (data about data), which makes it a cinch to organ­ise and share pho­tos amongst mates or whanau, or the world.

I cre­ated an account over the week­end and uploaded some of my best pho­tos the other night. Many are from Iraq, but you’ll need to register to see ones of my niece (some of which are real pearlers). After I’ve writ­ten this I’m going to send out a bunch of invites through their web­site which will allow you to register and be auto­mat­ic­ally linked to me as friend or fam­ily so you can view them.

Enjoy, and share the wealth!