Common Paradox Tech Blog

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The Ubisoft DRM situation has been covered to death, but it’s like a train wreck we just can’t seem to look away from. The latest news comes out of Europe and is reporting that the DRM authentication servers have been down all day, and have yet to return.

"I don’t have any clear information on what the issue is … but clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve been told these servers are constantly monitored," said ‘Ubi.Vigil’, adding, "I’ll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won’t happen in the future."

 North American customers don’t seem to be affected by the outage, but it clearly validates all the negative press and comments this DRM approach has been generating across the Internet. PC Gamers across the globe are united for the first time in history, too bad it wasn’t under better circumstances.

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We’ve tossed around some pretty harsh criticisms of Ubisoft’s new PC DRM approach, and it’s very much deserved. Piracy is a tricky issue to combat, we get it, but we also know that no amount of DRM will ever stop the dedicated few kleptomaniacs who for one reason or another, simply refuse to pay for software. The only truth when it comes to copy protection is that the stronger it is, the more honest customers you will accidentally burn with it. This isn’t anything we haven’t said before, but it is ironic how all of our predictions seem to be coming true.

According to ZDnet a version of Assassin’s Creed 2 sans DRM has appeared on Bit Torrents, and the date confirms it took a mere 24 hours to defuse Ubisoft’s DRM of mass destruction. If this version works as advertised, it would leave the gimped version in the hands of paying customers who will needlessly be forced to suffer through another failed attempt at heavy handed copy protection. Its hard to gauge if all the bad press is having any impact on Assassin’s Creed II’s sales, but a quick peek at the Steam player stats ranks the game in 29th place, just below the original Day of Defeat (a game released 7 years ago).

The best way to vote against this type of behavior is with your wallet, not your Bit Torrent client, but perhaps the evolving reality of the situation will force Ubisoft to take action and release a patch for its loyal patrons.

It’s been a busy week for BitTorrents! I’ve showed you how to download them, how to tweak the heck out of a great program you can use to download them, and how to remotely access your BitTorrent downloads through Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. You, young padawan, are now fully grounded in the ways of the torrent. But you are no Jedi yet…

The final task that awaits you isn’t so much related to the act of downloading information via BitTorrent as it is contributing to the cloud of data that you’re usually pulling from. Yes, that’s right. You’re going to learn how to make your own .torrent file for distribution via your tracker of choice. While I realize there’s a handy feature in uTorrent that allows you do this rather effortlessly, you’re limited to working on one torrent at a time via this method. What if you want to make a whole bunch of .torrent files corresponding to a larger number of files you want to make available for download?

In that case, you’re going to need the Download of the Week: MakeTorrent. This freeware app hasn’t been updated since 2004–it’s an oldie, but a goodie. It works fine all the way up to a 64-bit installation of Windows 7, so don’t worry that MakeTorrent isn’t going to be compatible with your OS of choice.

It couldn’t be any easier to make your own .torrent using this quick little app. Start the program, then navigate to wherever it is you’ve stored the files that you want to share. Select them all, and then enter the URL of the corresponding tracker that will help coordinate the communications between your computer and the other peers jumping into your download stream. You can find some useful links to get you started right here. You can also append a comment to your .torrent file if you’d like. Click on the "Create .torrent now" button when you’re done and voila! Create first BitTorrent file achievement unlocked! And if you’re feeling adventurous, you can also use MakeTorrent to edit existing .torrent files.

Each week, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of… the week. Have a nifty application that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Unlike its companion addon for Firefox, the Chrome Extension uTorrent for Google Chrome doesn’t actually give you any way to remotely add a torrent to a uTorrent client that’s running on a different, Web-connected system. That’s kind of funny, considering that the uTorrent Firefox addon doesn’t give you a way to control what’s actually being downloaded by the remote system–Google Chrome’s extension does.

It’s a weird mish-mash of features, but it doesn’t mean that uTorrent for Google Chrome is any less valuable of an addon for your daily browsing. If you’re a BitTorrent junkie, you’ll find this addon to be a considerable upgrade from the experience of having to load the default uTorrent Web UI every time you want to check on (or edit) your downloads.

Web UI… remote BitTorrent… this might be a bit over your head. Let’s back out for a second and take a more general look at what this extension actually does. The uTorrent app comes with a nifty little feature–a Web UI–that allows you to remotely "log in" to your BitTorrent client. It’s a great tool for when you want to capitalize on the fast speeds of your home (or office) Internet connection, yet do much of your actual browsing in the various coffee shops, libraries, or other WiFi hotspots around your community. You can fire up this Web interface to do everything you could normally do if you were sitting right in front of your running uTorrent app: start downloads, stop downloads, pause downloads, label downloads, et cetera.

The aforementioned Chrome Extension takes all of this functionality–and the painful process of typing in a large URL to access said Web UI–and slaps it into a tiny button near the address bar in your browser. You can’t add new files, but you can check and see the status of your downloads using a pretty visual bar that indicates the percentage done. You can also get a quick look at your client’s upload and download speeds, the estimated time remaining for your download, and the exact number of seeds and peers that are also grabbing the files in question. Of course, you can also perform all the basic uTorrent commands: starting files, stopping files, deleting files, et cetera.

It’s small, it’s pretty, and it’s quite useful–save for that whole "adding new files" bit. For a great Google Chrome uTorrent manager, this appropriately titled extension is just what you need.

Maximum PC picks one new Chrome extension as its favorite of the week each… week. Have a nifty extension that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

Keeping with my uTorrent/BitTorrent theme this week, it only makes sense to show you how you can go about pulling .torrent files through the Firefox browser. But wait, you say! What am I talking about? Clicking on a .torrent link allows you to open it right up in your client of choice (I’ll assume uTorrent for the sake of this post), and that, in turn, slots said file (or magnet link) into the application and begins the download.

Why would you need a fancy addon to do that?

Good point. In fact, you don’t need an add-on in Firefox to load torrent files. Where an addon becomes handy is when you’re using Firefox from a different computer and would like to somehow get a .torrent file you’ve found onto the download queue of a different machine. Think it’s a strange setup? It’s not that uncommon: perhaps you’ve left your PC on at home to make best use of its super-speedy landline connection, yet you’re browsing around various BitTorrent sites at work, in a coffee shop, or in your car.

I guess you could email the .torrent file to yourself and queue it up later. That’s lame, especially when a little addon called BitTorrent WebUI is ready to do all the work for you!

Here’s how it works. Go into your uTorrent preferences menu and turn on the program’s WebUI feature. You can change the default login and password if you want (I recommend it). Install the BitTorrent WebUI addon and restart Firefox. When your browser loads back up, it’ll want you to put in your system’s IP address as well as the port that uTorrent uses for its connections. Select uTorrent as the client, then hit OK.

Assuming that uTorrent is running on your main computer–and that’s a critical factor–then you’ll now be able to click on any .torrent link in your browser and load it into your main system’s uTorrent client. Simple as that. You can now start BitTorrent downloads (or access the Web UI to do much, much more!) via any computer with the configured addon installed!

Maximum PC picks one new Firefox add-on as its favorite of the week each… week. Have a nifty extension that you can’t live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.

BitTorrent has plenty of practical and legal uses, but sadly, if you’re one of the millions of people using it, you’re probably breaking the law. A student at Princeton University by the name of Sauhard Sahi has conducted a study of more than 1,000 random files acquired using the trackerless Mainline DHT, and found that more than 99% of them infringe on copyrights. I somehow doubt this news will shock or amaze you, but at least one interesting discovery was made and it makes a pretty compelling argument against those who would try to claim that DRM helps prevent piracy.

According to Sahi’s findings, movies and TV shows are among the most popular files being downloaded, and he argues that the onerous DRM which accompanies protected video could be to blame for this trend. This would also explain why music downloading is on the decline, and points out the sad reality that people who download video legally often have to deal with far more challenges than pirates operating over BitTorrent. It certainly makes an interesting hypothesis, but you could also argue that BitTorrent is a bit too much of a hassle just to track down a $0.99 song, but might be more worthwhile for those looking for a $20 DVD.

Sahi’s results only reflect data collected from Mainline DHT, but its hard to argue with these numbers, even if they are off plus or minus a few percentage points. Do you think BitTorrent can continue to function as a viable medium with such a high percentage of abuse? It will certainly be interesting to see how things play out over the next few years, or if governments will ever get involved. What do you think?

The FCC has formally issued their draft net neutrality rules, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling foul. The document contains language covering so-called “reasonable network management”. According to the EFF, this creates a loophole that would allow ISPs to block BitTorrent.

The net neutrality debate really took off when in 2007, Comcast began blocking BitTorrent connections. Eventually the FCC forced them to stop, but Comcast is still appealing the decision. This copyright loophole in the draft could be used by content producers to encourage ISPs to enforce copyright law. In fact, the EFF claims the exact behavior that got Comcast in hot water, and kicked off the debate could be perfectly acceptable under the proposed regulations.

It may not be feasible for the FCC to be intimately involved in every aspect of an ISP’s network management. What’s the solution? Can they just require protocol agnostic management?

In October 2007, Alan Ellis, the owner of the popular invite-only BitTorrent community OiNK.cd, was arrested in Middlesbrough, UK. The first person in the UK to be prosecuted for illegal file-sharing, Ellis was just found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud in a Teesside Crown Court.

When the IFPI raided OiNK more than two years ago, the case was unique not only because of its location (the UK), but because OiNK was always an invite-only community. You usually had to know someone to get an invitation, and there were very strict ratio requirements, as well as rules regarding quality of uploads.

A large part of the prosecution’s case against Ellis was that he had more than $300,000 in his PayPal account, as well as 10 other bank accounts with about ¬£20,000 spread across them. These funds were from donations that users could make to support server costs and other maintenance fees. Donations were not a requirement to join the site. Disclosure: I was a member of OiNK and made a donation, probably of ¬£25 or so at least once before it was shut-down.

Lots of major BitTorrent trackers were shut down in 2007, but the OiNK case was different not only because of its focus on a private community, but also because the founder was personally charged in court. Ellis’s argument, that OiNK didn’t actually host any of the music, was one echoed by The Pirate Bay owners in their trial, albeit with more pleasant results.

The Chief Superintendent for Cleveland Police told the Yorkshire Post:

“This has been a fair investigation. The jury has been presented with all the evidence and we abide by their decision.”

Tags: bittorrent, law, money, oink

Comcast has been hampering the peer-to-peer downloading protocol BitTorrent, and a federal appeals court will likely reject the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to sanction the company for it.

The FCC moved against Comcast as part of an overall strategy to defend and promote Net Neutrality.

Proponents of Net Neutrality — which include most Internet search and content companies, along with several officials in the current administration — believe that regulators should prevent Internet service providers like Comcast from prioritizing customers’ access to some network services over others. Comcast placed restrictions on the BitTorrent Internet protocol because it claims that the customers who download things via BitTorrent are placing too much strain on the network and slowing down service for other users.

The FCC demonstrated its support for the Net Neutrality cause by launching a website called OpenInternet.gov, but the appeals court judges Comcast turned to said during the debate that they will probably reject the FCC’s authority to regulate Comcast in this way. If you believe strongly in Net Neutrality like we do, you’ll unfortunately have to count this as a significant setback when it happens.

Tags: bandwidth, bittorrent, comcast, fcc, ISP, net neutrality, Political

With the rise of popular streaming services such as Hulu, many would probably speculate that BitTorrent usage would be on the decline, but according to the folks over at TorrentFreak, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly doubling its 28 million a year user base to 52 million, uTorrent usage is continuing to rise with no end in sight. “In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” said Simon Morris, BitTorrents VP of Product Management. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million”. “We see no evidence whatever that BitTorrent clients are any less popular”.

It seems pretty obvious that the legal woes of The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and others have done little to stem the tide of torrent adoption, and unless things change drastically, its hard to figure out what will. The uTorrent development team has several major improvements planned over the next 12 months, and hope to add options to increase file security, and even the ability for torrent site owners to promote their own content from within the client.

I’m sure all 52 million users are downloading the latest Linux build right? I had no idea it was becoming that popular! If you would like to join me in leaping to conclusions, feel free to leave your comments below.