Right On Technology

Many moons ago I came across this strange thing called bit-torrents. I quickly found that bit-torrents allowed anyone to find anything on the Internet (not that I ever used it for nefarious purposes ). One of the best sites that ever came along was The Pirate Bay. It quickly became won of the largest bittorrent sites on the Internet with a reported 25 million peers in it’s hay day.

As many know the rise and fall of The Pirate Bay has been a long one, including many legal battles that finally caught up to the folks in Sweden who ran the site. However, The Pirate Bay is not dead just yet. While it is true that the bittorrent will no longer be active that is because they are switching to a new trackerless solution called DHT. The crew recently posted the following:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The DHT system is much more decentralized and harder to track who is downloading what. It also means that when a tracker goes down the entire site won’t get hit.

The future of TPB is unclear. They have appealed their copyright infringement case and the appeal has been postponed until next summer. So, at least for the mean time, TPB is still around. Smoke em if you got’em.

There is little question that Twitter is the second most popular social networking site on the Internet behind Facebook. As more and more folks “discover” Twitter and how useful it is the more popular this tool will continue to be. However, for the first time the (U.S.) visits have declined for month-over-month. That decline was an 8% decline for the month of October. Comscore estimates that Twitter’s visitors went from 20.9 million visitors in September to 19.2 million in October.

Now, let’s put this in perspective, Twitter’s growth from October 2008 to October 2009 was a crazy 1,271% growth and their global visitors are at 58.4 visits per month, so there is still a lot to be optimistic about. This could be part of the motivation for Twitter to release many of their new features like the retweet button, geolocation feature and their new lists, which are really cool.

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Today I booted up the old Mac and noticed a gift from Apple, a new update! This is officially Mac OS X 10.6.2 for Snow Leopard. The biggest part of this update is that Apple finally decided to address a major bug that would cause guest accounts to delete part of your OS. I guess 2 months and 7 days since first reported is better then never.

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In one of the more exciting rumors I’ve heard in a while, Peter Kafka is reporting that Apple is possibly floating a deal to the various networks that would allow users to pay $30 a month rate to have on demand access to all TV programs.

The good news is that this deal would not necessarily be tied to any piece of hardware such as the oft-rumored Apple Tablet or AppleTV. The content would simply be tied to your iTunes account, thus you could access the content through any device that had iTunes.

The real question here is can Apple get the networks on board? While networks often claim they are excited to look at new revenue streams, in reality they never really want to because they don’t want to threaten the subscription fees they receive from cable and satellite providers such as Time/Warner or Comcast. I can especially see Fox and NBC balking at this idea because they want to launch some paid form of Hulu and they might worry about canabalizing sales.

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