p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday we published an item slugged ‘Yotoshi now sucks’ from Eugene Freaks.

Rob, Eugene’s owner, roundly attacked the ‘new’ Yotoshi for a variety of sins.

But Gregory Gumo, Yotoshi’s new owner, tells p2pnet that Eugene Freaks was somewhat hasty, to put it mildly.

And during the course of it, we learned Kazaa (read Brilliant Digital Entertainment /Altnet) is still on the sleaze, looking for gullible victims for its TrueNames quest.

More on that later. In the meanwhile, read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I bought Yotoshi.com because of my interest in community driven projects and the possible use of BitTorrents to be used as a means for indie music / film artists, and programmers to self-distribute.

My company CloudFive is made up of a group of people with different skill sets who work together doing what we each know how to do to help each other.

We’re based in Tokyo, Japan but most of the original members and our funding comes from our roots in New York City. Back in New York City business, and actually life in general, is run like a giant Open Source project.

If I have an idea, I try to find others to help me make it happen. On the web, my company is based on the same mentality. I was interested in BitTorrents for a while and originally, we’d set out to make them more multilingual as there are still NO Japanese native torrent sites online.

We had little funding at that time and I just was kicking around the idea with some indie film maker friends when they expressed interest in funding the projects.

Three months later, we opened an office in the center of Tokyo with a 2 GB Fiber line and 10 servers as backbone and we’re up to nearly 20 servers and 3GBps now.

I originally approached Smash for assistance back in June, 2004, but he was rather busy at the time. Later, in August I stumbled on Watcher, owner of myBitTorrent.com. He was the programmer behind TorrentTrader.com. I was aware he was in need of help to stablize his site and offerred him assistance with servers. From October to January he worked on rewriting the scripts for myBitTorrent and re-launched it in January of this year.

myBitTorrent.com has been very successful since and we continue to work very closely together. I’ve also been giving free servers to btsource.org (DarkCreature) (which is in the process of upgrading and becoming a public tracker), radiofusion.org (JustJon) an online audio streaming network, Rex of myBitTorrentforum.com for a game server, several private IRC & FTP networks, a group of programmers form sourceforge.jp for the localization of some BitTorrent clients, Linux, and MythTV, oh and Uniquez.net a free blog site run by a really cool Australian programmer.

I really try to keep my eyes open as well as my door. Currently, I’m trying to help Smash find funding for his next project. I’ve sent out several emails to people offering servers to support their projects and I’m brain storming with everyone about how to make a tighter community so we all grow rather than try to choke each other out.

With enemies like the MPAA, and RIAA, the p2p world doesn’t need attacks from within.

Just last week Smash was notified by some lawyers representing Kazaa that they wanted to sue yotoshi for using torrentsniff.

And people say I’m greedy.

Ha. I’m just trying to keep BitTorrent’s head above water.

I plan to keep yotoshi.com mostly as it was, although due to various complaints, some changes will have to be made.

We’ll likely add more file types beyond just torrent and iso files, and we’ll likely open up the back end for use by other bit torrent sites to help them index torrents more efficiently.

Actually, the only reasons I bought yotoshi were out personal interest in BitTorrents, and to keep the site from being book-shelved. Plus, it helped Smash with his current projects.

I think anyone who knows me can vouch for me. We’re really against closing our doors to others.

Seriously, any community based web site or application that is in need of servers or support is welcome to approach us.

I will help them at least get back on their feet.

Gregory Gumo

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

And over at Eugene Freaks, Rob has had a change of heart and says:

“I do somewhat regret not attempting to contact the new owner – my only defense is that I consider popunders EVIL and interpreted their existence as a bad sign. Frankly, my experience with suggesting improvements to businesses that effect their bottom line is one of being ignored and not taken seriously – if nothing else, I am glad that “making a stink” as I did resulted in the popunder going away. I don’t believe a race to the bottom defense works for popunders, ie. citing that other sites use them doesn’t make it ok.

“I also note that the site now works fine with both Safari and Firefox – so I’m having a hard time seeing how bugs in those programs simply resolved themselves. Similarly, I have not yet installed the OS X security update you refer to, so that has no bearing on the issue as well.”

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
Eugene Freaks - Yotoshi now sucks, p2pnet, March 31, 2005
Brilliant Digital Entertainment – Russell Simmons exits BDE, p2pnet. March 29, 2005
TrueNames quest – Altnet tries TrueNames on p2p ops, p2pnet, January 10, 2005
change of heart – Yotoshi BitTorrent Search Engine No Longer Sucks!, March 30, 2005

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2005 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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