p2pnet - rss feed: p2pnet’s top 10 stories for 2005
p2p news / p2pnet: The old year is closing and below are p2pnet’s Top 10 Stories for 2005.
But the single most important development for 2005 has to be the reality that citizen journalists, posting on internet blogs and personal pages, are steadily replacing the traditional vested interest mainstream corporate media as the principal sources of reliable, unspun news and information. Coming in 2006? Vblogs - video blogs. »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»
1 —- By far the most read p2pnet story was Big Music wants Britanny Chan (October 5), the tale of how, having failed to ensnare alleged file sharer Candy Chan, the multi-billion-dollar Big Four Organized Music cartel turned on her daughter Brittany, a 14-year-old schoolgirl. Using its RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), OM also appears to be gearing up to attempt to do the same to Patti Santangelo, the courageous New York mother who’s representing herself against the Big Four, Sony BMG, Warner Music, Vivendi Universal and EMI, in what will be the first court care of its kind in the US.
2 —- The second most popular story also centres on an RIAA victim, this time a disabled mother in Oregon. In The ‘We’re Not Taking Any More’ club (September 17), Tanya Andersen says, “The RIAA needs to stop hurting innocent people.” Also in the post is mention of other RIAA victims who decided they weren’t going to be blackmailed by the Big Four gang, either.
3 —- Stymie RIAA / MPAA spider bots (December 14) is part I of what turned out to be a collaboration between p2pnet readers and an open source software developer. The subject? A php script that, “generates fake apache directory indexes for the purpose of slowing, and overloading with false positives the RIAA/MPAA’s spider bots”. In part II, the developer says, “Wow! I’ve gotten such an overwhelmingly postive response on DirIndexFaker, mostly thanks to a writeup over at p2pnet.net, that I’ve decided to answer a few questions, and incorporate a few of the suggestions I’ve received”.
4 —- In their bizarre sue ‘em all marketing scheme, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI have needlessly victimized more than 17,000 men, women and children. The impression created is these people have been successfully prosecuted for some ‘crime’. And yet not one of them has so far appeared in a court. New York mother, Patti Santangelo, will be the first, and she’s taking on the multi-billion-dollar music industry alone and withot legal representation. In RIAA victim talks to p2pnet (September 4), Patti explains what motivated her to challenge the Big Four.
5 —- “The BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system attempts to build robustness to free-riding by implementing a tit-for-tat-like strategy within its protocol,” wrote David Hales and Simon Patarin in their paper How to cheat BitTorrent and why nobody does.” BitTorrent and free-riders (June 11) also has them saying, “… given the choice, users may choose unconditional altruism rather than the more restrictive reciprocal tit-for-tat approach as a result of the same group selective process.”
6 —- It was seriously bad news when we posted WinMX had gone offline. But, the very next day, “Wrong,” we were able to say. WinMX returns: Grazie P2PZone! (September 23).
7 —- The Hollywood based major movie studios try to come across as well-meaning, hardworking, honest companies battling millions of criminals who get up every morning, bent on robbing them blind. However, in Sweden, their Antipiratbyrån admitted using a paid informer in its attack on Bahnhof, Sweden’s largest ISP, in what ceo Jon Karlung described as a “badly arranged ambush“. Big Music’s Bahnhof Bust (March 22) outlines the initial sequence of events.
8 —- EFF cracks Secret Service code (October 17) reveals EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) researchers discover how the US Secret Service is able to track user information from Xerox DocuColor printers. And they believe similar codes may also feature on printers made by Canon, Epson, HP, IBM and Dell, among others.
9 —- Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer who originally acted for Patti Santangelo, says, in Mother of 5 takes on Big Music (August 28), that he believes his chances of having the case dropped are high because the motion for dismissal is, “based on black letter law” and the, “plaintiff’s ‘opposition’ papers are weak, digressive, and nonsensical”. However, judge Colleen McMahon didn’t see things that way and Patti is about to learn if Organized Music’s RIAA will try to get to her through her children and their friends.
10 — The RIAA and MPAA spearhead the attacks by their respective owners, the Big Four record labels and Big Seven movies studios, against their own customers. But their efforts don’t come cheap, say their US Internal Revenue Service filings. Millions spent on p2p battles (October 17) goes into detail.
