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I know, I know… So many of my posts recently have been about me doing media stuff elsewhere. But maybe that’s a good thing.
This morning I was one of the people interviewed in a story on ABC Radio National Breakfast about the recent Dutch legal decision against Mininova, a BitTorrent tracker site.
The story was produced by Oscar McLaren, and you can listen to it online.
Stilgherrian’s links for 25 February 2009 through 02 March 2009, gathered with gin and joy.
Stilgherrian’s links for 12 January 2009 through 18 January 2009, gahered with care and moistened with love:
[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday 5 January 2009, and the headline is theirs. Here it is for those folks too cheap-arsed to subscribe. I'll re-post my other recent Crikey material soon.]
The biggest criticism of the Rudd government’s plan to centrally censor the internet — apart from it being ill-defined, secretive, a potential human rights abuse, a great way to screw up broadband speeds, poorly planned, way behind schedule and tackling the problem of child sexual abuse in completely the wrong way — is that it won’t work. As Crikey has reported several times before. None of the filters tested in the first half of 2008 could touch peer-to-peer (P2P) networks like BitTorrent, which is where The Bad Stuff lives.
Just before Christmas, Senator Conroy tackled that last bit by declaring in a single sentence on his new blog: “Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.” If so, it’s news to the ISPs who signed up. But then they haven’t been given official notification yet, and the trials were meant to start before Christmas. Ahem.
BitTorrent is easy to understand, provided you skip the brain-imploding technical details. Instead of everyone downloading the same big media file from a central server, causing congestion, the file is split up into lots of little pieces. As soon as you’ve download one random piece, your computer becomes a server, swapping the pieces you already have for the missing pieces downloaded by other users — your peers. Automatically. Eventually everyone gets all of the pieces, with the work shared amongst all the participants.
BitTorrent is incredibly efficient. As we reported in March, Norway’s national broadcaster NRK used BitTorrent to distribute a full HD TV program to 80,000 people for just US$350 in bandwidth and storage charges.
Yesterday [Sunday], Crikey showed NRK project manager Eirik Solheim reports of Conroy’s plan.
“Wow!” he said. “A minister that is actively working to limit your country’s ability to distribute information and compete globally… If he plans to block BitTorrent traffic in general that would be a serious limitation to people’s ability to distribute content, creativity, ideas and information.”
[This article was first published in Crikey yesterday. I've added some follow-up comments at the end.]
Let’s sing along with Senator Conroy! You’ve got to accentuate the positive / Eliminate the negative / Latch on to the affirmative…
[On Monday] our Minister for Broadband was “encouraged” that lab tests of ISP-level Internet filters showed “significant progress” since 2005, and The Australian had him declaring the trial a success. But if you actually dig into the full report [2.8MB PDF] things aren’t so rosy.
Yes, on average filters might be more accurate than three years ago and have less impact on Internet speeds — well, at least for the six filters actually tested of the 26 put forward. But it’s about them being not quite as crap as before.
Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.
Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.
However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.
The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.
The episode of the 2 Web Crew podcast we recorded last Wednesday is finally online. The Podcast Network‘s Cameron Reilly, Laurel Papworth, TechCrunch‘s Duncan Riley and I chat about Underbelly, P2P networks, BitTorrent and distribution, telcos and innovation, Crikey and media impartiality. The audio quality’s a bit dodgy, but hey. I’ll also be on the episode being “recorded live” tomorrow at 1300 Sydney time on Ustream.
Crikey has just published my article ABC Playback is a backwards step as a “Crikey essay”, no less. It combines the themes of my pieces about ABC Playback and the CBC BitTorrent trial.
Following Norwegian broadcaster NRK’s highly-successful trial of using BitTorrent for program distribution, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has just released a prime-time episode of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister onto the torrent globally.
According to the last100 report, the CBC’s media release was clear:
“The show will be completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart’s desire.”
In a follow-up post Inside story: the making of a legal TV ‘torrent’, freelance producer Interactive Producer for CBC Guinevere Orvis explains how they got the approvals sorted within the CBC.
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