Adobe Flash To Eliminate Bandwidth Costs With P2P

Adobe Flash To Eliminate Bandwidth Costs With P2P
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The Flash team from Adobe has been working on their P2P Flash implementation for a while, but with the release of the 10.1 player it can really make a difference for online media distribution.

Kevin Towes, Product Manager of Adobe Flash Media Server told Beet.TV that the upcoming release of the Flash player will include new P2P technology that will “significantly change the way we think of media delivery.” According to Towes, this technology could in some cases completely eliminate bandwidth costs.

The system Adobe is offering to support P2P Flash is called Stratus. It is offered to developers free of charge and can support both live and on-demand video streaming. Besides video, Stratus can also be used for Flash based multi-player games and other forms of real time communication.

For broadcasters and video services, Stratus has the capacity to eliminate a significant amount of bandwidth costs. Instead of serving the media from a central server, users will provide the necessary bandwidth. Adobe’s Stratus system serves as an intermediary in this process, managing the communications between Flash players much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers.

Towes explained that Stratus users will first have to agree to participate in a P2P-enabled Flash swarm, similar to how they are now asked to indicate whether Flash can use their webcam. If users do not want to share bandwidth, the broadcaster has the option to offer a regular stream, a degraded stream or no stream at all.

Adobe’s Stratus project is not the first to combine P2P technology with Flash. Last year, during the inauguration of President Obama, CNN used P2P-assisted technology to send out the live stream to a million viewers worldwide. This required users to install a browser plugin called Octoshape, which then made the Flash video P2P compliant.

Other initiatives to serve on-demand and live streaming have been showcased by the Triber research team, who use a BitTorrent-based solution that does not require any central servers. Tribler is currently working with several European TV-broadcasters to test this technology in the real world.

The impact of Adobe getting seriously involved in P2P streaming could be a real game changer though. One of the main advantages Adobe’s Flash has is that nearly every computer has it installed, which should facilitate the adoption rate among content providers. One less hurdle to take, and a significant one.

ISP Must Hand Over Identity Of OpenBitTorrent Operator

ISP Must Hand Over Identity Of OpenBitTorrent Operator
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An ISP must hand over the identity of the operator behind a major BitTorrent tracker, a court in Sweden ruled today. OpenBitTorrent, probably the world’s largest public tracker, is currently hosted by Portlane. The ISP must now reveal the identity of its customer to Hollywood movie companies or face a hefty fine.

Yesterday we reported how a Swedish appeals court had upheld an earlier ruling which ordered an ISP to hand over the details of a torrent site operator. If it fails to supply several movie companies with the name of the customer behind the SweTorrents site, ISP TeliaSonera faces a 750,000 kronor ($96,500) fine.

Although TeliaSonera may yet appeal the decision and potentially win, today brings news of a new IPRED case on an altogether bigger scale.

Just as The Pirate Bay has relocated and obfuscated its real location to avoid detection, it has also changed its structure and modus operandi in order to stay alive. A major part of this strategy became apparent last year when it shut down its tracker, instead relying on DHT, PEX and trackers operated by 3rd parties, in particular OpenBitTorrent. Hollywood didn’t take long to react.

“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in an earlier comment.

In November last year Hollywood announced they would sue OpenBitTorrent host Portlane in an attempt to force the closure of the tracker.

In December the Stockholm District Court rejected calls to close down the tracker, a decision that is currently under appeal with the studios claiming that Portlane should take responsibility for the infringements being facilitated by OpenBitTorrent.

While that game of legal-tennis continues, the studios have today won another significant battle, this time in a Stockholm court. While there has been speculation about the identities of those behind OpenBitTorrent, that information has been impossible to verify. All that could be about to change.

“The Court orders Portlane under pain of a fine of SEK 500,000 ($63,633) to provide the Studios with the name and e-mail address information [of those behind OBT],” said movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted as she provided TorrentFreak with a translation of a decision announced in the Stockholm City Court today.

The ruling covers the customer behind the IP addresses 188.126.64.2 and 188.126.64.3 and/or any other IP addresses in Portlane’s entire range (188.126.64.0 – 188.126.95.255) which have been allocated to tracker.openbittorrent.com since August 28, 2009.

The Court also ruled that Portlane should state whether or not the customer is situated inside the EU. The operators of OBT say they first got together in Lima, Peru, although their nationalities and current locations are unknown.

Portlane has 14 days to hand over the information to the studios but may yet still appeal this decision. At the time of publication Portlane has yet to respond with comments.

OpenBitTorrent has never portrayed the ‘jolly roger’ style of The Pirate Bay and even has a DMCA-style notice and takedown procedure to stop the tracking of torrents. Even so, it would be surprising if they hadn’t anticipated the possibility of a court ruling like this and taken the necessary steps to hide their identities from Portlane.

Microsoft Fails to Close Major BitTorrent Tracker

Microsoft Fails to Close Major BitTorrent Tracker

Earlier this year software giant Microsoft launched a lawsuit against Lithuania’s largest BitTorrent tracker for its role in the unauthorized distribution of Office 2003 and 2007. Microsoft successfully obtained an injunction against the site and the operator’s assets were seized, but these requests have now been overturned by the appeal court.

Most legal cases related to copyright infringement on BitTorrent are initiated by the movie and music industries. Microsoft has recently joined this group, although they have done so with a relatively low profile in Lithuania.

With approval from their United States headquarters, Microsoft went after the largest BitTorrent site in Lithuania, LinkoManija. Microsoft accused the site and its operator of assisting in the illegal distribution of Office 2003 and 2007 and filed a lawsuit in January.

Hoping to recoup some of the claimed losses, Microsoft demanded $45 million from LinkoManija’s alleged operator Kestas Ermanas and his company. Microsoft further asked the court to close the tracker and seize the assets of Kestas.

Both requests were granted and the assets of the site’s operator and his company were seized and associated bank accounts frozen. The site, however, remained online as Kestas and his company said that they were no longer operating LinkoManija. Kestas told TorrentFreak that he handed the operation over to a third party early 2009.

The decisions were immediately appealed by Kestas and his legal team, who have now informed us that the Appeal Court overturned both. According to the ruling the site should not be closed before there is a verdict in the full trial, and Kestas has also regained access to his personal bank accounts.

This is not the only setback for Microsoft in Lithuania. It previously lost its court case against a user of LinkoManija who they claimed had shared Windows 7 Ultimate illegally. The man was on trial in March and walked free due to a lack of evidence.

The main trial against LinkoManija’s operator and his company is expected to start in the near future although no official date has yet been set.

IsoHunt Forced to Shut Down in the US

IsoHunt Forced to Shut Down in the US
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The US District Court of California has issued a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, forcing it to shut down in the United States. IsoHunt is expected to block all access to US visitors in response to the decision, but no action has been taken thus far.

Early 2006, the MPAA issued a complaint against isoHunt and its sister site TorrentBox, claiming that owner Gary Fung operated file-sharing services and profited from copyright infringement.

The case went on in the years that followed and two months ago the US District Court of California proposed a permanent injunction that would require isoHunt to maintain a list of banned keywords and remove torrents that match items found on it. This injunction has now become final, meaning that the site has to start filtering or close down in the US.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that he has no faith in a filtering mechanism either. He said that such a measure “raises serious issues on the balance between freedom of speech, fair use and copyright protectionism,” as it would also filter out many torrent files that are in the public domain, or distributed with the consent of copyright holders.

Last month isoHunt chose to redirect all United States visitors to a Lite version of its website in a final attempt to prevent the search engine from having to close, but this was not enough according to the Court.

The verdict does not necessarily mean that isoHunt will be unavailable in other parts of the world. Gary Fung earlier told TorrentFreak that the ultimate measure would be to block access to visitors from the United States, which would also be sufficient to comply with the Court’s demands.

IsoHunt is not the first torrent site that has been put out of business in the United States by the MPAA. In the summer of 2007 a federal judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities and these were to be handed over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision, TorrentSpy decided to block access to all US visitors instead which led to a huge drop in traffic. In 2008 TorrentSpy, once the largest torrent site on the Internet, closed its doors for good after it was ordered to pay a 110 million dollar fine.

Fung has to comply with the temporary injunction withing a day. The permanent injunction also holds for isoHunt’s sister sites TorrentBox, Podtropolis and Ed2k-it.

Technolgy Running At High Speed

Washington, June 1 (ANI): Advancing towards cars that drive on their own, Volvo Car Corp. has tested its new S60 model, which has the first in-car system that can sense an imminent collision with pedestrians and brake automatically if the driver doesn't.
The system is the latest in a line of developments made possible by sophisticated sensors based on cameras, radar and lasers.
The sensors already provide drivers with adaptive cruise control, which alters a car's speed to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front, as well as technology such as semi-autonomous parking systems.
Jonas Ekmark, a researcher at Volvo headquarters near Gothenburg, Sweden, has said that we are entering an era in which vehicles will also gather real-time information about the weather and highway hazards, using this to improve fuel efficiency and make life less stressful for the driver and safer for all road users.
"Our long-term goal is the collision-free traffic system," the Washington Post quoted Ekmark as saying.
Alan Taub, vice president for research and development at General Motors, expects to see semi-autonomous vehicles on the road by 2015.
They will need a driver to handle busy city streets and negotiate complex intersections, but once on the highway they will be able to steer, accelerate and avoid collisions unaided.
A few years later, he predicts, drivers will be able to take their hands off the wheel completely.
"I see the potential for launching fully autonomous vehicles by 2020," he said.
While Japan is leading the way in autonomous vehicles, collaboration between seven European manufacturers and universities are developing a system that would allow up to eight cars a little more than a yard apart driving in convoy, controlled by a lead vehicle operated by a professional driver.
Drivers will be able to work, read, watch films or even sleep while their cars are driven for them.
What fully autonomous vehicles might be like is hinted at by an experimental car built by a GM-backed team of engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Their 'Boss' car earned a 2 million dollar prize in 2007 by outperforming 10 other autonomous vehicles in a simulated urban environment.
The vehicle executed complex manoeuvres such as merging into flowing traffic, passing, parking


Taken From Yahoo News,So U Can Imagine How technolgy Running @ High Speed

BitTorrent Site Admin Kidnapped & Beaten at Gunpoint

According to staff at a large Russian BitTorrent site, earlier this month their admin was lured to another country under false pretenses, held hostage by a criminal gang and beaten at gunpoint until he handed over the site’s domain name. The plan was thwarted, but not before a ransom was paid by his family.

Attacks on torrent sites are a relatively common occurrence and hardly a week goes by without news of legal action of some kind or another.
One line of attack used by anti-piracy groups against The Pirate Bay, for example, has been to try to have its domain blocked by various ISPs. In Italy, police recently went a step further by seizing the domain of a Pirate Bay proxy.
In Russia recently the whole process of taking a domain was streamlined, when the authorities simplytook control of the Torrents.ru domain without any court rulings whatsoever. Although some may label these type of actions against BitTorrent domains as “evil”, if news coming out of Russia today is to be believed, anti-torrent activities have just moved to a whole new level.
According to staff at Russian BitTorrent site LostFilm, on May 3rd their owner was lured to neighboring Ukraine under false pretenses. There he had a 3 day ordeal at the hands of a criminal group who apparently had their eyes on some of his property.
The LostFilm.tv domain is close to breaking into the Top 100 sites in Russia and is one of the country’s most popular sites for foreign movies. It seems the criminal group wanted it pretty badly. Reportedly kidnapped then beaten at gunpoint, the site’s owner was ordered to transfer the domain to a third party.
The next day, May 4th, the domain transfer began and at the same time the kidnappers gained access to the site’s servers. But all did not go smoothly.
Instead of being able to take control of the domain in a single day as hoped, the transfer was delayed by its registrar – the process was going to take 5 to 10 days – so the kidnappers decided to move to plan B.
On May 5th, the gang contacted the admin’s family in order to demand a ransom payment, on the understanding that the admin would go free and later transfer the domain to his kidnappers. Later that day an amount was paid via electronic transfer.
The LostFilm owner was subsequently set free and staff at the site were able to block the kidnappers out of their servers. Both are believed to be safe and well and the case has reportedly been handed over to the prosecutor’s office in St. Petersburg.
There is little doubt that if true, this is a sensational story. However, although the Russian press aren’t questioning it, there are those who believe it could be a PR stunt. LostFilm built up its reputation on the series Lost, and everyone knows what happened to that yesterday.


Source: TorrentFreak