Anyway, Grant has been sentenced to 5 months in prison, and 5 months of home detention on top of that. He also has to pay a $3000 fine for his involvement with Elitetorrents.

Torrentfreak has more on this story. Here’s a bit from their article:

This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement”. He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as “Operation D-Elite”.

Most of them are lured by misleading advertisement, and flashy banners. They end up paying $3-$30 for a completely free application. In the best case they receive a couple of links to bittorrent search engines, and a bittorrent client. Support e-mails are simply ignored.

Pretty lame, but I’d imagine it’s a pretty successful method for bringing in quick cash. On the defensive, Bittorrent Inc. has launched an advertisement campaign warning users not to pay for BitTorrent. It reads “The Official BitTorrent is entirely free. Spell it with 2 Ts and 2 Rs”.

Ernesto, the guy that runs TorrentFreak, has noticed some of these “pay for bittorrent” ads showing up on his site. He’s managed to blacklist a number of them but they just keep popping up. And his blacklist is full, so he can’t add anymore. Google should take aim at these advertisers since they’re obviously making money off a free program.

But just remember, don’t pay for BitTorrent, ever. There’s a plethora of free clients out there. Don’t pay for access to sites purporting to give access to bittorrent movies and music, they’re most likely a scam. And besides that, almost any torrent can be found on a number of BitTorrent search engines and public trackers. Bottom line is you shouldn’t have to pay a penny to use BitTorrent to it’s fullest extent. It’s all free people.

Head over to TorrentFreak for more details. Ernesto has an image of one of the Bittorrent Inc. advertisements that are currently running to warn people not to pay for BitTorrent.

Unlike other services, MoveDigital only deducts bandwidth from your account after the entire direct download is completed. If a direct download is stopped before completion, no bandwidth is deducted. For P2P traffic generated by MoveDigital on your behalf and for mobile streams, bandwidth is deducted on a per-byte transferred basis.

I can’t really comment on Vista though as I haven’t tried it yet. Jeremy Wright’s Ensight has some good information about Vista though. He’s got a few links to screenshots.

TDavid @ Make You Go Hmm doesn’t understand what all the excitement is about. And neither do I frankly. I suggest you read his take on all the microsofties partying it up for the beta release of Vista. Seems silly to me too.

I am mostly interested in what Microsoft has done with the user interface. Does it have a dashboard? I know there was talk a long time ago about a dashboard in Longhorn, dunno if it came through into the Vista Beta 1 or not. I stopped paying attention.

I hope Gnome officially adds some sort of dashboard soon. I think the Longhorn dashboard was different than the dashboard in Mac OS X. The dashboard that was in Longhorn and may be in Vista (I dunno yet), is more like Beagle, which looks awesome. Beagle is similar to the Spotlight in Mac OS X. I’d actually expect to see Beagle in Dropline Gnome sooner or later, even if it’s not part of the official Gnome. The Gnome people seem to be really good about scheduling releases and sticking to those deadlines. I’m not sure if they plan what new software to include in future releases. I’d bet Beable will officially be included with Gnome around Gnome 2.2 or 2.4, if the releases continue being numbered as they are now.

This was supposed to be a post about Windows Vista. Maybe I should have touched on that subject after actually trying Vista. Doesn’t matter, cuz Gnome kills Windows in terms of UI.

Oh, and for those of you who don’t want to validate your copy of Windows to get updates, see below. Found this via BoingBoing.

Before pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:

javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’)

It turns off the trigger for the key check.

After doing that, the page where you select “Custom” or “Express” is reloaded. Select your option and you can get the updates you want (not just the critical updates) without validating.

The screenshot ICE provides is amusing to me. You’ll notice the title of the video they have playing in VNC (the video player) is clearly a trailer. It’s only a couple minutes in length. And in the background they have the EliteTorrents site showing with a copy of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith up, ready to be downloaded. Digital Warfighter has the text of the FBI message, incase the site isn’t even accessible soon.

Here’s a little bit from the Wired article:

Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.

I originally read this at Slashdot. It’s supposed to launch within 2 weeks. I’m excited to check it out. I wonder if the MPAA or RIAA will be purchasing any advertising space on the search engine…

UPDATE: Tried going to search.bittorrent.com and was presented with a “Test for apache installation” page. I’d guess the search engine will show up at that address once it’s ready. So keep an eye there if you’re interested in trying this out once it’s available.

Anyway, here’s the news as reported by Om Malik.

itTorrent’s new version is easier, better and well simpler. In other words, it is trackerless which essentially means “that anyone with a website and an Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download.” The torrent tracking tasks instead of the server, are now off loaded to the client. Downside, well not for users, for MPAA maybe. Many times downloads can kill you with high bandwidth bills. However with the new version, well website operators can simply use the efficient download paradigm of Bit Torrent and can get “broadcast TV” economics working for them.

This looks pretty neat. Previously, you’d have to use a tracker to distribute your files, which was kinda confusing to users. This new trackerless BT is more confusing to me than the previous tracker versions. Trackers are still supported in the newer versions. You can get new releases of BitTorrent from BitTorrent.com.

The site has had lots of problems in the past. There were week long periods of downtime due to server issues and domains expiring. I’m sad to see the site go.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=757

Supposedly, no court authorized Comcast to give away personal information about their customers. I doubt a court would need to have a say in it though as copyright infringement was taking place.

Read the story @ C|Net News.com.

The e-mails are hilarious to read. Especially the replies sent by the guys that run The Pirate Bay. I won’t write too much more about this, but you should really checkout their legal threats page. Very funny and entertaining.

The url is:
http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/