BigChampagne

Wow. These guys are claiming they are gathering stats on most p2p user. What’s intresting is they must have reverse engineered the kazaa stuff long before the open source community did. It also would seem that they are probably running Kazaa Supernodes in order to get this info, thus helping Kazaa users download stuff that the RIAA would rather they not. I bet they don’t tell their customers that.

I don’t think a company like this could exists if something like Overnet became more common place.

Camera in Sunglasses

The world slow catches up to Transmetropolitan. Birthday present suggestion everyone.

More UPnP NAT (now with source code!)

Wow, that was easy. I translated that VB junk that I mentioned in the last post into python, even found the MSDN docs for the object involved: upnp_example.py

UPnP Port Forwarding from WinXP

In a P2P app (say like Mnet) you need as many full peer (computers that can receive incoming connections as well as outgoing). Lots of homes now have (probably full of security holes) UPnP routers that will allow you to forward incoming connection to comptuers behind it.

I’m trying to learn how to monkey with this. On linux you might need to grok SOAP and learn whatever way M$ broke the standards with that (SOAPAction is a pain in the ass), but on WinXP you should be able to make some w32 api calls and have some COM object do the network calls for you.

So quickly poking around I found Programmatically Controlling a UPnP-Capable Firewall, on how to control port forwarding via COM in VB… and since I want to do this in python I found Quick Start to Client side COM and Python.

If I write some python to do this I will post it here.

Use "DarkNets", face stiffer penalties?

From Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground:

“The thing about darknets is that the users show more culpability than people who simply use peer-to-peer,” said Randy Saaf, referring to peer-to-peer sharing systems like KaZaA. Mr. Saaf is chief executive of MediaDefender Inc., a music technology company that does work for the record industry. “When people are found to be using them, they will face stiffer penalties.”

I can’t think of any legal reason why this may be. They are already asking for maximum damages from people. Sounds like someone who knows what’s headed his way and is handwaving to stop it.