But now, Renolds has returned and this time he's expanded on the original concept to create what appears to be a full-on App Store replacement application.

It's that last one, "Store," where all the shopping will take place. And unlike the official App Store, nothing is rejected. That's right - there's no approval process whatsoever and all apps will be added to the store within one week. The only exception to this rule will be releases not made free by their developers, says Alec. That means that appDowner isn't about to become a resource for sharing cracked copies of games that you would otherwise have to pay for.

But even without the illegal goods (a rule we're happy to support), appDowner has a lot of potential to compete with the other popular repositories/stores for jailbroken apps like Cydia and Icy. Because it uses BitTorrent technology, apps will always be available for download with no need for developers to worry about hosting issues. In addition, the technology will be able to be used for more than downloading just apps alone, if you're so inclined.

To kick start the launch, appDowner will include several popular apps like Steven Troughton-Smith's killer Stack application and Lights Off game. They'll even have some exclusive content from Nullriver, Inc., promises designer Miles Lorry, who teamed up with Renolds to work on the app.

No word yet on an exact release date, only that it will be arriving "very, very soon."

Stack for iPhone

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.

If the information were secure, this might be fine. However, in some monumental lapse of judgement, the entire site was left open to search spiders and accordingly indexed by Google, allowing anyone with hackerish leanings ample opportunity to create all kinds of mischief.

A Google search for "'infringement information' site:baytsp.com" yields distressing results. Some of the pages have been removed, but you can still have a look at the cached versions:

Whoops!

Not only have the forms been online for Google and the waiting world to view; the forms could also be completed and submitted online by just about anyone.

More technically savvy tricksters could send infringement notices of their own. "And, on top of that," the TechDirt blogger writes, "some have discovered that BayTSP's site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data."

Although this recent debacle is simply one more PR disaster for the media industries themselves, my first thoughts were echoed by TechDirt commenter Mechwarrior: "Once this hits 4chan, it's over."

Great Video Podcast Player

The area where Miro excels is as a video podcast client. Thanks to the Miro Guide, adding video podcasts like Democracy Now or the Onion News Network is just a two click process. The Miro Guide, which is very well designed, now features over 6000 video podcasts. It is important to remember, though, that this content is bound to your desktop, as Miro doesn't feature any support for portable players.

Too Much Competition

We really like the idea and people behind Miro, but while the promotional video calls it the "best internet video application available," others like Vuze or Boxee are currently offering a wider range of features. Maybe the comparison with Boxee is not necessarily a fair one, though, but the current trend is also clearly towards a convergence between TV and the Internet, and Miro doesn't offer a Boxee-like solution for bringing this content to your living room.

In an extensive guest post on TorrentFreak, a well known BitTorrent blog, Dan Morrill told his experience with offering his latest eBook, 'Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets' on popular BitTorrent tracker Mininova. Dan explains that his initial reason for releasing his eBook using BitTorrent was not for marketing purposes, but "to control the release and gather good stats on the process." We don't think he could've picked a better service. Within the first 24 hours, Morrill's eBook had been downloaded close to 700 times.

Based on the stats he received from Mininova, Morrill was also able to pinpoint the countries in which the eBook was being downloaded the most. Africa ranked high on the list, which is understandable because of the relatively large amount of e-commerce businesses that are set-up in Africa. Morrill was surprised to see India contributing to 5.2% of the overall downloads.

Operation BitTorrent a Success

Morrill rated his overall experience as highly satisfying and recommends using BitTorrent as a great content distribution channel for those that don't mind. The expansion of the BitTorrent network will only increase in the next few years. In doing so, we think this may be a tool that publishers will eventually start taking a lot more seriously than they do now. It's undeniable that BitTorrent can prove to be an effective marketing tool for a cheap price when used correctly. Nine Inch Nails concluded the same in March of this year when they uploaded part 1 of their 4 part album Ghosts I-IV to numerous BitTorrent sites. It became the #1 most downloaded album on The Pirate Bay, which helped to increase their sales tremendously for the rest of the album.

We can only wonder when others will catch on to the effectiveness of using BitTorrent sites to market and distribute content. You can download Dan Morrill's eBook 'Selling Books On Amazon, Tips and Secrets' here.

A major problem that plagued the release of Spore was the inclusion of a DRM system. This has caused multiple reviews of Spore to be disappointing for Electronic Arts (EA), the developing and publishing company of Spore. If EA hoped the problem would go away, it hasn't. Fans and "pirates" have taken things one step further to make Spore one of the most pirated games ever.

The DRM system included in Spore has caused an outrage in the gaming community. We stated in our review of the game that the DRM system would have to go if Spore wanted to succeed. Apparently, consumers of the game seem to feel the same way. As of today, Spore has been downloaded over 500,000 times on various bittorrent sites and doesn't look to be slowing down. The first 300,000 downloads of Spore happened after just one day of the game being released. These pirated versions of Spore remove the DRM system that users encounter when installing the game. While it's not uncommon for popular games to hit those type of numbers on P2P sites, it's unusual for it to happen so quickly. Currently, the game has been the most popular download all week on The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular and controversial bittorrent sites around.

DRM is Not the Answer

The Sims 2 currently holds the record for the most pirated game. Pirates and disappointed fans are looking to change that. According to the TorrentFreak blog,

[Spore's] download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.

Spore is still one of the worst rated games on Amazon. Since its release it has been given a rating of only 1 star by more than 50% of its reviewers. The majority of these ratings address problems with the DRM system. DRM is not the answer and continues to provoke "pirates" to release what publishers should have given to customers from the beginning.

There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. A commenter on the Pirate Bay known as "deathkitten" stated,

"You have the power to make this the most pirated game ever, to give corporate bastards a virtual punch in the face."

BitTorrent accounts for a substantial percentage of traffic on the internet and some people believe it causes unfair slowdowns for web users doing anything else online. Many other people argue that ISPs have an obligation to treat all internet traffic equally regardless of content. This is a key battle in the Network Neutrality debate.

Comcast voluntarily stopped throttling in March, but today's FCC decision is important FCC Chair Kevin Martin says so that "consumers deserve to know that the commitment is backed up by legal enforcement." Martin, a Republican, is believed by some to be taking an out-of-charecter populist stance on the matter because he's preparing to run for a position in the US House of Representatives.

EFF Releases "Switzerland"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today released software called "Switzerland" (as in, the neutral country) that can be used by consumers to test our networks for ISP interference.

The EFF explains:

"Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use."

We'll keep our eyes peeled for a version of the tool that doesn't require using the command line, though every network in the land can now assume that it has users tech-savvy enough to be monitoring its behavior.

This quote from the EFF release puts things into context:

"The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit."

What Do You Think?

The FCC's ruling was narrowly decided, through a 3 to 2 vote. Do you think ISPs have a legitimate interest in favoring some web traffic over others? On one hand, a future where big players get preferential treatment could cause a major slowdown in innovation. Startups and unknown application providers could be prevented from leveraging maximum bandwidth to offer new types of services to consumers. The most common example given is that YouTube may have struggled to make online video so common if they were discriminated against in their earliest days.

On the other hand, people downloading long lists of huge media files over common networks could be seen as an onerous drain on the "bandwidth commons." Slowing down an entire neighborhood's web use because you want to get the entire archives of some TV show is arguably pretty anti-social behavior.

Discussion above hasn't touched on legal matters, but for many people that's a big part of this debate as well. The US Congress, for example, voted this morning to require US colleges receiving federal funding to make commercial music purchasing services available to students online and filter traffic to deter P2P music sharing. The music industry says thank you! Some scientists using P2P on college campuses to transfer large files used in academic research, on the other hand, probably don't appreciate it as much. (That's probably not going on over the same networks, but the point is that there are very legitimate and important uses for P2P as well.)

We'd love to get our readers' thoughts on these questions - and for those of you able to put Switzerland to use, let us know if your ISP appears to be doing the same kinds of shady things that Comcast was slapped for today. These are going to be very big issues for the near-term future of the web.

Photo: Im in ur Internets by Jason Walton

The new Vuze client includes some really useful search and social features that are worth a look. It's remarkably easy to use and includes access to both affordably priced and free content from around the world.

The two new features that are most interesting are the ability to search other BitTorrent sites and the ability to add friends on Vuze. While the service itself has a fair amount of content available, including a good selection of BBC video for rent, users can now search for content on Mininova, Sumotorrent, BTJunkie and Jamendo. Not all of the content on those sites is rights-holder approved but that's how it goes. It's a very useful feature.

Second, the ability to add other Vuze users as friends looks truly useful. Friends are able to show each other the content they've discovered, something that will no doubt save time exploring the huge world of torrented content available. Most important, friends are able to get priority access to each other's shared downloading power - meaning that friends and family can help accelerate access to content of mutual interest. That's a great idea. As Janko Roettgers pointed out in his lengthy review of the new features on Vuze, the social features could use some more richness like the ability to share reviews of content - but it's a great start.

People Will Pay for Good Content Online

While most of the content available through the new Vuze is available for free, there's a lot of it that you have to buy or rent. A notable UK study released last night found that 80% of young people surveyed would be willing to pay for a legal P2P service . As Nate Anderson wrote at ArsTechnica last night: "What the respondents appear to want is an unlimited download service free of DRM that could be legally accessed for a monthly fee, something that doesn't yet exist."

This author can agree with that. After watching all the free episodes of The Office on the wonderful service Hulu, I'm ready to pay for some more. Unfortunately, there's no such option. Renting the original UK version of the show can be done on Vuze and we'll see what kind of search results come up there.

Sign me up for "an unlimited download service free of DRM that could be legally accessed for a monthly fee" - if content owners would get on board then it could very well end up being a great deal.

For now I'll keep using Vuze; I've found some great things on there before - now if I can make some friends my downloading will go faster. Vuze has raised $34 million in venture funding, has the co-founder of Tivo on its board and reported having more than 15 million installs at the end of last year.

Revision3 uses Bittorrent to help distribute their shows across the web by running their own tracker which coordinates the sharing and downloading of their content. Despite this perfectly legal and legitimate practice, MediaDefender set their sights on Revision3's servers and flooded them with SYN packets, effectively shutting them down.

What's even stranger is that MediaDefender didn't even bother to spoof the packets they sent - each one was easily traceable. As Jim Louderback explains it on the Rev3 blog, "it's as if they wanted us to know who they were."

The real question now is who hired MediaDefender to do this damage? The company acts on behalf of its clients, who in the past have included Sony, Universal Music, the RIAA, and the MPAA. One can only imagine that today's list of old media companies fearing Revision3's success is a mile long.

Once Louderback determined MediaDefender was behind the attack, he got on the phone to the ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard (MediaDefender is a subsidiary of Artist Direct) and Ben Grodsky, Vice President of Operations at Media Defender. Villard admitted that MediaDefender had been abusing Revision3's network for months, allowing them to use the tracking server to point to non-Revision3 files. When Rev3 noticed that and began to de-authorize those rogue files, it set off the flood of SYN packets which were attempting to reconnect to the files stored on the company's servers. Although Grodsky admits that his servers sent the packets, he claimed it was only every three hours. Rev3's logs show 8,000+ packets per second.

Why Hasn't MediaDefender Been Shut Down?

To sum up, MediaDefender was using Revision3's server without approval, they appear to be lying about the level of the attack, and they had no business attacking Revision3 in the first place since the company runs a legitimate business that just happens to use Bittorrent as a distribution technology.

In the end, Louderback concludes "I don't think Media Defender deliberately targeted Revision3 specifically...the company has a history of using their servers to launch denial of service attacks against distributors. They saw us as a "distributor"..." We're not so sure, but it looks like it's now going to be up to the FBI to sort it out, since they have been contacted and are now involved.

Ultimately, the situation again brings to light the very questionable business tactics of MediaDefender itself. If traditional media companies are using MediaDefender as a hired gun to attack "illegal" filesharing networks and a side effect of those attacks is the takedown of a legitimate business, then it's time this information was publicly revealed and addressed in a court of law. Enough with the vigilante tactics - it's time MediaDefender was shut down for good themselves.

Some P2P promising apps circa 2006; RedSwoosh had a nice exit, acquired by Akamai in April '07.

As we noted back in '06, P2P is about many-to-many distribution and has so far been most useful for distributing music and other large multimedia files. Just today we heard that the music band Nine Inch Nails is releasing their new album via BitTorrent. So clearly P2P is of great utility for distributing media over the Web. And let's face it, P2P could be the key to the future of social networking and online video - two of the most important parts of the consumer Web - because P2P provides a scalable architecture for storing large media files. The trend is for UGC (user generated content) to continue to ramp up, with more and more multimedia (= large files).

There have been some notable web 2.0 apps built on top of P2P networks. The most famous is probably Skype - self-described as "the first P2P telephony network". Skype has proven that P2P can be the backbone of a very successful startup venture, if all the stars align.

However AllPeer's failure and Skyrider's 'failure to launch' indicates that the commercial market for P2P, as a standalone service, is as hard as ever to crack. Skyrider is said to be still around and raising money, but frankly it's not a good look to promise something revolutionary and 18 months later still not have a real product out.

Conclusion: Commercialising P2P = Tough Market

AllPeers set out to add "file sharing to the web browser". Technically the service seemed fine, however the reason for the closure according to their blog is that "we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service." That indicates that AllPeer's problems were more based around marketing and the luck of the draw in getting a startup to ramp up (which can be as serendipitous as a StumbleUpon click).

We've seen that P2P can be used with success in a startup (ref Skype); and of course there is still a thriving underground network for P2P. However commercialising P2P as a service appears to be going nowhere fast (if anyone has an update on Skyrider, please leave a comment). And it also perhaps indicates that technically speaking, P2P holds too many challenges for startups to commercialise - that seemed to be the opionion of Tim Bray and Radia Perlman of Sun Microsystems when I interviewed them in August 2006.

What are your thoughts on P2P's commercial future?

That's very much like the advice that Marshall Kirkpatrick gave to Reznor writing on this blog in January after Reznor complained about the download-to-pay ratio the pay-if-you-want Saul Williams album that Reznor produced received late last year. "Times are changing and if you can, it's better to work on innovating along with them than it is to make dragging your feet and suing people your business model," advised Kirkpatrick.

At the time, Reznor wrote that he was "disheartened" that just 28,322 of the 154,449 people who downloaded Williams' album chose to pay the $5 for a higher quality copy. At the same time, though, that's nearly as many as who bought Williams' previous traditional CD release in 2004 (which sold 33,897 copies) and far more who are hearing his music -- which could theoretically translate to increased concert ticket and merchandise sales. Further, because by not dealing with a label the artist is likely taking a much larger cut of the download revenue than they would receive of CD sales revenue, Williams probably made more money on fewer transactions this time around.

Clearly, Reznor was not disheartened enough to forgo trying a similar type of release for his own new album. Ghosts I-IV part I is available as a free download on the NIN site, as well as on BitTorrent. The entire album is available as a $5 download, a $10 double CD, a $75 "deluxe" package with CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copies, and a $300 "ultra-deluxe" edition that also includes vinyl copies and signed giclee art prints. The $5 download can also be had via Amazon -- where the album has quickly shot up to the #1 spot on the sales charts.

The 9-track free edition of the album is licensed under a Creative Commons license and is free for non-commercial use. "We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc." said the band in release notes.

Conclusions

While it is impossible to predict how this release will fare compared with previous traditional NIN releases, that may not be a fair question. The dynamics of the music industry have changed and artists like Reznor and Radiohead are blazing new trails as they attempt to figure out how to best release music under these changing market conditions. If 18.3% of downloaders pay -- as they did for Williams -- then that's probably not a bad number for NIN, who can bet that they'll get far more downloads than Williams (Ghosts is already the most downloaded torrent at The Pirate Bay) and will presumably be pocketing most of the revenue.

What do you think? Is Reznor's release a harbinger of the future of the music industry? Let us know your thoughts on the issue in the comments.

1. Not all P2P downloading is illegal. Some people may be downloading a digital copy of an album or single that they own, a practice called format-shifting that the recording industry has said they won't sue for (and theoretically exists within fair use guidelines).
2. Do the numbers include fake MediaDefender files people are downloading? If a person downloads 5 fake tracks before finding the one they're looking for, is that 6 downloads or 1?
3. Some people download solely to improve share ratio on BitTorrent sites, but don't actually have any desire for the files they're downloading.
4. People are obsessed with discographies and might download an entire set of albums when they really only want one or two songs.

I would add that there is a fifth reason that TorrentFreak failed to mention, which is perhaps the most important reason why illegal downloads don't equate to lost sales. People download music they wouldn't pay for. Not all of the music people download from P2P networks is music that they would buy in stores or via legit download sites were the downloading option not available. Many times people download music that they hear in passing simply because they can, but not because they like it enough to buy it (in fact, it is precisely that they don't like it enough to buy it -- just enough to hear a few more times -- that they download via Kazaa or BitTorrent instead of pay for it).

In fact, I'd go so far as to guess that the majority of music people download via P2P networks is not music they would buy in stores. Further, a recent study showed that P2P downloading actually leads to more purchases of CDs in stores. We've set up a poll below to test that theory. For anyone who has ever downloaded music illegally via a P2P network, please respond to the anonymous poll below.

There was one thing the IFPI definitely got right in their annual report. "Progress in the digital music market is being hampered by lack of interoperability between services and devices," they wrote (emphasis mine), hinting that DRM that ties consumers to a specific devices or service is bad for the industry. This is something that consumers have long been aware of, and that the record labels are finally starting to catch on to.

In my testing, westream worked perfectly with nary a hiccup. I was able to quickly stream any track, start to finish (I picked a torrent with an ample amount of seeders from Legit Torrents for my tests). Of course, the quality of audio and level of gaplessness you experience will be totally dependent on the health of the torrent you're trying to stream.

The volume control seemed a bit wonky (going from very soft to very, very loud without much in between) and it would be nice to have the option to download the torrent straight away if you like what you're hearing. But in general, westream performs very well.

Westream is a useful BitTorrent innovation that lets users essentially "try before they buy." Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool.

For their part, the defendants, site operators Justin Bunnell, Forrest Parker, Wes Parker and Valence Media, put forward multiple arguments for why they should not hand over server logs. Initially, they argued that because their servers were located in the Netherlands they were under the jurisdiction of Dutch law and were protected by a US court order to turn them over.

Later they told the judge that they could not comply with an order to turn over certain server logs because it was temporary information and was not able to be retained. The lawyer for the defendants said that they were reluctant to turn over records of IP addresses to protect the privacy of their users.

The BBC reports that TorrentSpy is expected to appeal. The MPAA was predictably pleased by the ruling, calling TorrentSpy a "one-stop shop for copyright infringement" in a statement.