News Universities list LimeWire, Kazaa, and other defunct software in piracy warning

[Admin]

Spurred by the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which includes anti-piracy measures, American colleges and universities must send warnings like these.

Universities list LimeWire, Kazaa, and other defunct software in piracy warning : Read more

 

[edzieba]

Filesharing applications in this context typically refer to applications that use the BitTorrent protocol (not to be confused with the app of the same name— plenty of other torrent applications exist) to transfer files between users to scale with how many are on the same torrent. A healthy torrent has people who have completed the file still connecting to the network and "seeding" the torrent by copying that data and sending it to other users wanting to download it. It's a very distributed form of filesharing and has been a staple of digital piracy for about as long as it has existed.

Most of the applications listed use the BitTorrent protocol or some variation to distribute files for free between users.

Was this generated by ChatGPT? NONE of the 'listed applications' use 'the bittorrent protocol', and most predate bittorrent's existence. 'Bittorrent' is not a generic term for piecewise distributed file transfer.

 

[fyiv]

That's right, all of those applications used the Gnutella Network, and BitTorrent didn't really hit it big until maybe 2004 or 2005, both are still P2P, but slightly different approaches to it. I guess nobody remembers the end game client for that network, FrostWire, which was a fork of LimeWire that gave less false positives and less viruses and all sorts of other things that would come through on the normal one.

And of course, uTorrent was the biggest torrent client back in the day, and pre-3.x builds are still probably one of the best ways to do it (2.35x was the last build before the BitTorrent company bought it and made it trash).

I can understand them blocking Gnutella network even if it doesn't exist anymore, just out of spite, but it's weird that they would be blocking BitTorrent, because there were some legitimate use cases back in the day for file sharing with it, but I guess that doesn't really matter that much anymore with cloud services and everything else.

Just another relic of a bygone time where the internet was cool, and you were in the know if you were able to figure it out. I only put the tricorn back on when I have no other options (because s#!ts expensive, yo!)