Archive for: file sharing
Online communities have since been known as tribes. Thanks to Seth Godin’s famous book of the same title, it’s forced us to think of our online networks and communities in a unique light. Much like primitive tribes of earlier times, we’ve now formed digital tribes where we’ve found comfort in connections with people of similar interests, habits, hobbies, and histories. The tribes we belong to have a simple connectivity of communication that we long to maintain, enter Gigatribes.
The concept of communicating with your tribe is easy to see in networks such as Twitter, Facebook, or even LinkedIn. What if you wanted to share files in a local depository where all of your tribe can have access to? Or what if you only wanted to share with certain members of the tribe? Gigatribes allows you to build your community, much like any other social network, but now you’re able to share large files seamlessly and with out problems.
But there is a problem. How is this different from DropBox? Or maybe ZumoBox? Or any other of the hundreds of file sharing sites. In looking at the application itself I didn’t see anything that really stood out to make this the go to community file sharing network out there.
What it’ll come down to is comfort level and ease of use for your needs. DropBox and Zumobox both have mobile apps that give you access to your files on the go. No such app was found for Gigatribes which already puts this network at a disadvantage.
We’ve mentioned DropBox as one of the coolest free file sharing options available in the market. And now, as most of the cool web apps, the iPhone version has been released to the public. Download it from here (iTunes link):
DropBox has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface, using your Mac, Linux or Windows client; or even using the web interface. You can simply synchronize your files everywhere; it doesn’t matter from which computer you are connecting. And now, it won’t matter if you are using your laptop, desktop or iPhone.
Some of the other features included are:
- Possibility to use public links for your files: Instead of using rapidshare, megaupload or any other file hosting; you can upload your files to DropBox in a public folder and share it with the community.
- Usability similar with Subversion: With the local client, you can store your files in your hard drive. And every time you put files in there, they are automatically synchronized.
- 2gb of storage.
And some of the features that you can see with the iPhone app:
- Download files for offline viewing: Add files to your ‘Favorites’, and they’ll be accessible at any time.
- Take photos and videos and sync them to your Dropbox: Take a photo from your iPhone and email its public link to a friend in less than a minute.
Take a quick look:
It seems like these days you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a multitude of Twitter Apps, all of them struggling against each other vying for attention of the masses. Much like the people who use twitter. Well now it’s the turn of Filetwt.
It’s all very simple and convenient. Just put in your Twitter name and password, type in a description then upload a file. A link to that file will be posted on your twitter account.
Filetwt is a tool of convenience as it wouldn’t take too much effort to find one of the many other file uploading websites and then manually post the link to twitter yourself. That way you could have files larger than 20 megs. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more well known uploading websites added a Tweet option.
According to the website if you sign up you can get Private Tweets, faster file uploads, updates and stuff. Personally I try not to sign up for anything if I don’t have to and the upload speed seems reasonable enough.
DropBox it’s a tool that offers you file hosting, synchronization and publishing. This free product does not represent anything that is not available in the web right now, but let me say that the usability and features available had been a very nice experience for me so far.
One of the coolest things that you can find with this tool is the similarity with a Subversion client: Instead of using only a web app to upload/download your files, works directly with a client and selecting the local folders you want to use as your dropbox, the files are automatically synchronized without any user intervention.
More features for dropbox:
- Free registration with 2GB of storage.
- Separates your personal files with public files that you can share with friends. Accessing directly with a public link.
- Files secure with SSL and encrypted with AES-256.
- Windows, Mac and Linux clients agents available.
- Besides the installed client, you can use the web app to upload/download files.
There has been a lot of talk about Rapidshare, a free file-hosting service, in which has been handing over information about their users who might have been comitting copyright infringments to major record labels. According to TorrentFreak since the information has been leaked German authorities has raided the home of at least one uploader.
Among other albums, Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” was made available on Radipshare by an anonymous user on the day before its official release.
TorrentFreak cited the German local Gulli, which reported that copyright holders there are citing the law they have used to compel ISPs to disclose the identities of suspected file-swappers, to get Rapidshare to disclose information on its users.
TorrentFreak posited that this strategy could potentially be duplicated to go after other free file-hosting services, such as MegaUpload, and even BiTorrent sites.
Copyright holders have already sued Rapidshare, and a German court ruled in October that the company must work proactively to remove copyrighted material uploaded to its servers.
There has been a lot of reports this morning about the Pirate Bay and their trial. Im going to list some of the best sources at the bottom of this post if you are interested in reading. Anyways, the Pirate Bay trial was very interesting indeed. At times the trial was just a media circus and it didn’t really have much substance. However, I wanted to just write a few of my thoughts and also pose a few questions because I’m not an expert at copyright law, especially in Sweden.
The Pirate Bay trial came to a verdict stage but after watching Peter Sunde chat about the results Im really too clear on the actual verdict and what is going to happen to the site and also the people involved.
According to TorrentFreak who was the first to report on the verdict (because it was leaked from the court), all four of the guys involved has been fined and also received a jail time of a year each. However, as you can tell from the press conference Peter Sunde did, is that he is not actually in jail. Here in the UK the process is quite simple. A court case is either civil or a criminal. In Sweden it seems as though they first of all don’t define a court case, and considering that copyright law is a civil case that also means that jail time is not an option.
Peter Sunde also suggested that this was only the first verdict and implied that it was in a very low level court and the Pirate Bay is going to continue to appeal and this whole process could take between 4-5 years.
Am I right on all this information or am I missing something here?
What is the future of file sharing
Let’s say this whole thing plays out in the high court and The Pirate Bay loses. Let’s say BitTorrent completely ceases to exist as a result. (Just play along for a minute.) Would that, then, be the end of online file-sharing?
The answer: of course not. Even in that extreme (and extremely unlikely) scenario, little would be accomplished in the grand scheme of things. Technology is constantly evolving. Just as more advanced decentralized peer-to-peer networks sprung up in the wake of Napster’s shutdown, new alternatives would surface once again were a site like The Pirate Bay to lower its sails. Already, countless other methods exist for exchanging data with ease, and more will only pop up as the months wear on.
Other sources of information:
ArsTechnica, PCWorld, Mashable, PaidContent, MusicAlly and Kotaku.
Microsoft it offering a free download of the E-book “Windows Vista Resource Kit” written by Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team. Microsoft Press Books is celebrating its 25th Anniversary of with this “Free E-book of the Month” offer. For downloading you need to sign in with your Windows Live ID and register with Microsoft Learning.
Some of the core areas covered in this book are exploit new Group Policy features, settings, and ADMX templates, administer disks, file systems, file sharing, search, and Internet Explorer, manage IPsec, IPv6, wireless, and remote connectivity.
Download Windows Vista Free E-Book
