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Pirate Bay Traffic

The seizing of Pirate Bay’s servers has raised many legal and political implications but what are the traffic implications on the loss of servers? Keeping in mind that there are other trackers online can the effects of the closing of The Pirate Bays servers be seen? After all, the Pirate bay has claimed to be the worlds biggest bittorrent- tracker. This is should not be taken as a rigerous attempt to measure Internet traffic but only an indication of the impact of the loss of a major online site.

Looking at the traffic for of a student dorm at Chalmers Universtity in Göteborg for the last week we see this:

The blue line represents the amount downloaded in bits/second while the green represents the amound uploaded in bits/second. The servers went down on Wednesday 31 May. If we take a look at the traffic data for the last month we see:

last week was week 22.

The amount of traffic seems to have dipped by about 20% the question is whether or not this is caused by the loss of The Pirate Bays servers? If we look at the traffic data for the last year we can see that there is a natural dip which begins at about this time which is the of term. While it is difficult to be exact the dip which coincides with the loss of the Pirate Bay’s servers seems to be a bit earlier than the annual dip due to the summer holidays.

The most interesting dip in yearly traffic occurs at Christmas. On Christmas eve at 3 pm it is traditional for most Swedish families to watch television (Disney Christmas Special) and then sit down to eat together.

Posted on by mklang

Editing Hell

Editing my thesis is hell. Every time I pick it up to do some more work there is a physical feeling of lethargy which needs to be overcome. Thankfully a quote of Albert Camus keeps me on track. He wrote this in his personal notebook on September 30, 1937

It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.

Albert Camus (1947) photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson

This was not written for others but I see it as a message to himself- a reminder that the work must be done. So ok – I am not Camus but I realise that when such a great writer needed to remind himself of the work that needed to be done…I feel comforted and begin again.

The thesis is now 101 815 words long. This is spread over 270 pages. An updated draft can be found online here.

Posted on by mklang

Back Online

A couple of days ago 50 police raided the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. Today they are back online. The site is slow but the implications are far reaching.

Whats new? Amongst other things the name: The Police Bay and their new logo – too cool!!!

So it took 50 police with a questionable legal basis to take down the Pirate Bay for five days. The ethical and legal questions will carry on for a long time. For review of the questions see here. The Swedish Minister of Justice will have to use more than his usual amount of teflon to avoid this mess sticking to him.

Posted on by mklang

Starcups, Starbucks & Trademarks

While on a short coffee break from the exciting world of thesis writing I saw this sign on the coffee place next to the place where I was having coffee.

Starcups Coffee? Its amazing that Starbucks would let such a thing survive… There seems to be a site registered online but it keeps timing out. Thanks to google image search here is a better image of the Starcups logo and next to it the Starbucks logo.

So what do you think? Trademark infringement? Which is the copy and which is the original? If you know anything about this please comment. And if you happen to be in Göteborg on Plantagegatan then I can recommend Cafe con Leche next door to Starcups…

Posted on by mklang

Raiding Pirate Bay

What is The Pirate Bay (TPB) supposed to have done?

TPB is the site of a BitTorrent tracker. In other words it helps users to locate BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is a variant (some would say development) of the Peer-to-Peer networks. It (the BitTorrent protocol) is a method for advertising and sharing files over a network.

Basically users looking for files (this can be films, music, texts, software etc) go to the search engine (TPB) and conduct a search. If they find what they are looking for they can download a â??.torrentâ?? file. This is not the actual end file they are looking for. It is a file which contains meta data about the file which they are looking for.

This data contains two sections. One that specifies the URL of the tracker and the other that contains the filename, fragment size, key length and a pass. The torrent file can contain information about many end files.

By activating the torrent file one begins the download of the end file or files. These are downloaded from several computers where the file is stored. As soon as part of the file is downloaded the downloader also becomes a source where others may download this part of the file. Once the download is complete the downloader may decide to keep this file available to others or remove it from the swarm.

Torrents are used to coordinate file sharing of copyrighted material both with and without the copyright holders consent. The technology cannot define whether the actions are legal or illegal. At present I have two complete files which I have been sharing for some time via BitTorrent. Since I am sharing complete files I am called a Seeder.

I have the most recent version of UBUNTU which is a Linux operating system licensed under the GPL license where sharing (and more) it is allowed. I have a film called Elephants Dream which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and it is therefore permissible to share. In both these cases I am providing a service and helping the legal distribution of material.

OK â?? so that was the technical side. What does TPB do?

TPB is a search engine which helps people find the small tracker (.torrent) files. In other words the small files which contain information about where the end files are within the network. These tracker (.torrent) files are possibly not even capable of being copyrightable. If they are protected by copyright then they are the property of the author â?? in other words their creator. Not the creator of the end files that they track.

TPB case is going to be exciting to watch because the people in control of TPB are well aware of their legal position and of what they are doing. They will not have made the newbie mistake of having copyrighted material on their servers without permission.

Is it illegal to do what TPB does? If I tell you that you can buy a Gucci wallet knockoff at a well known marketplace am I guilty of the crime of â??facilitating copyright infringementâ??? Better still if I tell you how to make your own Gucci wallet am I still innocent? If I could sow and I create a copy of a fashionable suit for my own use is this copyright violation? If I instruct someone else is this â??facilitating copyright infringementâ???

If TPB are â??facilitating copyright infringementâ?? then what about Google? or Flickr? Google helps me find images and texts of masses of copyrighted material. Flickr not only helps me find it but also helps me store it?

What about the local library? They help me find and copy the material I needed to write this postâ?¦

The next step is obviously the question of the police action. The police have removed property from TPB. Removing property is a serious step and the question is whether the alleged crime motivates such action. In the case of computer equipment the question of surplus information must also be taken into consideration. In other words have the police taken too much?

TPB website today states that even servers containing material from organisations not connected with TPB were taken â?? in this case this amounts to a serious violation of an organisations ability to communicate. Can this amount of force justified â?? is the police action proportional to the alleged crime? Especially when other non-accused organisations are affected by police action.

Posted on by mklang

For the bibliography

After procrastinating and reading them online for the better part of a year I bought them. They have now arrived:

 

Jorge Cham’s brilliant comic strip about PhD studies have been collected in the two albums “Piled Higher and Deeper: A graduate student comic strip collection” and “Piled Higher and Deeper Chapter 2: Life is tough and then you graduate” They are an absolute necessary part of the required reading for PhD students (or those considering the path). With great sections like “What is…the thesis?“, “Grad Motivation Graphs“, “Newton’s Three Laws of Graduation” and “Writing” the strip captures what writing a dissertation can be like.

Posted on by mklang

Graph of the Website

As you may have seen I have updated the design of this site – let me know what you think.

Also I found this website that makes a graph of your website – check it out. What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Posted on by mklang

Sexist Coop Konsum

Coop Konsum is launching an advertising campaign which uses images of vegetables shaped as suggestive female body parts. Their sexist attitude is made even more hypocritical since their message (according to them) is that beauty comes from within (a message which is included on the posters)…

 

 

According to Coop Konsum the campaign is a part in a strategy to present itself as a healthy store which helps its customers choose healthy foods. How come they need to be sexist to be health conscious? Why do they feel the need to lower one standard in order to attempt to raise another? And why does the whole thing feel like a scam â?? maybe because they keep selling the same amount of unhealthy products as they always didâ?¦
Coop writes about their campaign here.

(via Media Culpa)

Posted on by mklang

Meatrix II

Its food politics and awareness served up by Sustainable Table in the form of animated flash films. Sustainable Table wants to make consumers aware of the problems with factory farming and to promote sustainable food.
The followup of the brilliant Meatrix movie is out now. Watch the new movie here!

In an age characterized by mechanization, there exists a large gap between our illusions about where food comes from and the stark reality of industrial meat and dairy production. Enter the Meatrix films. The Meatrix II: Revolting is the sequel to the original smash hit, the critically acclaimed exposé of industrial farming, The Meatrix. Simultaneously spoofing the popular Matrix films while educating consumers about the evils of factory farming, The Meatrix brings the concept of sustainability to a wide audience of mainstream consumers. With a growing audience of over 10 million viewers worldwide, translations into over 25 languages, as well as a 2005 Webby Award, the Meatrix has been an incredibly successful tool for raising interest in Sustainable Tableâ??s unique goals and projects. www.themeatrix.com and www.themeatrix2.com

Check out their earlier movie the Grocery Store Wars.

(via Peter Forsberg)

Posted on by mklang

Did you miss it too?

Today (May, 25) was international towel day. The day is celebrated for being 42 days after the anniversary of Douglas Adams death. To commemorate the day and to remember Douglas – carry a towel…
I missed it – again…

Why towel day? Shame on you for displaying such ignorance. But in the aid of your further education:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Towel Day 2006 – Innsbruck

So long and thanks for all the fish, Douglas…

Posted on by mklang