Dowbrigade

Hey, what’s up with Bit
Torrent? Although a little hit-and-miss, this technology and the various
front ends developed to make it easier to use, were the most reliable
way to download, er, review copies of music, movies and television
shows. For example thanks to bit torrent we can clearly state that the DVD-rip Chinese language
version of House of Flying Daggers is better quality than the VCD English
subtitles version, although it’s subtitles are difficult to understand
unless one reads Dutch. Actually, we have gotten lots of video snippets
this way which we have used in class to illustrate various aspects of
modern
American
culture
and language.

We know that the RIAA and the MPA are putting
lots of pressure on hosting sites and ISP’s to try to get a handle on
this exploding phenomena. It appears to be having an effect.

Since early yesterday (Christmas Eve) we have
been unable to get a single torrent to hookup with any of our "peers". Normally,
we get a successful download about half the time, an operational inconvenience
which makes fishing for files somewhat akin to fishing for bass, albeit
with a considerably higher rate of success. We imagined that the technical
complexities and unpredictability were
what was keeping bit torrent in the province of the geeks and protecting
it from the full wrath of the copy police. Dream on.

Our current hypotheses are:

• Our ISP (cable company) got one of those nasty
  cease and desist letters and is blocking torrent downloads somehow
• The Mac OS system upgrade (10.3.7) which we installed
  just before noticing the shutdown contained a torrent-download block
  (we have no idea if this is technically possible)
• The copy police have flooded the net with faux
  .torrent files which don’t connect to anything
• It’s all a bad dream/unfortunate coincidence and
  things will be back to normal as soon as we can wake up or change
  our luck.

Any info, rumors or opinions out there?