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| SXSW 2011 on BitTorrent: 4.49 GB of Free Music Posted: 10 Feb 2011 01:41 PM PST
All of the MP3s are still freely available for download on the festival's site, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. For the past three years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and this week the first torrent containing 792 tracks has been released. The 4.49 gigabyte torrent will likely be followed by another release later this month or early March. Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre. In total, the torrents of the previous editions have been downloaded close to 150,000 times. Although all tracks can also be streamed and downloaded directly from the festival website, a big torrent makes more sense since it’s easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent saves SXSW some money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn't watching over your shoulder when downloading music This year's SXSW music festival takes place from March 16-20 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars. For those interested in even more free music to fill up their MP3-players, there’s always Jamendo with nearly 50,000 free-to-download albums, also supported by BitTorrent. That’s a few Terabytes of free music, good for 5 years of continuous play. a |
| BitTorrent User and $4 Seedbox Saves 172 BBC Websites From Extinction Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:11 AM PST
Well, not quite. An officially anonymous BitTorrent user (who TheNextWeb believe may be called Ben Metcalfe) has set out to prove that the websites in question can not only be saved for posterity, but also at a super cheap price. “As time goes on, the on-going cost of storing this website data decreases – to the extent that it is practically nothing by today’s costs,” he explains. “The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online – independently – for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee (around $3.99).” The anonymous user says that he embarked on his mission to save the websites at almost zero cost to “expose the ‘cost savings’ of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government.” Of course, since this is TorrentFreak, it will be no surprise to any of our readers that when people want to copy, archive and distribute digital data with a tiny financial outlay, there is no better mechanism online than BitTorrent. This task is no exception. Once the individual discovered that the BBC would be deleting the 172 websites, he began spidering them and ripping their content to a VPS server, purchased for the bargain price of $3.99. This seedbox is hosting the content which is all neatly wrapped up in a torrent for anyone to download and share. “Contained within this torrent is a gzip tarball of each site, archived individually, allowing you to download just the site(s) you are interested in,” explains the site ripper. He adds that he would like to see people continue to seed the torrent so that the sites can continue to exist after the BBC finally scraps them, adding that people may even be able reconstruct and host all or some of the sites. This is not the first time a whole bundle of sites have been saved with BitTorrent distribution. Last year a huge torrent weighing in at more than 641 GB hit the net which linked to the entire archive of Geocities sites which were eventually shut down by Yahoo. a |
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In late January the BBC confirmed that due to a 25% budget reduction it would be axing 360 jobs by 2013. The cuts, which dig deep into BBC Online, mean that half of this international broadcaster’s websites will not only stop being updated, but will disappear offline forever.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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