Posted in
Main on December 2nd, 2009 by Devindra Hardawar
In the past few weeks, there have been some major shifts in the BitTorrent community which have had a resounding impact on the larger world of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. They’ve led to some of the largest BitTorrent sites completely changing focus, or figuring out smarter ways to continue sharing files illegally.
Meanwhile, Adobe announced a massively interesting inclusion in their upcoming Flash player 10.1 update – a seemingly innocuous version number that is adding some world-changing P2P technology to Flash video streaming.
I’d like to discuss these opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology, and what they ultimately mean for how we use the Web.
Read more
Posted in
Main on August 7th, 2009 by Pingdom
Spotify, the European peer-to-peer music streaming service that gives its users access to millions of songs for free is gaining more buzz every day. The service already has millions of users and has managed what many thought was impossible: it got the big record labels on board a free service and gained access to their music libraries.
Spotify has deals with Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI and Merlin. The first four of these are often called the “big four” record companies.
How did Spotify pull this off?
Read more
Posted in
Main on April 2nd, 2009 by Pingdom
Yesterday, a new anti-piracy law went live in Sweden. The result was an immediate 30% drop in Sweden’s Internet traffic.
The combined traffic passing through Sweden’s Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That’s a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place.
Read more
Posted in
Main on March 10th, 2009 by Pingdom
Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.
We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.
Read more
Posted in
Outages on September 24th, 2008 by Pingdom
On Tuesday (September 23), the rather infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was down for a continuous 3 hours and 11 minutes. The site went down at 2:44 p.m. CET (08:44 a.m. EDT).
Read more
Posted in
Main on February 22nd, 2008 by Pingdom
Since February 8, the Joost website has had outages almost on a daily basis. Some short, some up to an hour long. With a full week left of February, the website has already been unavailable for a total of five hours and ten minutes this month. This can be contrasted with January, when they had [...]
Read more
