P2P

Transmission is one of the very best choices for a BitTorrent client on the Mac, being both extremely lightweight (some users even manage to run the Ubuntu version on their cell phones!) and fairly feature-packed. Transmission's interface is easy to use--and easy on the eyes--and this open-source app provides a whole host of clever features and flexible settings, especially when it comes to managing your bandwidth.

Transmission lets you queue downloads, set "Speed Limits" for certain times of day, stop seeding when you've met a specified ratio, and more--all with live download stats viewable directly in … Read more

uTorrent 3.0 (download) graduated to beta yesterday, combining some impressive new features with initiatives from parent company BitTorrent to encourage legal torrent usage.

The new beta can stream videos and music while the files are still downloading, using progressive and sequential download technology. The streaming feature can also be used to preview a file before committing to a full download. The preview feature can lend itself to the new basic socialization features in uTorrent, which serve as a passive reminder while downloading that you can interact with other people also seeding or leeching the torrent.

You can now rate … Read more

On today's show, Android is taking over the world (seriously), Internet-starved users turn to ham radio and dial-up to get the word out of Egypt, and Intel's Sandy Bridge chipsets are delayed (uh oh). Also, details about a possible Netflix-like streaming service that would be free for Amazon Prime users. As if Amazon Prime could get any more awesome. All the right moves, Amazon. All the right moves. Plus, some problems with quashing subpoenas. --Molly

Skype has pinned the blame for last week's outage in part on a buggy version of its software for Windows.

In a blog posted today, Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe explained the house of cards that took down the service the morning of Wednesday, December 22, and kept it offline for many until the following day.

On December 22, a number of support servers that handle offline instant messaging became overloaded, according to Rabbe. Because of that, some Skype clients didn't receive responses as quickly as usual. A bug in one particular Skype client for Windows (version 5.… Read more

Lawyers representing independent filmmakers, including the studio that produced Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker," might learn something from a document filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce today by music, television, and film industry trade groups.

The Commerce Department recently sent out a request for information, known as a "Notice of Information," on "copyright policy, creativity, and innovation in the Internet economy." What the Commerce Department intends to do with the information it obtains was unclear this afternoon, but it did receive a response from nine trade groups representing the entertainment sector. In that … Read more

The long saga of the Lime Wire company appears to be close to an ending.

The maker of the popular LimeWire file-sharing software--a peer-to-peer setup along the lines of the original Napster--has announced that at the beginning of next year, it will cease business, as originally reported by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital.

Owing to a copyright complaint filed against it in 2006 by the Recording Industry Association of America, Lime Wire had already been ordered in October of this year to shut down its peer-to-peer service. But, following Napster's example, it had previously opened a legitimate online music subscription service, … Read more

Peter Ha from TIME Magazine's Techland joins us again today to wrap up a week's worth of stories, including yesterday's Facebook meltdown, Adidas sneakers inspired by Boba Fett, Wil Wheaton, Halo: Reach, Moleskines, and more!

We kick off the show with Peter showing off his new limited-edition Star Wars X Adidas Originals ZX800 sneakers with side panels inspired by Boba Fett! You can see that the shoes are influenced by Boba Fett's weathered armor, and the special Mandalorian patches on the heels. Peter definitely made the right choice...the Adidas Chewbacca shoes from the same collection aren't quite as subtle.

Peter also tells us about the news around Techland, and apparently actor Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation) is now writing for the Web site. Check out all of Wil's articles online, including The Evolution of E-mail Spam, Why I Hate DRM, and Recovering from W00tstock.

Apparently CNET wasn't the only office that almost went up in smoke after Facebook mysteriously displayed a DNS error yesterday afternoon. Soon after, Facebook software engineering director Robert Johnson blamed the technical error on a change to the site that caused configuration value errors for every client, causing Facebook's clusters to be "overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To fix this error, engineers utilized a classic troubleshooting method that's spanned a hundred of years of electrical design: turn it off, and then back on again. That's all it took, and while some users might still experienced intermittent errors over the next few days, the majority of us can sleep well knowing our profiles are still intact and open for liking.

Today is the last day to sign up for our Twitter contest for a chance to win a pair of tickets to see "The Social Network" with The 404 next Tuesday, September 28. To enter, simply follow us @The404 and RETWEET THIS. You can also become a fan of The 404 Facebook Fan Page to enter, and while you're at it, add Peter Ha on Twitter as well!

uTorrent is a free BitTorrent client, the Mac version (officially still in beta) of the popular, open-source uTorrent client for Windows.

Much like the lightweight uTorrent for Windows (also weighing in at less than 5MB), this version of uTorrent excels at downloading files quickly with minimal resource overhead. Even more stripped down than the Windows version, uTorrent for Mac gives you a familiar, three-pane interface, with support for multiple downloads and probably more drill-down details than you even need--including graphs, tables, and other specifics on seed, peers, pieces, and more. You can also throttle upload and download rates, and stop … Read more

FrostWire is a free, open-source Gnutella client and a fork of the LimeWire source code (and as such, it functions exactly the same). When you search for a file using FrostWire, you get results from LimeWire and vice versa.

However, the user experience differs in two ways. One is that the code is actually based on LimeWire Pro, the paid version of the popular P2P client, so users don't have to worry about simultaneous download restrictions, and they won't get bombarded by ads. Also, befitting the name, the interface has changed from green to blue and has been … Read more