File Sharing

There are Firefox plug-ins for just about every task imaginable. There's one to tell you how many e-mails you've got waiting to be read, and another that gives weather forecasts. You can change how the browser functions, you can manage your music players, and with FireFTP, you can transfer files using a top-notch FTP client.

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FrostWire hopes to breathe some new life into the much-maligned P2P file-sharing client LimeWire.

LimeWire has become the Web 2.0 equivalent of Kazaa and the late 1990s Napster. What you think is last night's episode of Heroes turns out to be a villainous chunk of malware, and litigation issues have forced its programmers to include a license filter, warning you if you're about to grab something without proper copyright information attached. Plus, the interface is ugly.

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The Participatory Culture Foundation's universal video player has finally left the development world with its first non-beta release, Miro 1.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are very few changes to distinguish this version from the previous beta versions that have come out in the past two months. Beside the fact that you can now delete a video while it's playing with impunity, all the changes are minor bug fixes to sort out stability concerns and other small tweaks.

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Miro Public Preview 3 has been unleashed for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It seems like this is the version of the freeware Internet TV channel player and aggregator that we've all been waiting for. Crashes seem to be a problem mostly of the past. The smart player, able to download content on the fly as well as play nearly any video on your machine makes Miro's appeal hard to resist.

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DC Comics has been publishing comic books even before Superman debuted in the first issue of Action Comics nearly seven decades ago. On Tuesday, they launch Zuda Comics, their first foray into webcomics, throwing the full weight of a major publisher into a game that has been dominated by independent and self-published creators.

So what took so long?

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Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent is set to announce on Tuesday morning the availability of a new enterprise content delivery product, BitTorrent DNA. Designed for companies that use streaming video, large downloads or games over the Web, the launch of BitTorrent DNA marks yet another conscious move by the San Francisco-based software brand to move beyond its roots as the creator of file-sharing protocol that became nearly synonymous with digital piracy over the past few years.

BitTorrent described the new BitTorrent DNA product in a statement as "the ideal solution for publishers seeking ways to overcome the obstacles associated with centralized … Read more

Tubes, the powerful peer-to-peer synchronization service we first covered in January, now has a hosting service, as well. Once you create a "tube" on your PC and synchronize it, other users will be able to view it on the Web. They no longer need the Tubes software.

This means that Tubes is now a Web-publishing platform, which is an interesting development. You will be able to create a site using Tubes, and then update the site just by dragging files or directories from your PC. Whenever you're connected to the network, your site gets the new files straight from your PC, and the Web site is immediately updated.

This feature can be used to create fairly deep, professional sites, or just for keeping family members up to date with vacation photos. The drag-to-publish function reduces the hassle of keeping a site up to date.

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If you use torrents frequently, then you'll remember December 7, 2006, as a day that will live on in infamy, a day that teh Interwebs broke in half--just a little. That was the day that BitTorrent, Bram Cohen's torrent progenitor, announced it had bought ?Torrent, the free-but-closed-source torrent client that showcased innovative features in a surprisingly lightweight app.

Now, two years since their last upgrade, BitTorrent has released its first version that combines ?Torrent code with its own open-source base, and ?Torrent has also come out with a minor-point upgrade. Confused? Read on.

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In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. The tagline? "Everybody gets paid."

As content distribution has mutated from analog to digital, the companies that came into existence to control the distribution have panicked and floundered. Decentralized peer-to-peer sharing made this all possible, but it's also thrown nearly a century of copyright law beyond the deep end and into rough waters.

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