peer

From all that we've heard about Michael Moore's soon-to-be released documentary indictment of the U.S. health care system, he clearly supports universal health care.

But does he support universal Web access to his film two weeks before its official release? Probably not, or at least his studio doesn't.

Advertising Age reported Friday that Moore's new film, Sicko, has been pirated and is widely available for free download on the Web at BitTorrent and peer-to-peer sites. Advertising Age reporter Claude Brodesser-Akner wrote that he easily downloaded a copy and watched it late Thursday night.

The breach … Read more

Creationists are adapting another element of the traditional scientific realm to their cause: the peer-reviewed journal.

The Institute for Creation Research, a prominent believer that the scientific method can validate a literal reading of the Bible's account of the creation of the universe, Earth and humanity, has begun soliciting papers for the International Journal for Creation Research.

Peer review, in which a scientist's paper is scrutinized by a group of colleagues, is designed to find errors and weed out half-baked ideas. And although some have criticized peer review for rejecting new ideas just because they're too radical … Read more

Sharing files from your PC is nothing new. BitTorrent is all about sharing media files with the world, as Napster was before it. And file sharing products like Pando, eSnips, Titanize, Box.Net, YouBackItUp, and many others make it possible to share other files, or even entire directories and hard drives.

So when the team from Izimi pitched me on their new PC-based file publishing system as "the future of Internet publishing," I didn't really share their wonder.

I did try to find the spark of this product over the weekend. What I found was a tool … Read more

The Tamagotchi has barely gotten into its teens and it's already got next-generation competition.

Japan's Frepar Network is developing some kind of futuristic 3D persona "capable of replying when you talk to it and interact with you when you try to touch it or even blow on it," according to Akihabara News.

All that sounds well and good, but will it get you a date? We didn't think so.

Tubes, a new app going public Tuesday, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing and -synchronization system that can make it very easy to distribute files among multiple users and computers.

It's the application I've been looking for to solve this real-world problem: Every other year, my wife's family gets together for Christmas. This past December, her four siblings and their families gathered in her parents' house in Baltimore (the family doesn't believe in hotels, so it was cozy). There were eight digital cameras in operation. After the holidays, we all scattered back home, and the great photo archive … Read more

I have a background in creative writing, so I was very excited to hear that one of the presentations at last night's NY Tech Meetup would be a demonstration of a new kind of Web community for writers (and eventually artists, musicians, and filmmakers). Indeed, the first presentation was of Urbis, which is a new review community founded by local New Yorker Steve Spurgat. Meetup founder Scott Heiferman described Spurgat, with his background as a playwright, as "the most unlikely Internet entrepreneur."

Here's the central concept of Urbis, which according to Spurgat has 12,000 members … Read more