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Check out the world’s first internet router… hard to believe that only a 30 years ago that was cutting edge technology.

• Now compare that to the current state of the Internet’s undersea world vs. undersea cables from 1901
• Search Google better
• Files24 is a mashup between bittorrent and IMDB which looks pretty useful.
• There have been a bunch of shake-ups recently in the torrent community. I still stick with BtJunkie for the majority of my torrents but if you are in need of a new torrent site, check out TrackOn which tracks Trackers.

Network Neutrality is important. The last thing you want is Telus and Rogers controlling what you can view and how fast you can view it. In the US the Obama backed FCC is finally seriously considering moving forward with NN legislation. Unfortunately Canada seems to be lagging behind and seems incapable of leading the world. An interesting counterpoint, Cringley has a post on the state of NN in the US and why it really doesn’t matter in the end.

• Social storage seems to be a big thing on the net these days. Both Wuala and Drop.io do a good job of making online storage free, easy and fast.
• Need to figure out where an image came from? Check out Tinyeye image comparison and search.
• Are our brains being re-wired by the internet and video games? And is this a bad thing?
• There has been a ton of wacky news recently about the Pirate Bay. Apparently it is being hosted in the Ukraine now… but it doesn’t seem up today. In the mean time, here are 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Edit: the Pirate Bay is back up!
• Finally in some great news, ICANN cuts cord to US government… this is theory means less control by the US government over the internet… but seems mostly like a talking point than a real move forward.

Usenet and bittorrent have made me seriously consider getting rid of my TV cable subscription. Its just so quick and easy to get any show on TV… plus no ads. However, sometimes you really want to see shows live when they air: enter live streaming sites. You have a ton of options (some of them require somewhat sketchy downloads) but with these sites you’ll be able to see almost anything (including pay-per view events) live. Quality is somewhat crappy but you get what you pay for!

• http://www.atdhe.net/
• http://www.ustream.tv/
• http://www.justin.tv/
• http://www.tvunetworks.com/

How Canadian ISPs throttle bandwidth is a look at who, how and what Canadian ISPs are throttling (and not telling you about). This my friends is why we need net neutrality.

• Speaking of throttling, why do we need to throttle if new Cable Modems have hit 300Mbps in speed. Uh oh telcos you’re in trouble because your whimpy phone lines can’t handle all that bandwidth.
• This is a pretty crazy technology from Adobe called Zeotrope - . The idea is being able to compare and view the history of data on webpages. Sounds boring but the applications are astounding!
• Google Zeitgeist 2008 is bigger and better (and broken down by country now).
• You can now page through old magazines Google Book Search. Old Playboy here I come!
• Obama’s pick for FCC chairman (much like most of his other picks) looks to be well chosen
• Finally, a cool site called Jinni that recommends movies based on the ones you like. Unfortunately it requires you to login and it also has a limited number of movies (for some weird reason).

• Google begins extracting the text out of all the documents they have scanned recently to provide textual versions of all the books on Google Books. Crazy!
• The BBC answered a question that I’ve had for ages: How do spammers make money?
• Haven Co (the floating data haven) appears to be offline… perhaps permanently.
• You’ve heard about all the pirating going on off the coast of africa recently… well check out the Google mashup Pirate Map that shows you all the currently highjacked planes / boats.
• Facebook has recently released Facebook Connect which allows you to share your personal information from Facebook with third party developers. Sounds like the worst privacy fiasco ever to me… but also pretty useful for some. Facebook has implemented fairly strict privacy rules around the data. Not exactly the killer app thats going to (finally) pull me into Facebook.
• EZTV is a bit torrent tracker that does an excellent job of filtering crappy torrents and only showing you the real-deal known good torrents in both regular def and high-def formats.  Hook it up to uTorrents RSS feeder and get your shows automatically downloaded to your computer before you even know they’re released!

White Space is the frequency spectrum being freed up but the upcoming switch to all-digital TV. As you might have noticed in recent IA posts, I think spectrum is a big deal. Available spectrum ultimately decides who has the freedom to distribute ideas and culture. As the world becomes more globalized and the internet becomes even more ubiquitous, the ability to stream culture and ideas wirelessly over large distances is huge. WiMax will not that technology because its been sold as an ISP solution to networking not a consumer solution. What the world really needs is 1km range Wifi… allowing the users to create the net instead of ISPs. Both Google and Bill Gates are now heavily lobbying for white space and white space based devices. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this story.

Update: Apparently the FCC has unanimously approved white space devices!

• Ever wanted to get into a site that required a password but didn’t want to bother signing up? Its worth checking out Bug Me Not to see there is a working password there. Its an open password site… unfortunately lots of the passwords don’t work.
• By the same people who brought you Bug Me Not, its Retail Me Not which tracks down coupons codes for online retailers.
• PC Magagzine has published an article entitled the cybercrime hall of fame. Pretty interesting read.
• A new project by Google called Gears allows you to position your just like GPS but using WiFi signals only.
• Long-time contributer Rumplekillskin sent me a link to the Diggnation podcast, apparently its is about digg.com and he touts it as an american version of IA.
• Rumple also sent me a lin kto the Who Owns Ideas podcast from CBC which is super informative and easy to listen to.

Imagine the ideal wireless solution: free or cheap, wide range and speedy. Wifi is good and “free” but has a limited range and speed. Google has been recently talking up their White Space agenda. Basically the idea is to use the space between existing frequencies to open up a more community based wireless (as opposed to all the WiMax and recently auctioned frequencies that will ultimately be controlled by big business). I think its one of the coolest and most exciting things to happen to the net in a long time (if it comes to pass). Definitely worth a read if you are a fan of freedom of speech.

WiMax seemed like it might be the ultimate solution to wireless a few years ago but its quick adoption by big business seems to have crushed hopes for free ubiqitous wireless. However there is still hope as the Clearwire CEO says he wants “open WiMAX networks and high speeds”.

• Wikipedias of the world beware Google’s Knol (more based around scientific knowledge sharing) is open for business…
• In the first piece of good news we’ve seen the traffic shaping debate lately, the FCC has spanked Comcast for traffic shaping without disclosure.
• Do you want to test your ISP to see if they are traffic shaping your connection? The EFF has provided a tool to do just that, however you need to be pretty technical to use it effectively.
• A pretty interesting article by Cringley on an app called Talkinator and (more interestingly) the death of the login.
• Speaking of cool stuff on the net, check out this amazing Google and Wikipedia mashup. Almost overwhelmingly awesome!
• Google is (obviously) throwing their backing behind mandated ISP guaranteed minimum data rates. Sounds great to me… will it ever happen? Doubtful.
• The biggest US ISP Comcast has announced a 250gb/month cap on its basic high-speed accounts. You can expect similar caps to appear on everyone’s ISP’s soon I would think.
• Finally, I came across this really cool blog the other day, its called Interview This and it purports to be written by an HR person who is trying to help out employees in the interview and hiring process. Definitely some good information here if you are looking for a job.

• There is a major court battle brewing over the future of QuebecTorrent, a canadian torrent site recently taken down by Canadian authorities. This court battle will have major implications on the future of P2P in Canada.
• Canada’s Punk Rock MP has submitted a pretty nice looking net neutrality bill. Will it be passed? Almost certainly not. But its a step in the right direction.
• Speaking of Canadian net neutrality, there is more on Bell Canada’s roll in ISP bandwidth throttling. Haven’t read enough about this fiasco yet? There’s even more. Finally, Google has slammed Bell Canada’s stand on throttling and has clearly articulated that an open, neutral net could be amazingly awesome.
• YouTube has opened an indy movie screening room which looks pretty damn cool.
• McAfee (the virus people) asked 50 people to sign up for e-mail accounts and then use the e-mail to sign-up for any free offers they found and to use the e-mail everywhere they logged-in for a single month. The result? One participant saw 23,751 spam e-mails in her inbox! Crazy.

• There has been quite a bit of talk recently (especially in conservative circles) about creating a second internet, one that doesn’t have all the bad stuff on the current one. Ars explores whether a second, safer internet is even possible.
• Speaking of a safer net, a Utah ISP is the world’s first G reated ISP. They’ll filter all the good stuff from the net so you get the pure, unadulterated commercialized crap! You only have to pay a small fee.
• If you lean the other way and want everything unfiltered, you could check out TorrentFreedom. They offer 100% anonymous and unrestricted Torrents through their own proxy servers. Seems like a very good service.
• The venerable but still occasionally awesome CBC is releasing all their shows for free on BitTorrent… too bad JPod is already cancelled!
• Net Neutrality debate is everywhere these days but, of course, Canada is lagging way behind, so its good to hear that Canadian Net Neutrality is being debated.
• It started with a bang and ended with a faint rumble, the 700mhz auction is finished: Verizon and AT&T big winners. We probably won’t see much in the way of actual usage of this spectrum for at least a couple of years.
• A few people have talked about this recently, is the internet running out of bandwidth? Short answer: nope!

• I had seen this before somewhere but had lost the link, its a mashup Housing Rental Maps from Google and Craigslist.
• If you’re interesting in finding out more about the news and background of BitTorrent and file sharing world, check out the P2P Life website.
• A somewhat wacky story of Google vs. Wikipedia and the Knowl (a proposed unit for knowledge)
• The always interesting Cringley’s 2007 wrap-up and 2008 predictions.
• Fearful of loosing their dominance in the search market Google is working on a new and improved search. Ars looks in detail at the new features and they do look impressive.
• I’ve been following this story for a while, ICANN has made a case for freedom from US oversight. Will the US actually do it? Unlikely.

• Here’s an interesting list to peruse: the first 100 .coms ever registered (interesting fact: it took two years to register the first 100 .coms!).
• Seems like the world’s government (and spy agencies) have finally figured out that hacking other governments computers is a cheaper and more effective way of spying that actually having people on the ground in other countries… and because of this government sponsored cyber attacks are on the rise.
• Don’t you hate when you download a torrent and it stops at 98.5% Why does this happen? Its torrent poisoning. The copyright holders (or those companies paid by the holders) are putting up fake torrents, making them look real and heavily seeded and then assuming that once you try once to download… you’ll never try again. Here is a good guide to determining bad torrents.
• Another annoying torrent problem occurs when you download a video torrent and the quality is super crappy (I simply refuse to watch anything cammed). Check out the VCDQualtiy website which ranks the quality of the vast majority of torrents.
• Inane, stupid and dumb… the Jackass franchise is still really really fun to watch. Jackass 2.5 the most recent release is the first major theatrical release to be only available on the net. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes over.
• The Erowid drug archive (in my university days one of my favourite resources on the net) is now a non-profit charitable foundation and its still the best resource of the net for unbiased, scientifically founded research into all the drugs the government doesn’t want you to use.
• At long last, iTunes movies and TV comes (finally) to Canada including CBC and CTV shows. I’ll never use it or buy anything from it… but is good to see that we at least have the option!

A friend asked me if I thought that there would ever be a music site as good as Oink again. I’ve thought about the question quite a bit since then and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not sure its possible. The beauty of Oink was that it was the undisputed place to get and share music. There have been a myriad of announcements about Oink replacements for various sources but thats just the problem… too many sources means that the user based is split between sites… meaning less files for anyone who isn’t a member of all of them. The one big announcement on this front came from The Pirate Bay who have annouced Boink! Nothing has happened since that announcement and it’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take the Pirates to release a real site. The big problem with Boink is that it will probably be a public tracker (not invite only like Oink). Why is this a problem? Well it means that anyone can post fake torrents and anyone can post fake comments… and this one of the worst things about public trackers like BTJunkie right now. Could Oink have been the last best hope? I’m hoping that the internet can prove me wrong.

• Speaking of the Pirate they have grabbed IFPI.com formerly owned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (aka the international RIAA) and renamed it to the International Federation of Pirates Interests. Great stuff!
• The US tops the top Spamer list by landslide. Canada no where to be seen
• In huge news that wasn’t nearly publicized enough, Absolute Poker (in the top 5 poker sites on the net) was caught cheating by industrious users with lots of time on their hands.
• The Daily Show is still my favourite day-in-and-day-out TV show. Its just sooo damn good every single day. Comedy Central has released the complete show archive on their site
• The Google Phone has been announced… well kind of…
• Comcast in the US has been accused of fucking about with internet packets. Now Bell Canada has admitted to throttling bit torrent traffic also.
• ZML is a new site that probably won’t be up for long that is selling cheap movies online. Its like allofmp3.com for movies.
• Is internet TV for your PC worth it? Hulu, Joost and Miro Reviewed.

As expected, Oink has been killed by the recording industry… so young… with so much potential. Yesterday Dutch athorities raided some guys house and took all the servers. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is saying that Oink was the “primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music”… which is totally untrue since this was a private site… I’d guess that usenet would be considered the primary source. Personally, I’d never downloaded anything pre-release from Oink.

Here is my open challenge to the recording industry. Put up a site thats even half as good as Oink and I will pay for the chance to use it. What did Oink do well? It has lossless music options for almost everything. It had rare and hard to find albums. It was fast to download and easy to search… and it had albums from all labels (not just one or two or a select few). Thats all I want. Give me that and I’ll pay you a reasonable amount per album. Is that so hard? Apparently so.

Although I’m sure we’re fine in Canada, i have to wonder a bit about the US users of Oink. Oink (and now the Recording Industry and police) have your IP address and probably your uploading/downloading history. For those of us who use Private Bit Torrent trackers regularly… you might want to consider just how safe you are.

• Radiohead has decided to let fans choose how much they want to pay for their new album (no details yet on download format). I was just thinking the other day that someone should setup a system where people can send Paypal money directly to artists whom I’ve downloaded CDs from… I’d totally do it (if the album is good!). Another blast from the 90s, Nine Inch Nails has dumped their record label and is going ‘indie’. Its the beginning of the end for big record labels me thinks.
• Demonoid (the second largest bittorrent tracker in the world) is back up… but not available to Canadians because of CRIA (Candian RIAA)’s letter (which is clearly not backed up by Canadian law).
• Yahoo search is better than Google? A recent study finds that Yahoo provides more relevant searches than Google and new features just added to Yahoo make it at least as useful as Google.
• Craigslist has got to be one of the best things about the internet. Check out these two guides for your favourite free buy ‘n sell: a sellers guide to Craigslist, a buyers guide to Craigslist.
• As has been pointed out several times recently on IA, BitTorrent is more popular than ever… according to this study the number of releases have trippled in the last year. TorrentFreak (thanks Shinanigoat!) also has a list of the most popular movies on BitTorrent which is an interesting read.
• Finally check out these cool looking maps of the internet.

Since my original post on Torrent Trackers (like Oink) I’ve found out a great deal more about this subculture and found a number of sites that I really like. I think finally BitTorrent has come into its own as the dominate file transfer method for the internet. The only problem with it is that its quite a complicated process to post your own files.

Anyway, I found a huge list of tracker sites (mostly private) that you might be interested in… you can find the big list in the comments for this post.

I’ll point out once again that Oink is by far the best of the music ones and I’ll also note that Cheggit.net is crazily deep for naked people.

I now have an extra Oink invite that I’ll send out to the first IA reader to send me a request.

[Update: IA reader Tom was all over this and ganked the free invite in no time at all. Look out in the future for more invites as I’ve still got a couple more. (You might be able to convince me to give you one with a well written email)]

• I’ve posted about it before and I’ll definitely post about it again. The 700mhz auction in the US is coming up and its going to be huge… but only if its bought by a company that will actually use it. Cringley has an interesting article on Google and the 700mhz auction. Crazy if its true.
• Canadian superstar company RIM has opened the BlackBerry to a number of very interesting APIs including audio, video and GPS. But please don’t make me buy one, I fucking hate those things!
• Cringley on ad supported downloadable video that can’t be skipped avaialble soon on a bittorrent near you. That will suck if true.
• Speaking of crappy ads in the videos, it looks like YouTube will potentially shoot itself in the foot by forcing user to watch 30 second “bumper” ads (ads presented before your video plays) in the next few months.
• Don’t have time to watch all the TV you really crave? Or maybe you just want to seem cool by telling people you’ve seen all the episodes of America’s Next Top Model. Fear not, Minisodes is a new site that condenses TV shows into 4-6 minute videos for your watching pleasure.
• Spock.com is trying to brand itself as the google of people searches. Although searching for myself and a few other people turned up incorrect info… so who knows. (ah… it only works for people in the US. Not very Googlish if you ask me).
• Shenanigoat sent me this interesting article looking at P2P poisoning company Media Defender’s effectiveness on various BitTorrent sites. The bottom line is the Pirate Bay is the best by far if you want to avoid downloading a huge movie only to find out that it doesn’t work.
• Finally, an interesting Cringley on immortality, technology singularities and bandwidth.