I'm working on the certificate Zayed suggested ;) It is sad but true, we have a serious lack of readers and books. You won't believe this, but every time I'm on train reading a book, I can see easily that most people are staring at me as if I was doing something wrong. # »
Monday, February 28, 2005
I think my browser stats look very different from Kottke's stats. Is it because Firefox still not so popular in the Arab World?
IE 69%
Firefox 17%
Safari 5%
Netscape 4%
Mozilla 3%
Opera 1%
Unknown 1% # »
IE 69%
Firefox 17%
Safari 5%
Netscape 4%
Mozilla 3%
Opera 1%
Unknown 1% # »
Friday, February 25, 2005
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Jason Kottke decides to do his blog as a full-time job. This post will be trackback no. 116 to his entry. Nice and impressive. # »
After what happened at the BABA's last month, I was really frustrated, and wrote something I should have not written. The idea of the BABA's is great, but I think the situation was handled wrongly. I was not all that interested in winning. All I was hoping for is a fair competition, in an event where we can celebrate the good Arab blogs, and may the best wins. I think the organizers had several solutions instead of disqualifying of whole categories.
I really respect the people behind the BABA's and appreciate their efforts, and I'm sure those smart people can come up with better ideas to solve such problems. And despite what happened, I'm glad I was nominated for this year's awards, and I'm looking forward to participate in next year's ceremony. Finally, thanks for Mahmood and Haitham because they gvae us the chance to get to know some great blogs and bloggers. Without you, that was not possible. # »
I really respect the people behind the BABA's and appreciate their efforts, and I'm sure those smart people can come up with better ideas to solve such problems. And despite what happened, I'm glad I was nominated for this year's awards, and I'm looking forward to participate in next year's ceremony. Finally, thanks for Mahmood and Haitham because they gvae us the chance to get to know some great blogs and bloggers. Without you, that was not possible. # »
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Two years ago, when Arab bloggers appeared for the first time on the web, most of their weblogs -- if not all -- were written in English. Not a long time after that, some new Arab bloggers decided to start writing their weblogs in Arabic. There were some technical difficulties at the beginning, but eventually all the difficulties were solved.
However, the great growth of the Arab blogosphere seemed to move in two parallel lines. As a reader, and a blogger, I have noticed that English-writing Arab bloggers are living in their own world, and the Arabic-writing Arab bloggers are living in another world. Now to make things easier, let's call the first group A, and the second group B.
The great divide can be shown clearly by the variation of the qualities in every group. For example, most members of group A are liberals who look to West with admire, and tend to criticize the situation in their countries harshly. They have little or no HTML knowledge, and they like to start blogging using a free service such as Blogger.
In the other hand, most members of group B are expert programmers who look to West in suspicious, and write their blogs with Islamic sense. Of course, there are some exceptions in both sides, but I can't study every individual case in this article.
Such differences, and therefore such divide, is not a big a problem by itself, as long as A and B are communicating with each other properly. The big problem is coming next.
From my observations, I have noticed that A and B are living in two separate worlds. Every group seems isolated and enclosed with itself. Just take a look at Sabbah's blogroll, and then look at al-Mohareb's blogroll. You may refer this to personal preferences, but I think it reflects a deeper problem. Because other than the blogrolls, A members do not link to B members and vice versa. Furthermore, there are even smaller groups inside A and B, which looks so obvious in the case of the Kuwaiti blogs and the Egyptian blogs, where the two communities are very self-centered.
I think this is a serious problem because as most of you know "links are the building blocks of the web" and therefore the blogosphere. I can't emphasize on this enough, but links are really important. And if the Arab blogosphere is to be built upon ignorance and denial, it will be a weak destructed world. This is unhealthy, and it cannot be good for our little beautiful world. # »
However, the great growth of the Arab blogosphere seemed to move in two parallel lines. As a reader, and a blogger, I have noticed that English-writing Arab bloggers are living in their own world, and the Arabic-writing Arab bloggers are living in another world. Now to make things easier, let's call the first group A, and the second group B.
The great divide can be shown clearly by the variation of the qualities in every group. For example, most members of group A are liberals who look to West with admire, and tend to criticize the situation in their countries harshly. They have little or no HTML knowledge, and they like to start blogging using a free service such as Blogger.
In the other hand, most members of group B are expert programmers who look to West in suspicious, and write their blogs with Islamic sense. Of course, there are some exceptions in both sides, but I can't study every individual case in this article.
Such differences, and therefore such divide, is not a big a problem by itself, as long as A and B are communicating with each other properly. The big problem is coming next.
From my observations, I have noticed that A and B are living in two separate worlds. Every group seems isolated and enclosed with itself. Just take a look at Sabbah's blogroll, and then look at al-Mohareb's blogroll. You may refer this to personal preferences, but I think it reflects a deeper problem. Because other than the blogrolls, A members do not link to B members and vice versa. Furthermore, there are even smaller groups inside A and B, which looks so obvious in the case of the Kuwaiti blogs and the Egyptian blogs, where the two communities are very self-centered.
I think this is a serious problem because as most of you know "links are the building blocks of the web" and therefore the blogosphere. I can't emphasize on this enough, but links are really important. And if the Arab blogosphere is to be built upon ignorance and denial, it will be a weak destructed world. This is unhealthy, and it cannot be good for our little beautiful world. # »
I think most of Firefox users know about the general keyboard shortcuts provided in the menu list of the browser, however, there are some secret useful shortcuts. For example, the Firefox Edit menu will provide CTRL+F as a shortcut for search, while you can easily activate the same function by pressing " / " (Yep, the slash key only!). And if you want to search for links that contains a specific word, click the " ' " and then enter the word you are looking for. # »
This is a tribute to those great bloggers, who I like, admire and cannot get enough of reading their blogs.
- Zaydoun: The author of Kuwait Unplugged (formerly known as Live from Kuwait) is by all means a celebrity Arab blogger. His start was as a warblogger during the American invasion of Iraq, and that gained a him an interview byThe Guardian The Daily Telegraph. When the war ended, the sarcastic "failed writer" took a break and then decided to change the interest of his blog, by focusing more on local Kuwaiti issues. His blog inspired many Kuwaitis to start blogging, helping in shaping one of the most active blogging communities of the Arab blogosphere. Recently, he began to post in Arabic every once in a while.
- Mahmood: The favorite Bahraini blogger of all times. Using the not-so-well-known Xaraya content management system, Mahmood's Den is much more than a weblog. The website attracted a nice community around it, and Mahmood's initiative was always a remarkable landmark in the Arab blogosphere.
- Serdal: This cool man from the UAE was behind the rise of the Arabic language blogs. He has launched various Wiki projects, and his blog is a must read for all Arab programmers and developers.
- Haitham: A Jordanian, works for MTC-Vodafone Bahrain. Sabbah's blog is my favorite place to read interesting stories on politics of the Middle East, and the Palestinian conflict in particular. Plus, cartoons of his choice are irresistible to me. He has launched the Bahrain Blogger Meetup, and he co-hosted the first BABA awards. Little secret: he tried several times to convince Mahmood to change to Movable Type, but Mahmood is still insisting on Xaraya.
- Subzero Blue: The Tunisian man with the initials MMM was the only Arab blogger to be nominated for the Bloggies 2005 awards for the category "Best African or Middle East Blog" and because he is based in Jordan, I think he fits perfectly for this award. The only drawback with his blog, imho, is that most of the link open in a new window, which is really disturbing to me. And btw, Sabbah's blog have the same thing. # »
- Zaydoun: The author of Kuwait Unplugged (formerly known as Live from Kuwait) is by all means a celebrity Arab blogger. His start was as a warblogger during the American invasion of Iraq, and that gained a him an interview by
- Mahmood: The favorite Bahraini blogger of all times. Using the not-so-well-known Xaraya content management system, Mahmood's Den is much more than a weblog. The website attracted a nice community around it, and Mahmood's initiative was always a remarkable landmark in the Arab blogosphere.
- Serdal: This cool man from the UAE was behind the rise of the Arabic language blogs. He has launched various Wiki projects, and his blog is a must read for all Arab programmers and developers.
- Haitham: A Jordanian, works for MTC-Vodafone Bahrain. Sabbah's blog is my favorite place to read interesting stories on politics of the Middle East, and the Palestinian conflict in particular. Plus, cartoons of his choice are irresistible to me. He has launched the Bahrain Blogger Meetup, and he co-hosted the first BABA awards. Little secret: he tried several times to convince Mahmood to change to Movable Type, but Mahmood is still insisting on Xaraya.
- Subzero Blue: The Tunisian man with the initials MMM was the only Arab blogger to be nominated for the Bloggies 2005 awards for the category "Best African or Middle East Blog" and because he is based in Jordan, I think he fits perfectly for this award. The only drawback with his blog, imho, is that most of the link open in a new window, which is really disturbing to me. And btw, Sabbah's blog have the same thing. # »
I really enjoy reading Omra al-Arabi. He is on hiatus now, but two weeks ago, he posted some interesting posts regarding a document that Sunnah reference to on treating non-Muslims. # »
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Subzero Blue and Natasha have written some good posts on the launch of MBC4, but I wonder if they can answer the question I asked on the same subject earlier. # »
Friday, February 11, 2005
In the NY Times story on the first-ever municipal election in Saudi Arabia, the mayor of Riyadh Prince Abdul-Aziz Bin Ayaf "cited the example of the late shah of Iran as an area ruler who pushed modernization on his people too fast and paid the price by losing his throne." This is interesting. So, the royal family is organizing elections to keep the throne, and I thought the purpose of the elections is to give people a chance to participate in the process of making decisions, and to be the first step on the road of democracy. Oh, sorry, I was so wrong.
And another thing. How the religious police allowed all those candidates to stick posters of their faces in the streets, while the poor Ronaldo is still standing near Holiday Inn with no face! # »
And another thing. How the religious police allowed all those candidates to stick posters of their faces in the streets, while the poor Ronaldo is still standing near Holiday Inn with no face! # »
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The 
debut album for this band fuses R&B, rock and pop in a way I never experienced before. Tracks such as 'This Love' and 'She Will Be Loved' hooked me from the first time I heard them, and the album over all is really good. Many people thinks that Adam Levine's vocals are what make this album special, but for me their unique music was the main attraction. This is just the first album, and I think everybody should keep an eye on this band. # »
debut album for this band fuses R&B, rock and pop in a way I never experienced before. Tracks such as 'This Love' and 'She Will Be Loved' hooked me from the first time I heard them, and the album over all is really good. Many people thinks that Adam Levine's vocals are what make this album special, but for me their unique music was the main attraction. This is just the first album, and I think everybody should keep an eye on this band. # »I don't usually visit the AFC website, but while I was there to read about yesterday's match between our national team and Uzbekistan, I stumbled upon this good article. It is totally true; here "the merry-go-round seem to spins faster than anywhere else on planet football." # »
Maram Makkawi tries to compare between Saudi universities and UK universities. I could easily say there is no comparison, and I disagree with her when she generalize about all universities of the Arab World. She only has studied in Saudi Arabia. I think she made such generalization to make the criticism softer in order to be published in our so-called free newspapers. I'm not the only one who disagree with her. The Saudi minister of labor says that "extremist teachings, not unemployment, are the root causes of terrorism." # »
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
We have Flickr tags, Technorati tags, Del.icio.us tags and now science intends to tag all life. "Scientists are to establish a giant catalogue of life - to, in effect, "barcode" every species on Earth, from tiny plankton to the mighty blue whale."
# »
# »
Even though the most famous chefs in the world are men, things can get disastrous when some guys try to cook. However, it seems like women usually admire a guy who can cook a good meal. Check out these confessions of a Kitchen Romeo. # »
Subject: Out of Control: The Sequel
From: - "Mark Pesce"
Date: - Mon, December 20, 2004 6:35 am
------------------------------------------------
Out of Control: The Sequel
This morning I woke up to find that the torrent had died. Someone - no one knows who - had put enough pressure onto the operators of Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com to shut them down. SuprNova.org was amazing, the Wal-Mart of torrents, a great big marketplace of piracy, all neatly dished up and aiming to please. You want this new Hollywood release? Here's a recording from someone who smuggled a camcorder into a screening. - How about the latest episode of that hit HBO series? There you go, and no subscription fees to pay. Just fire up your favorite BitTorrent client - BitTornado, Azureus, Tomato, or that good old-fashioned Bram Cohen code. Click on the torrent, and you're up and downloading, sharing what you're getting with hundreds of others. Share and share alike. What could be more friendly?
For those of you who found the last paragraph littered with weird gobblygook, here's your opportunity to come up to speed: BitTorrent is a computer protocol (a language computers use when communicating with each other) which allows computers to freely and efficiently share information with one another. This free-for-all of sharing is often called peer-to-peer or P2P, and it has become one of the most popular acivities on the Internet. Many of you have heard how the record companies are deathly afraid that their markets are about to evaporate as their customers move from buying CDs to downloading pirated music. This much is true: for the last several years, peer-to-peer software has been used to help people find audio files on the internet - files being offered up by other people for you to download, anonymously. Find a song, click on it, and down it comes to your computer's hard drive. All of this song swapping began before most Americans had access to high-speed "broadband" internet connections. But, as of a month ago, just about half of the home users in the USA access the Internet through a broadband connection. These connections are anywhere from 10 and 50 times faster than the earlier "dial-up" onnections which tied up phone lines and kept you waiting for what seemed like weeks as you struggled to download the latest gossip from your favorite website. While it takes some time to download music over a dial-up connection, you'd only wait about ten minutes for an average song. Movies and TV shows, which are much "richer" (more data), take a lot more time to download. The new U2 album, for example, might contain 45 million bytes of data. But an episode of "Six Feet Under" - roughly the same length - would probably run to 450 million bytes of information, ten times the amount. Coincidentally, that's how much faster internet connections are, compared to a few years ago.
This increase in bandwidth has led to an enormous underground trade in all sorts of audiovisual media. It's not just current movies - classics and cult films are available. (I downloaded Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the day he died, watching it that evening, my homage to the great schlock director.) And, more significantly, nearly every new TV show that airs in the US or the UK is almost instantaneously available globally, because someone watching that show is recording it to their hard disk, publishing the recording to the Internet. This isn't rocket science: computer peripherals which convert TV signals to digital data cost less than $100, and millions of them are out there already.
If you're just one person with one recording of one show, and it's a popular show, your computer's internet connection is going to get swamped with requests for the show; eventually your computer will crash or you'll take the show off the Internet, just so you can read your email. And in the early days of peer-to-peer, that's how it was. Someone would find a computer with a copy of the song they wanted to listen to, connect to that computer, and download the data. It worked, but anything that got very popular was likely to disappear almost immediately. Popularity was a problem in first-generation peer-to-peer networks.
In November 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen decided there had to be a better way, so he spent a few weeks writing an improved version of the protocols used to create peer-to-peer networks, and came up with BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a radical advance over the peer-to-peer systems which preceded it. Cohen realized that popularity is a good thing, and designed BitTorrent to take advantage of it. When a file (movie, music, computer program, it's all just bits) is published on BitTorrent, everyone who wants the file is required to share what they have with everyone else. As you're downloading the file, those parts you've already downloaded are available to other people looking to download the file. This means that you're not just "leeching" the file, taking without giving back; you're also sharing the file with anyone else who wants it. As more people download the file, they offer up what they've downloaded, and so on. As this process rolls on, there are always more and more computers to download the file from. If a file gets very popular, you might be getting bits of it from hundreds of different computers, all over the Internet - simultaneously. This is a very important point, because it means that as BitTorrent files grow in popularity, they become progressively faster to download. Popularity isn't a scourge in BitTorrent - it's a blessing.
It's such a blessing that, as of November, 35% of all traffic on the Internet was BitTorrent-related. Unfortunately, that blessing looks more like a curse if you're the head of a Hollywood studio, trying to fill seats in megaplexes or move millions of units of your latest DVDs releases. And, although BitTorrent is efficient, it isn't designed to make data piracy easy; BitTorrent relies on a lot of information which can be used to trace the location of every single user downloading a file, and, more significantly, it also relies on a centralized "tracker" - a computer program which registers the requests for the file, and tells a requester how to hook up to the tens or hundreds of other computers offering pieces of the file for download. As any good network engineer knows (and I was a network engineer for over a decade), a single point of failure (a single computer offering a single torrent tracker) is a Bad Thing to have in a network. It's the one shortcoming in Cohen's design for BitTorrent: kill the tracker and you've killed the torrent. But network engineers know better than to design systems with single points of failure: that's one of the reasons the Internet is still around, despite the best efforts of hackers around the world to kill it. Failure in any one part of the Internet is expected and dealt with in short order. Various parts of the Internet fail all the time and you only very rarely notice.
Back to today, when the hammer came down. SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they'd never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves - they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent.
Gnutella is a particularly telling example of how the suppression of a seductive technology (and peer-to-peer file trading is very seductive - ask anyone who's done it) only results in an improved technology taking its place. Instead of relying on a centralized server - a fault that both Napster and BitTorrent share - Gnutella uses a process of discovery to let peers share information with each other about what's available where. The peers in a Gnutella peer-to-peer network self-organize into an occasionally unreliable but undeniably expansive network of content. Because of its distributed nature, shutting down any one Gnutella peer has only a very limited effect on the overall network. One individual's collection of music might evaporate, but there are still tens of thousands of others to pick from. This network of Gnutella peers (and its offspring, such as Kazaa, BearShare, and Acquisition) has been growing since its introduction in 2001, mostly invisibly, but ever more pervasively.
If Napster hadn't been run out of business by the RIAA, it's unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn't attacked that single point of failure, there'd have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no single point to failure. It's as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn't just a cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA, generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.
Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child's room and ripping a TV set out of the wall while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they're smart enough, they'll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They'll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA's worst nightmare.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Mark Pesce
Sydney/Hobart
20 December 2004
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0
www.creativecommons.org # »
From: - "Mark Pesce"
Date: - Mon, December 20, 2004 6:35 am
------------------------------------------------
Out of Control: The Sequel
This morning I woke up to find that the torrent had died. Someone - no one knows who - had put enough pressure onto the operators of Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com to shut them down. SuprNova.org was amazing, the Wal-Mart of torrents, a great big marketplace of piracy, all neatly dished up and aiming to please. You want this new Hollywood release? Here's a recording from someone who smuggled a camcorder into a screening. - How about the latest episode of that hit HBO series? There you go, and no subscription fees to pay. Just fire up your favorite BitTorrent client - BitTornado, Azureus, Tomato, or that good old-fashioned Bram Cohen code. Click on the torrent, and you're up and downloading, sharing what you're getting with hundreds of others. Share and share alike. What could be more friendly?
For those of you who found the last paragraph littered with weird gobblygook, here's your opportunity to come up to speed: BitTorrent is a computer protocol (a language computers use when communicating with each other) which allows computers to freely and efficiently share information with one another. This free-for-all of sharing is often called peer-to-peer or P2P, and it has become one of the most popular acivities on the Internet. Many of you have heard how the record companies are deathly afraid that their markets are about to evaporate as their customers move from buying CDs to downloading pirated music. This much is true: for the last several years, peer-to-peer software has been used to help people find audio files on the internet - files being offered up by other people for you to download, anonymously. Find a song, click on it, and down it comes to your computer's hard drive. All of this song swapping began before most Americans had access to high-speed "broadband" internet connections. But, as of a month ago, just about half of the home users in the USA access the Internet through a broadband connection. These connections are anywhere from 10 and 50 times faster than the earlier "dial-up" onnections which tied up phone lines and kept you waiting for what seemed like weeks as you struggled to download the latest gossip from your favorite website. While it takes some time to download music over a dial-up connection, you'd only wait about ten minutes for an average song. Movies and TV shows, which are much "richer" (more data), take a lot more time to download. The new U2 album, for example, might contain 45 million bytes of data. But an episode of "Six Feet Under" - roughly the same length - would probably run to 450 million bytes of information, ten times the amount. Coincidentally, that's how much faster internet connections are, compared to a few years ago.
This increase in bandwidth has led to an enormous underground trade in all sorts of audiovisual media. It's not just current movies - classics and cult films are available. (I downloaded Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the day he died, watching it that evening, my homage to the great schlock director.) And, more significantly, nearly every new TV show that airs in the US or the UK is almost instantaneously available globally, because someone watching that show is recording it to their hard disk, publishing the recording to the Internet. This isn't rocket science: computer peripherals which convert TV signals to digital data cost less than $100, and millions of them are out there already.
If you're just one person with one recording of one show, and it's a popular show, your computer's internet connection is going to get swamped with requests for the show; eventually your computer will crash or you'll take the show off the Internet, just so you can read your email. And in the early days of peer-to-peer, that's how it was. Someone would find a computer with a copy of the song they wanted to listen to, connect to that computer, and download the data. It worked, but anything that got very popular was likely to disappear almost immediately. Popularity was a problem in first-generation peer-to-peer networks.
In November 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen decided there had to be a better way, so he spent a few weeks writing an improved version of the protocols used to create peer-to-peer networks, and came up with BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a radical advance over the peer-to-peer systems which preceded it. Cohen realized that popularity is a good thing, and designed BitTorrent to take advantage of it. When a file (movie, music, computer program, it's all just bits) is published on BitTorrent, everyone who wants the file is required to share what they have with everyone else. As you're downloading the file, those parts you've already downloaded are available to other people looking to download the file. This means that you're not just "leeching" the file, taking without giving back; you're also sharing the file with anyone else who wants it. As more people download the file, they offer up what they've downloaded, and so on. As this process rolls on, there are always more and more computers to download the file from. If a file gets very popular, you might be getting bits of it from hundreds of different computers, all over the Internet - simultaneously. This is a very important point, because it means that as BitTorrent files grow in popularity, they become progressively faster to download. Popularity isn't a scourge in BitTorrent - it's a blessing.
It's such a blessing that, as of November, 35% of all traffic on the Internet was BitTorrent-related. Unfortunately, that blessing looks more like a curse if you're the head of a Hollywood studio, trying to fill seats in megaplexes or move millions of units of your latest DVDs releases. And, although BitTorrent is efficient, it isn't designed to make data piracy easy; BitTorrent relies on a lot of information which can be used to trace the location of every single user downloading a file, and, more significantly, it also relies on a centralized "tracker" - a computer program which registers the requests for the file, and tells a requester how to hook up to the tens or hundreds of other computers offering pieces of the file for download. As any good network engineer knows (and I was a network engineer for over a decade), a single point of failure (a single computer offering a single torrent tracker) is a Bad Thing to have in a network. It's the one shortcoming in Cohen's design for BitTorrent: kill the tracker and you've killed the torrent. But network engineers know better than to design systems with single points of failure: that's one of the reasons the Internet is still around, despite the best efforts of hackers around the world to kill it. Failure in any one part of the Internet is expected and dealt with in short order. Various parts of the Internet fail all the time and you only very rarely notice.
Back to today, when the hammer came down. SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they'd never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves - they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent.
Gnutella is a particularly telling example of how the suppression of a seductive technology (and peer-to-peer file trading is very seductive - ask anyone who's done it) only results in an improved technology taking its place. Instead of relying on a centralized server - a fault that both Napster and BitTorrent share - Gnutella uses a process of discovery to let peers share information with each other about what's available where. The peers in a Gnutella peer-to-peer network self-organize into an occasionally unreliable but undeniably expansive network of content. Because of its distributed nature, shutting down any one Gnutella peer has only a very limited effect on the overall network. One individual's collection of music might evaporate, but there are still tens of thousands of others to pick from. This network of Gnutella peers (and its offspring, such as Kazaa, BearShare, and Acquisition) has been growing since its introduction in 2001, mostly invisibly, but ever more pervasively.
If Napster hadn't been run out of business by the RIAA, it's unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn't attacked that single point of failure, there'd have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no single point to failure. It's as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn't just a cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA, generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.
Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child's room and ripping a TV set out of the wall while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they're smart enough, they'll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They'll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA's worst nightmare.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Mark Pesce
Sydney/Hobart
20 December 2004
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0
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Zeina pointed to a story in Arab News on banning of Valentine's Day celebrations. I do not want to tell you how retarded some people can get, but I am going to celebrate this day even if I had no one to celebrate with. This is a day for love, and I'm not going to let some lunatics ruin it for me. # »
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Dave Winer never wears ties, and thinks it's "one of the few (only?) pieces of clothing that appears to serve no functional purpose." But if you had to wear a tie, here's a step-by-step instructions with pictures. (via Lifehacker)
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Virginia lawmakers pass bill authorizing $50 fine for anyone wearing low-riding pants. Is this USA or KSA?
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Monday, February 07, 2005
This is the third book I read on the subject of blogging. 
The author of this book, Biz Stone, is the Blogger Senior Specialist at Google. I liked the book because it can be helpful to beginners and advanced bloggers on the same way. I think the writing style of Biz Stone is what makes this book special. When I read it, I felt more like reading a blog.
One of my favorite parts was the in fifth chapter: Blogging in Business. The story of Matt Haughey who started his PVRblog as a side project and was amazed how a blog could turn to be a silver mine.
From the back cover:
The author of this book, Biz Stone, is the Blogger Senior Specialist at Google. I liked the book because it can be helpful to beginners and advanced bloggers on the same way. I think the writing style of Biz Stone is what makes this book special. When I read it, I felt more like reading a blog.
One of my favorite parts was the in fifth chapter: Blogging in Business. The story of Matt Haughey who started his PVRblog as a side project and was amazed how a blog could turn to be a silver mine.
From the back cover:
This book "is not just a how-to-get-started guide but a next-generation blogging book for anyone who wants to keep their blog blooming."# »
I'm hooked to Lifehacker. This is the best blog around in a while. I always thought Gawker Media would make some great stuff. Gizmodo was good, but this one is my favorite. # »
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Some of you may have noticed that I did not post anything about the counter-terrorism conference which takes place in Riyadh these days. I think such conferences are useless as long as the government -- and the people -- are not admitting that we have some serious problems in the religious establishment and the educational system. Prince Abdullah said that we must attack the grassroots of terrorism, but I'm not seeing any action to do so. The way the officials here talk about terrorism gives you the feeling that we have an attack every five or ten years, while a quick look to this report will tell you something totally different. The extreme mentality has been in control in this part of the world for more than 200 years, and it will take a very long time to be changed. # »
The story of the first man who drove "The Horse of Devil," is a good example to understand the Wahabbi mind. Those people look in suspicious to anything different or anything new. It could be because they used to live isolated in their desert, but I think the religious establishment have played a major role in shaping the minds of those people. # »
I've said before that I'm moving to a new apartment this semester. With three other lads, this is our very first own apartment. The place has two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. I'll share a room with my lifetime friend Mo, whose also a cousin of mine.
Last night, we went shopping for furniture at IKEA. Probably some will always consider them as a "semi-disposal Swedish furniture," but I think many of their pieces are good and come in a perfect prices for college students like us.
I never had the experience of shopping for furniture before, and I've got to tell you it is so exhausting. We spent more than three hours at the new huge IKEA store in Riyadh, and we still need to do more shopping. The good thing about the apartment is that, unlike the students dorm at the university, I can customize it the way I want. I will be living here for another three years till I get my degree, and I'll make sure to make it as good and comfortable as possible. # »
Last night, we went shopping for furniture at IKEA. Probably some will always consider them as a "semi-disposal Swedish furniture," but I think many of their pieces are good and come in a perfect prices for college students like us.
I never had the experience of shopping for furniture before, and I've got to tell you it is so exhausting. We spent more than three hours at the new huge IKEA store in Riyadh, and we still need to do more shopping. The good thing about the apartment is that, unlike the students dorm at the university, I can customize it the way I want. I will be living here for another three years till I get my degree, and I'll make sure to make it as good and comfortable as possible. # »
Friday, February 04, 2005
Tonight, I went with a couple of lads to a football match between the home team al-Hilal from Riyadh and guests al-Ahli from Jeddah. The match was anticipated by the fans, especially we, al-Hilal fans, who can't forget the 3-0 defeat in Jeddah. The tension filled the atmosphere, and more than 10,000 fans remained silent waiting for the first goal. Al-Hilal captain Sami al-Jaber scored first with a fine rebound in the 6-yard-box. The opponents could not make any real chances, and the first half ended faster than we expected.
Early on the second half, al-Ahli scored the equalizer. The home team fought bravely to come back, but they were blocked by a strong defense and an unfair referee. I thought that only one player could score the winning goal. Ahmed al-Swaileh, who is, just like me, originally from Hassa, entered the match in the last five minutes. Last season, we had a similar situation against the same team, and al-Sawileh scored a late goal and led al-Hilal to win.
Actually, I was right this time. On the second minute of the injury time, al-Swaileh jumped and scored the winning header. Most fans could not believe it, however, I always believed in Ahmed al-Swaileh. He is one talented young player, and I think he could be the next big thing in Saudi football. # »
Early on the second half, al-Ahli scored the equalizer. The home team fought bravely to come back, but they were blocked by a strong defense and an unfair referee. I thought that only one player could score the winning goal. Ahmed al-Swaileh, who is, just like me, originally from Hassa, entered the match in the last five minutes. Last season, we had a similar situation against the same team, and al-Sawileh scored a late goal and led al-Hilal to win.
Actually, I was right this time. On the second minute of the injury time, al-Swaileh jumped and scored the winning header. Most fans could not believe it, however, I always believed in Ahmed al-Swaileh. He is one talented young player, and I think he could be the next big thing in Saudi football. # »
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
I'm glad that Dr. Rafeia Ghabash, the president of Gulf University in Bahrain, protested against the sexual segregation at a workshop at KAAU on Tuesday. "We respect local traditions but the role of women must be activated and increased because the discussions are about human and social issues of importance to women," she said. This is exactly why other countries of GCC are better than Saudi Arabia. In other countries, local traditions are respected but they are not sacral. They can be changed and modified to suit the modern world. Traditions are not a part of the religion, and even religion is flexible and can undergo changes.
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The first municipal elections are making a lot of buzz around here. There are some problems with timing. According to this story, voters in Riyadh have only 12 days to decided which candidate, among the 646 candidates, deserves their vote.
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Rebecca Blood makes some really good points on a problem she has noticed with the Technorati tagging system. The other problem she has noticed is not only with Technorati. Kinja has a similar problem. I've noticed that some websites has updated several times during a certain period, however, Kinja does not show any of the updates. # »
The new semester will start on Saturday, so I'll be leaving to Riyadh today noon. I don't usually leave this early, but I'm moving to a new apartment and there is a lot of work to do. This also means I won't be able to post as I was doing in the past two weeks. I will be blogging less during the weekdays, but I'll try to post as much as I can in the weekends (that's Thursdays and Fridays over here).
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Tuesday, February 01, 2005
I did not see that coming, but it looks like the new design of the blog is leaving some readers confused. Where is the comments? Where is the permalink? How can I send this post to a friend? Here is the answer: It's all in the @. Keep your mouse pointer for few seconds on it, and you'll see everything. Click on it to read the comments, or to send the post.
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YouSendIt is a large file email service that helps you get around email file attachment limits. (via LifeHacker)
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Ghassan al-Imam seems to have some problems with Shiites. He thinks that Shiites deep down are Persian not Arabs. I'm sorry Mr. Al-Imam, but you are seeing the whole issue in the wrong way. In fact, people like you are making Shiites Arabs look toward Iran instead of their Arab neighbors. You are looking at them in suspicious and you don't trust them, so don't expect them to trust you. # »
Another good column by Maurine Dowd on the disgusting behavior of the American interrogators in Guantanamo. "Who are these women? Who allows this to happen? Why don't the officers who allow it get into trouble? Why do Rummy and Paul Wolfowitz still have their jobs?" # »
