USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps 246
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
I suppose I am not (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I suppose I am not (Score:5, Funny)
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And yet you did...
Not only that, but fast enough to get a first post.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Surely your first thought was "can I hack it to run my own code?"
I felt... (Score:5, Funny)
I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...
Re:I felt... (Score:5, Funny)
NOW I don't have mod points! Damnit!
Re:I felt... (Score:5, Funny)
I do!
Oh, wait...
Re:I felt... (Score:5, Funny)
Lots of home NAS already do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Insightful)
Plug it in at the end of the day, pick it up in the morning. RIAA/MPAA catches the traffic? No tracing it back to you.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Insightful)
If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Informative)
If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.
RTFA
Pulled directly from the link:
The resulting device, pictured above, includes a 200MHz Marvell PXA255 processor with 64MB of RAM and 16MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, WiFi, and an SD slot which was fitted with a 2GB memory card.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Informative)
2GB memory card - not nearly big enough. My torrent PC has 320GB hard drive which sometimes is too small.
A nice idea though. Now add a IDE or SATA port to it and make it autonomous, well, like a PC with the torrent software, so that I can:
1.set up the network, load the .torrent files, disconnect it from my PC, connect it to a battery and leave it somewhere to download. The ability to change MAC address would be useful.
2.If it is used as a network card - the small CPU should still work and download files so that if the host PC freezes or has a BSOD the downloads continue.
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You underestimate the size of HD video, I think.
Fine for discographies and DVD-Rips or even SD TV shows (a season or two at a time), but HD TV shows and movies would be out of the question.
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Also, I usually download several series or seasons at once, if the torrents are slow and part of my connection is left unused. And don't forget torrents that have the whole show and are usually very large, with those I can't download a part of it, move it to another HDD then download another part or I will not be able to seed effectively. So the whole, say, 60GB stays until I download the last file and seed it for some time (not always to 1.0 ratio; if the torrent has a lot of seeds I better use my limited
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I bought an eee. Run quite awhile when the monitor is turned off :P
With a 26GB cap on my down pipe a month, it really saves me that I can stash this thing at the library and pull all my low priority large files.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Informative)
If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.
You might need to build a dumb USB power supply for it though. How about a 9 volt battery, a resistor and a zener diode?
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Informative)
You might need to build a dumb USB power supply for it though. How about a 9 volt battery, a resistor and a zener diode?
How about that's extremely inefficient. For an additional $0.50 you can get a voltage regular or DC-DC converter. Come on, I'm on the digital side of EE and I know better.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Funny)
You might need to build a dumb USB power supply for it though. How about a 9 volt battery, a resistor and a zener diode?
How about that's extremely inefficient. For an additional $0.50 you can get a voltage regular or DC-DC converter. Come on, I'm on the digital side of EE and I know better.
Yeah I really should have gone for the switchmode solution and saved a few microwatts. In my day sonny we were glad to have zeners. I had to walk all day in the snow....up hill...oh stuff it.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:4, Funny)
Are you old enough to remember when Radio Shack actually sold electronic components?!?!
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As long as we're in pedantic mode, a LM7805 (or any other linear regulator) will save no more power than a zener and resistor. A better option would be to start with a voltage source closer to the 5V that you want (say a 6V battery pack) and use a low dropout regulator.
Even with an efficient switchmode regulator, a 9V battery wouldn't last terribly long at these loads. You might be able to get overnight out of it, though.
As long as we're leeching bandwidth from the library or computer lab, might as well h
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:4, Funny)
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You don't need a 9v battery, just 4 1.2v rechargeable AAs. Duct tape the two together and chuck it through an RIAA window hoping it picks up a signal.
Come to think it forget about the signal. Just short the rechargeable AAs and chuck them through the window
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:4, Funny)
You want to 'mildly warm' them to death?
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Interesting)
RIAA/MPAA catches the traffic? No tracing it back (Score:2)
Re:Perfect for the computer lab: recipe for FAIL (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
Sorry... still no anonymity. Did you actually think the same developer responsible for DRM-enforcing Windows Vista would actually help produce a device that might make you immune to it?
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Where I went to school, they had an excellent means of blocking p2p traffic. After the RIAA started suing schools, they made it a priority to make sure no one could connect to a bit torrent network from their internet accounts.
They also had the PCs locked down to the point where it was nearly impossible to change a setting (with impossible being the goal), and had a ghost scheduler set up to reformat and re-image the drives at 3am.
That doesn't mean it can't be done. But, in some campuses, it would be more p
No need. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No need. (Score:5, Funny)
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50x less? (Score:5, Informative)
Argh!
It's one of the following:
1/50 the power usage
or
a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC
Re:50x less? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet you knew immediately what the phrase meant. Gee, it's almost like it got its point across with perfect clarity.
Re:50x less? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and I cn rd wrds tht r splld wtht vwls, but that doesn't make it right.
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What?
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Yes, andue I cone iraid wierds tauihot rouie espulelied woathut eviwils, but that doesn't make it right.
I tried to fix that for you...
(actually it was a real effort to get things that didn't sound pretty similar to the sentence you were trying to write O.o I guess the lesson here isn't that "the human brain is amazing and special" but more like "vowels are all very similar and virtually interchangable").
Re:50x less? (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for clarifying that. When I read the article, I assumed that 50x less meant that if a normal computer used 10w, this device 'used' -500W, or actually generated 500W. Boy was I wrong!
(I'm kidding of course - I didn't read the article :)
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so, if you are using 1 unit of electricity, 50x would be 50 units (50 x 1 unit). Using 50x LESS would mean 0.02 units so that (0.02 x 50 = 1).
KillerNIC? (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this somewhat akin to what the much-hyped KillerNIC [slashdot.org] was all about-- a separate device to offload network activity (for example, BitTorrent downloads)?
Re:KillerNIC? (Score:4, Informative)
No. Not at all.
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This one works while your computer is in a sleep state. The KillerNIC does not. Sure, it could in theory, but the software to do so doesn't come with it, and no third party ever developed such an app.
So while hardware offloading network activity is nothign new, software to run downloads while the computer is asleep is quite new, and quite nice.
At a reasonable price, I'd consider getting one myself, just to save on power costs.
Re:KillerNIC? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The NIC in the article acts a passthrough when the computer is on, and only starts doing its work when you turn the host PC off. It promises to deliver better energy usage by shutting the PC off.
why get one of these when (Score:2, Insightful)
having something that only supports bittorrent seems pretty limiti
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From the article, it's not just bittorrent - they've got other large downloads in mind too. It'd be nice to be able to leave a device like that downloading something like the entire debian stable branch for my particular architecture to a soon-to-be-cheap 64 gigabyte micro
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Either that is a typo of I missed the memo.
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Talk about typos!
I need to learn how to press that Preview button first. Is there a way it always Previews before posting (while logged in)?
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Bittorrent clients can be resource intensive though. rtorrent appears to be ncurses-based, which is a bit spartan for my taste. I've been using azureus, but the memory consumption is ridiculous - like, 200+ megabytes for 1 or 2 torrents!
What's an easy-to-use, full-featured, but resource-light torrent app?
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Transmission is my favorite. Really doesn't get any better IMO. Light, looks good, does everything I want.
Deluge is my second favorite. Not as light, not as snappy, a bit ugly, but about a thousand times better than Azureus.
I use uTorrent (muTorrent) on Windows.
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Oh, right, links. All links go to screenshots page, unless the home page has some.
Linux:
1. Transmission [transmissionbt.com] (Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris)
2. Deluge [deluge-torrent.org] (Linux, mediocre Windows port available)
Windows:
1. uTorrent [utorrent.com] (Windows, Mac beta port available)
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there are so many other low-powered devices that will do so much more.
The important part of this work isn't that there is another device to do your downloading. Yes, there are better devices for that.
What these guys have done is design one way to keep your PC in low power mode as long as possible. One reason that people keep their computers on is that they want network services to be available. (Some keep their computer on because it's downloading torrents. I keep my computer on because I might want to SSH in or access my files remotely.)
This device is one way to kee
Torrents going green?!?!!? (Score:3, Funny)
There's another name for such a device (Score:4, Informative)
Another "great innovation" from Microsoft.
jdb2
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Dell did it one step better and put the ARM chip in the laptop along side the x86 CPU. I forget what version of laptop does this but it's currently used for instant-On but has full network access and I guess it shares it with Windows since they said Windows can boot while using the ARM stuff.
But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.
LoB
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But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.
2 things
1. The KillerNIC doesn't work while the computer is in sleep mode
2. The KillerNIC (or a DD-WRT capable router)is never going to get put into a laptop
I'd jump on this NIC in a heartbeat if they could shrink it down to ExpressCard size,
though I suspect it'll just eventually get integrated into Intel motherboards.
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The KillerNIC can not do this independently of the host like this device can. With Microsoft's prototype you can put your main computer to sleep (not off) and it continues to download.
The smart bit I see is the interaction: the take-over of the network state by the NIC from the main PC and vice versa, and the transfer of torrent files (this of course includes the downloaded bits and so), current connections, and whatnot. That is quite cool and afaik not done before.
So this one for a change appears to be a
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The killer XENO pro and Ultra WILL do this while the computer sleeps.
though the device is pci-e and will require a BIOS that supports this function.
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This really is better than vista. It lets us seed our favorite flavors of Linux (And also copies of XP, just to add irony to injury) without clicking through Microsoft's bastardization of sudo.
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Wrong, the Killer NIC doesn't run whilst the PC is sleeping.
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Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
It is supposed to work while in sleep mode, but for some reason it doesn't work while shut down. I'd guess not enough power is sent to the PCI slots in that state, and the thing does suck down a bit of wattage. I'm sure Some part of the card is active while shut down, even if just for wake on lan functions. But no bittorrent while off, only asleep.
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Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
Sorry for the double reply. But it seems I was incorrect. There is no mention anywhere on their website about remaining active when the OS isn't. The PDF spec sheet, and their technical details page both don't even mention that as a feature.
I didn't bother digging through their forums, but I'd prefer to hear from someone who has gotten this device to actually function in that way (and ideally a HOWTO)
Other functionality (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but can it stay up all night looking up wikipedia for names of obscure early-90s dance acts and then scour all the torrent sites for full albums instead of just "Best of 90's Dance You Like Me Now?" compilations, and then stare at bittorrent, begging more seeders to come online to increase the speed from 0.01KB/s, and then say "screw it" and download the latest metallica and eminem albums on principle, delete them without listening to them, because it doesnt really like metallica or eminem, and then wander off to youtube to watch old WCW videos?
If not, it can't truly duplicate my torrent experience.
Eh (Score:3, Insightful)
The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.
Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.
A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.
Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.
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4.4 Applications Using Stubs
To demonstrate how modest application stubs can enable significant sleep-mode operation in Somniloquy, we have also implemented application stubs for three applications that were popular in our informal survey: background web download, peer to peer content distribution using BitTorrent, and instant messaging. For all these appli- cations, we did not have to modify the operating system or the existing applications on the PC, which were only available to us in binaries. To capture the state of the application for the respective stub, we wrote wrappers around the binaries.
Emphasis mine.
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It's capturing the information from a specific location in memory that is specific to the version of the OS you're running.
At the minimum, the software would have to know where to look in :
Win XP
Win XP 64 bit
Win Vista
Win Vista 64 bit
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With external power it'd just be a bittorrent NAS. (Score:4, Interesting)
This gives new meaning to the term (Score:4, Interesting)
Zombie computers.
It's already been done (Score:2, Informative)
You can purchase a linksys router that will download your torrents to a usb hdd or cf card. One less thing that takes up a usb port.
Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
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Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:4, Interesting)
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
This makes me wonder if this is already possible with a little hardware hacking and something like openwrt. The only piece currently missing is the "I'm going to bed" packet from the client to the router, and the "go back to sleep packet" you mentioned. When a client goes to sleep, the router takes over the connections using whatever the mechanism is in this paper, and starts caching rx packets.
Then either when the buffer gets full or a certain pre-defined packet signature triggers the router, the router can send a replay of what happened at 100Mbps back to the client, which is all transparent to the OS.
The caveat of course being that the network stack would need to be similar, you can't have the client machine thinking it sent a RST where the router didn't. And the router would need to decide which packets it can handle, and which are unimportant, and which need to cause a wakeup. But on the surface there isn't a lot stopping a POC of this kind of thing.
Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people run rtorrent on their WL-500g's and use an rtorrent front end on the PC. It works perfectly well. rTorrent continuosly downloads on the router and the front end transparantly displays information as if it was downloading locally. No moving of the service to have it running on the PC or embedded device is required.
Really this board in the article has no advantages over a bittorrent capable router that i can see. It only allows 1 computer to make use of the services on the embedded device, so you'd need 1 for each computer. It takes up 2 USB ports when really it already has connectivity to the computer via the LAN anyway so why the need for USB at all? It still requires the modem/router to be on to work, so it uses more power than just a bittorrent router. It doesn't work when the computer is in hibernate or off completely, only when in S3 or above. It doesn't have any other storage options but the SD-Card...
I could go on but you get the idea.
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DD-WRT [dd-wrt.com] is what you're looking for.
Bittorrent, webserver, whatever--it's Linux, put whatever you want on it. Runs on tons of routers, though the lowest end ones are usually a little weak to both keep up with routing and do downloading. Has a web config and torrent interface, I think.
Instead of the complicated "cache, wake computer, transfer, sleep computer" thing, just plug an external hard drive in to the router and share it with Samba or something.
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Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
That's great if you don't seed.
I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router!
Well, my ADSL modem maybe has ARM CPU, but my router has x86 :).
not even a proof of concept (Score:2)
The makers say this is a proof of concept. But it isn't. Networking protocols are incredibly flexible, on purpose. This device cannot know how to answer on a given socket unless the code I've written to answer is running on this device. Which isn't going to happen since my code is running in a different address space, on a different processor architecture on a different OS.
Neat concept (Score:3, Interesting)
something similar (Score:4, Interesting)
My housemate has something similar. It's the typical NAS with two drives, but the cool part is the web interface. You can c&p torrent urls straight into it and even manage all your existing torrents through the web interface. So every computer in the house has a central torrent location. When it's time to play L4D we don't have to go around checking which machine is sucking all the band, we just log into the NAS and pause the torrents.
Just went and looked at it. It's a D-link DNS 323 (company link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509 [dlink.com]).
I'd say the d-link beats the Microsoft research team's device (even though gumstix is awesome). No pc required and it can sit anywhere on your network.
at home 37% leave computer ON to support IM/Email (Score:3, Insightful)
Never mind the fact that emails are saved on the server, but is this device is really necessary in case "An instant messenger (IM) client will require the PC to be on in order for the user to stay "online" (reachable) to their contacts."
So instead of telling a significant number of respondents that they really don't have to leave their computer ON to run background applications such as IM and email (unless of course you are running an IM/email server at work or home), the author does a cartwheel while holding a sermon on how to be green.
Now that everybody has get some green in order to be green, something similar but different, here is a bare-bone OS running on a daughter card (PCIe) which allows secure access to the host's hardware even when the host is OFF but the motherboard still has power. http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/drac5/OM53/en/ug/racugc1.htm#31825 [dell.com]. Works with Dell. A must if you don't have unrestricted physical access to your servers, and every once in a while the main power cycles but your servers don't boot/reboot automatically.
Small correction to the main article, a couple of the authors are from University of California, San Diego and not University of San Diego.
Gentoo on a Linkstation Live (Score:2)
In case you prefer something more than a preconfigured appliance: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Main_Page [nas-central.org]
Debian is also available, in fact it officially supports [debian.org] devices like this.
Read TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
It might be linux, but it's still crap.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
The interesting(hardly earthshaking; but interesting) bit is the work they did on interaction between the gumstix board and the full PC. Making a little computer do stuff is trivial, making common applications IM, bittorrent, and parts of the network state, running on the full PC work with the little computer in a reasonably clever way is rather less so.
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It'd be even better if it included PeerGuardian as part of the application bundle as well.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
PeerGuardian is a trap. Consider.
Loads of people are torrenting at any one time. Probably the vast majority of them will torrent a few files and then stop. A small minority will torrent 24/7 maxing out their pipes.
Now if you want to shut down filesharing it is this small minority that you want to target, firstly because they are a legally inviting target - it's hard for them to claim they are innocent if you can show they were maxing out their DSL connection 24/7. Also from a PR point of view it's better to sue the hard core pirates than the casual ones - you avoid headlines about grandmothers being sued for thousands of dollars because their grandkids downloaded a couple of songs. Last but not least they are the ones seeding most of the files because the casual torrenters download what they want and then shutdown the application.
Normally of course there's no good way looking at one torrent to work out which torrenters are the hard core minority and which are casual torrenters.
Enter PeerGuardian.
The hard core torrenters will download and install it and the casual ones won't bother. Now you have an easy way to distinguish the two. Try to connect from a few IP addresses on the blocklist, and try to connect from a few that aren't. The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.
So PeerGuardian provides no protection for downloaders and it provides very useful information to anti piracy organisations.
If you don't want to get sued, don't seed and don't install things like PeerGuardian.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I thought the interesting bit was the part where Microsoft Research was involved in creating a device that ran linux. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't slim down Vista enough for this project.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.
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I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.
C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.
...and in the wrong order.
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Or download a game that you play one time and decide - this sucks, so you save EVEN MORE MONEY.
My guess is that you do not pay your own electricity bill.
Heh. (Score:2)
Yo dawg! (Score:5, Funny)
A tiny computer that can download files while another computer sits idly by.
Yo dawg, we herd you like torrents, so we put a computer in your computer so you can torrent while you torrent.
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limited to 3 peers at a time.
There, fixed that for you.
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Yep, Sheevaplug rocks. 500GB USB drive, rTorrent, and then uShare to the Xbox360. No muss, no fuss, no hassle. And, it has the capacity to do a lot more. Works out of the box, and everything is just an apt-get away.