Second, although games are listed in the B.E.N. catalog as free, they are nothing of the sort. You get a free preview period to try the game. If you want to play it past that period, you have to pay up. Gangland, for example, is free only for 60 … Read more
The new BitTorrent media store, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, has been live for a few hours. It's a mixed bag, and these are my hands-on impressions. I wanted to come up with five pros and five cons. But I think the cons outweigh the pros, and this list reflects that. Update: The section on games has been rewritten and moved from pros to cons.
Pros:
It's fast. BitTorrent.com has big pipes. This morning, even on files that no one else was hosting (no one else in the swarm), I got 1MB/sec download speeds. An episode of … Read more
BitTorrent is launching a legal, paid media distribution system, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BEN). [See News.com story.]
Essentially an online store that will compete other stories like iTunes, the new BitTorrent Network will have more than 5,000 titles. TV shows will be $1.99 an episode, and users will be able to watch them as much as they want. Movies will cost $2.99 or $3.99 and will time out 30 days after download, or 24 hours after the user begins playing them.
In other words, there will be heavy digital rights management (DRM) on BitTorrent files. … Read more
YouBackItUp is a great way to share large files with friends. YouBackItUp has employed a really neat drag-and-drop interface that makes it dead simple for anyone (read nontech-savvy people) to use. Instead of hitting a browse button and fishing through your hard drive to find the file, you can just drag the original right onto the interface, and it takes care of the rest. When you're done uploading things, you're given a simple URL to send to friends or family where they can download the files.
What makes the service a real winner in my book is its … Read more
Box.net is a file hosting service for individuals and groups. They've got a really great customizable widget you can put on your blog or Web site that lets you share files with anybody. Even better, the Box widget provides instant previews of images and music. The files reside in your Box.net storage area, which provides its users with 1GB of free storage and more with paid plans. As the widget owner, you can even upload files through the widget, without having to manage things at Box.net. It doesn't get much simpler.
[via SexyWidget]
I tried a few online backup services last year: Carbonite, Mozy, ProtectMyPhotos, and Titanize. I use Carbonite to back up my home system, but I have found the Achilles heel of online backup: it's really slow. My first backup of music, photo, and video files over my home broadband connection took, literally, months. Plus, online backup puts my files on someone else's servers. They're probably more secure than my home machine, but it still makes me a bit uncomfortable.
A new service, Crashplan, lets you back up your PCs and Macs to other PCs and Macs, either … Read more
Tubes, a new app going public Tuesday, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing and -synchronization system that can make it very easy to distribute files among multiple users and computers.
It's the application I've been looking for to solve this real-world problem: Every other year, my wife's family gets together for Christmas. This past December, her four siblings and their families gathered in her parents' house in Baltimore (the family doesn't believe in hotels, so it was cozy). There were eight digital cameras in operation. After the holidays, we all scattered back home, and the great photo archive … Read more
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