What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.

Basically its a really neat program that allows you to instantly stream music legally and for free using a combination of server and perr to peer based technologies.� It’s only available in a few countries and with an invite currently.� If you’d like to check out this pretty awesome program send me a message with your email or leave a comment on this post and I’ll do my best to get as many invites out at possible.

Link: Spotify

How to Join And Access Spotify

Fixing Spotify Login Issues

Download: Windows 7 x86 (32bit) and x64 (64 bit) If you have issues with the direct links try via the Akamai Java download manager 32bit and 64bit, you will need to copy and paste the links into a new window otherwise you’ll get redirected to the Windows 7 home page.

Here’s the steps for a key:

1. Visit TechNet Downloads, sign in at the top right and let the page load
2. Within the same window copy and paste the following links into the address bar. (64bit key but will work on 32 too, if you get an error refresh a few times).� If you are still having issues try clearing your temp files and deleting all cookies.

64 bit key: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/scripts/gcs.aspx?Product=tn-win7-64-ww&LCID=1033

32 bit key: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/scripts/gcs.aspx?Product=tn-win7-32-ww&LCID=1033

According to Microsoft there are 2.5 million keys to go around worldwide. Microsoft is also providing a QFE patch for the MP3 corruption issues that have plagued build 7000 as KB961367. It’s extremely important you apply this patch as you may lose parts of your MP3s if the patch is not applied. 32bit and 64bit patches are now available.

While this method worked the first time for me many other have reported that it is not working for them.� Post here if you cannot get it working and someone should be able to generate a key for you.

Nine Inch Nails has made its new ten-song, 44-minute minute album entitled “The Slip” available for free download at www.nin.com (free signup required). The new set includes the songs “Echoplex” and “Discipline” which were both posted online during the last couple of weeks ahead of the new album release.

The music is available in a variety of formats, including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license). All downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

For those of you interested in physical products, the band plans to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in July.

Since the NIN site is getting hammered I set up a mirror of the MP3 version.

Download “The Slip”

If you have been following this story, it’s the day that Bell has to respond to the CIAP’s complaint to the CRTC. The following outlines Bell’s response.

Bell Canada says it is downgrading the Internet services of bandwidth hogs in the public interest, and is asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to toss out a landmark complaint by competitors.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers has asked the federal regulator to issue an immediate cease and desist order to stop the telecom giant from “throttling” the web traffic on its networks. Bell, in its response made public Wednesday, says it has no choice but to slow down the services of Internet customers who use up a lot of bandwidth to share files during peak hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

News via CBC…

It’s all-out war between independent internet service providers and Bell Canada Inc. as the smaller companies have urged the CRTC to put an immediate stop to the phone giant’s interference with their traffic.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, which has 55 members representing about 100,000 customers across the country, has asked the regulator to issue a cease-and-desist order on Bell’s throttling of their internet speeds.

Bell recently extended its “traffic-shaping” policy to the smaller companies that rent its network. Under traffic shaping, Bell identifies and slows down certain internet applications, such as the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, during peak traffic periods.

CAIP says the policy harms the businesses of its members and gives Bell — which sells its own competing internet services under the Sympatico brand — an unfair advantage against them.

The group also says Bell’s move violates existing regulations.

Bell’s actions have “caused serious degradation of the performance and service speeds of the retail internet access and other services offered by independent ISPs,” CAIP said in a filing with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Friday. “[It] threatens to cause serious and irreparable harm to the business interests of these ISPs in the form of disrupted service, business uncertainty, loss of good will and loss of customers and market share.”

Read the rest of this entry »

ImageShack has just launched a new service that lets people download torrents to their servers. After the download has completed you then get a http link to download the file to your home PC. I have tried this service out and it works fantastically. The one issue it seems to be having is that even though the torrent is downloading fine it reports that it is stopped. I suppose this is to be expected for beta software.

While other services like this have existed in the past this is the first I have come across that is completely free. The only restriction is that you are only allowed to download a maximum of 15GB a month to your computer and have 15GB of space on ImageShack’s servers.

ImageShack also provides some basic details about the progress of the downloads. Under the “status” link they list information about the download progress, connected seeds and leechers, share ratio and more.

A more serious point of critique is that the torrent seems to disconnect as soon as the download has finished. This basically means that you will be sharing less than you should. I hope that ImageShack will add a sharing friendly feature, and will at least continue seeding until the share ratio is 100%.

Overall, it’s a good service if you want to be a little more anonymous when filesharing. Undoubtedly ImageShack keeps track of your IP but it will prevent the RIAA/MPAA from seeing you in a bittorrent swarm.

Check out ImageShacks Torrent Service.

In perhaps one of the most ironic twists I have seen in awhile, a small software company has accused major label Sony/BMG of software piracy.

PointDev, which makes Windows administration software, claims that a raid on Sony/BMG servers revealed that as much as 47 percent of the software used by the company can be considered to have been pirated under French law, according to Zeropaid’s Google translation of the initial report:

We are not interested in an amicable settlement. It is not just a question of money but more importantly in principle. The rate of software piracy in the company is very high. According to the Business Software Alliance, a association of the major publishers in the market, 47 percent of programs used in the company would be [unlawful] in France…

The Business Software Alliance raid that uncovered the programs on Sony/BMG’s servers was apparently triggered by Sony IT worker’s request for assistance with a program called Ideal Migration. When the PointDev tech support person tried to help, he or she seems to have discovered that the key provided by Sony/BMG was pirated.

Sony/BMG apparently asked La Provence not to pick up on the story, which, of course, it did. The case will surely provide no small amount of glee to file sharing activists and RIAA boycotters as it unfolds.