The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘torrent’

Short Version: We now have so much storage in our homes that we could probably, each of us, start our own Rapidshare service. But how do we get all that data to the other machines on our network or, better yet, out onto the Internet

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Review: Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station

Is it even worth getting upset over this Ubisoft nonsense ? By now you’ve certainly heard about the company’s plans to implement a new form of DRM for its PC releases—I’ve only written about it 800 times in the past month! The DRM is bat-shit crazy, sure, but it’s the sentiment behind it that has me concerned this Sunday morning

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Ubisoft claims new DRM scheme was designed by ‘PC guys’ who are our ‘friends’

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more .

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The Pirate Bay kills its tracker, tries to usher in the DHT age

An email announcing TaffyBox hit our inbox this morning. It’s yet-another-BitTorrent service, but there’s a hook that makes it a really nice choice for the casual BitTorrent user – easy search combined with a Java applet BitTorrent client for downloading.

There are other services like BitLet that let you download torrents directly from your browser via a Java applet. But you need to already know the Torrent link (usually via a Torrent search engine) to start downloading it. With TaffyBox, you can search for the name of the show, song or whatever that you’re looking for, and click a button to start downloading immediately in your browser. Point and click downloads for those who find the usual BitTorrent clients complicated.

TaffyBox just ties search and download together, and the search results seem to come from BTJunkie, who also host the tracker.

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You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding.

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It’s time for The Pirate Bay to die

The D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router has a lot of features stuffed into a small, attractive package. It’s the first router I’ve ever made space for on the top of my desk and, expensive though it is at $299, it’s part router, part Chumby, part print server, part network hard drive, and more

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Review: D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router

Remember yesterday when I noted, by way of TorrentFreak, that the RIAA had all but considered DRM to be dead? Not true! Not true at all. Long story short, and in the interest of protecting sources and so forth, the RIAA rep who supposedly went on record saying “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” didn’t actually say that

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False alarm: The RIAA doesn’t think DRM is dead after all!

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is the company that announced plans last month to buy The Pirate Bay now getting cold feet ? A lawyer representing Global Gaming Factory X said in a Dutch court today that GGF would only buy The Pirate Bay if it could turn it into a “legitimate business.” And while we’re at it, I’d like to announce that I plan on purchasing the New York Knicks, but only if I can turn it into a winning baseball team.

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Company that pledged to buy The Pirate Bay now says it’ll only buy if it can make site ‘legitimate’

You wouldn’t want to be isoHunt founder Gary Fung these days. (Note: That’s the best story about BitTorrent I’ve read in some time. Take a few minutes to read all of it.) He’s currently facing an MPAA lawsuit that could well result in fines in the millions of dollars.

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MPAA will hound isoHunt founder till the End of Days