re OT question: I remember trying out Azureus a bit back in the day, and with its “legit content distribution” section getting to watch this video:

YouTube - Benny Benassi - Satisfaction

But I didn’t stick with it, mainly used µTorrent and eMule.

So sad this is necessary now.

Or hosted in a way that is itself P2P? Like IPFS or ZeroNet?

Ah yes, in the year 2000…

(a gag that’s already a quarter-century old!)

[OT: watch “Shadow of the Vampire” after watching the OG Nosferatu.]

Two decades torrenting in Mexico (also periods of eMule and Soulseek), never a problem. No VPN, no seedbox, no Tailscale.

(ISP: Telmex Prodigy Infinitum.)

I believe using a CDN would defeat the author’s goal of not being reliant on third-party service providers.

A problem with this approach was that many readers use VPN’s and other proxies that change IP addresses virtually every time they use them. For that reason and because I believe in protecting every Internet user’s privacy as much as possible, I wanted a way of immediately unblocking visitors to my website without them having to reveal personal information like names and email addresses.

I recently spent a few weeks on a new idea for solving this problem. With some help from two knowledgeable users on Blue Dwarf, I came up with a workable approach two weeks ago. So far, it looks like it works well enough. To summarize this method, when a blocked visitor reaches my custom 403 error page, he is asked whether he would like to be unblocked by having his IP address added to the website’s white list. If he follows that hypertext link, he is sent to the robot test page. If he answers the robot test question correctly, his IP address is automatically added to the white list. He doesn’t need to enter it or even know what it is. If he fails the test, he is told to click on the back button in his browser and try again. After he has passed the robot test, Nginx is commanded to reload its configuration file (PHP command: shell_exec(“sudo nginx -s reload”);), which causes it to immediately accept the new whitelist entry, and he is granted immediate access. He is then allowed to visit cheapskatesguide as often as he likes for as long as he continues to use the same IP address. If he switches IP addresses in the future, he has about a one in twenty chance of needing to pass the robot test again each time he switches IP addresses. My hope is that visitors who use proxies will only have to pass the test a few times a year. As the whitelist grows, I suppose that frequency may decrease. Of course, it will reach a non-zero equilibrium point that depends on the churn in the IP addresses being used by commercial web-hosting companies. In a few years, I may have a better idea of where that equilibrium point is.

You’re welcome.

I believe I found it originally via the “distribuverse”… specifically, ZeroNet.

What about a dumb TV with a Roku Xpress?

https://fmhy.net/

“His behavior was disrespectful and disruptive and in violation of our code of conduct.”

Remember, folks: you have to obey the MSG code of conduct even when you’re thousands of miles away from MSG, and years before going there!

They added the wrong Robert Farley to the group chat?

Appointment to the Trump Administration in 3… 2… 1…

I don’t know but my speculation:

• Europe’s economy (from which the Church’s income was largely derived) didn’t go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
• That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
• The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autonomous archbishoprics.
• Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.

The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope’s temporal power over the city, Rome’s population growth went stratospheric.

Source: https://www.jetpunk.com/users/quizmaster/charts/population-of-rome-over-time

Lots of things happen there! It’s party time all the time!

In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.

Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.

The city’s population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Middle_Ages

Thanks to multiple sackings, power struggles, plagues etc.

It only surpassed a million again in 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics

Musk probably has his own Night of the Long Knives coming sooner or later.

As in, he will be the target, not the perpetrator.

• Röhm = Musk
• Hitler = Trump
• Himmler = Vance? Patel? Other?

You know what… it is 😉

(Giving me flashbacks to the days of the Slyck forums!)

As first torrents, then cyberlockers, and then streaming came to dominate, the other P2P networks and programs did one of the following:

• Shrunk to a much smaller number of users but still linger on.
• Software stopped being developed, domain name lost
• Purposely closed down to avoid legal consequences
• Pivoted to something else (like legal downloads or streaming e.g. Napster, Audio Galaxy, or a different P2P network, e.g. Limewire went from Gnutella to BitTorrent to… web file transfer?)

Every now and then, I try a Kad/ed2k client but soon return to torrents. E.g. a few months ago I tried out aMule on Linux… and got a LowID. 23 years after I first started using it, I still can’t dodge LowID 😂 It does have content, though.

Compared to previous times I revisited Kad/ed2k, some sites/services with ed2k links have now finally disappeared: MoTV (Ministry of Television), TV Underground, ShareTheFiles. I think VeryCD is still going though.

Shareaza is still a thing (at least, a fork of it is), still claiming to be the one P2P app to rule all the networks. One of only three clients left (according to Wikipedia) that still access the Gnutella network.

Just to see what’s up, I installed Gtk-Gnutella (last updated March 2024). I can find a few things in searches, but still waiting for them to begin to download. UPDATE: One just started downloading, although the speed is max 50 Kib/s, ETA is at least a few hours.

I might give a Soulseek client a try, as a hard drive full of music I got from Soulseek in 00s recently died (yes, it lasted 15 years!), and Soulseek seems to be the music P2P that never dies (and has a Linux client).

PS I don’t think Retroshare is a “new iteration”; it’s been going since 2006!