Tag Archives: bittorrent

Hacking and torrenting

Posted on by

The game I’m working on at the moment is a little bit of a clone of Uplink, an awesome hacker style game I played back in the day. I was too young to buy it back then (I think I was just playing the demo), and I sort of stopped playing it after a while.

I’m designing my game pretty much from memories of Uplink, but I’m a little bit stuck for inspiration on how to do a certain aspect (gosh, check me out being all secretive and careful with my words) so I decided to nab Uplink again and try see how they did it.

I decided to pirate it until I have money – I know I’m strongly against the “I’m allowed to pirate because I’m poor” argument, but I genuinely will buy the multipack of their games when I do have money next. It pains me even more than it’s a small development company and not some multi-conglomerate that I’m stealing from.

But the reason for my posting here is the comments on the torrent page. First, it’s ironic that people trying to download a hacker game don’t know how to install it. Second, it’s awesome to see that some of the people on there have already bought the game and they’re just torrenting it now for their own reasons. I’m against the “Oh, I bought a copy on CD, so now I’m allowed to bit torrent it” argument too, but it’s better than nothing. It at least shows that bit torrent sometimes does drive sales.

Giving your TV away for free: you’re doing it wrong.

Posted on by

I decided to check what was causing my hard drive to thrash, and it turns out it was Kservice.exe, which is basically a peer-to-peer service that 4oD uses.

I’m happy with that; Bittorrent was designed to take the bandwidth strain off distributors so that they can lower the costs of their service, which helps us out too by making them cheaper. What 4oD does is lets me download the TV show I’m watching from other people, and not just Channel 4′s servers.

I’m all for legal ways to use Bittorrent technology; the more ways there are, the more accepted it’ll become and ISPs will stop bandwidth throttling. What I’m against though is Channel 4 not telling me it’s doing this! It was most likely the the terms of service, which I don’t think any one really reads (Google’s TOS say that you have to be over 18 to use any of their services) so it should be more advertised that it’s doing it like this.

Not only was it uploading without me knowing, it was also maxing out my connection! Well, it’s not even my connection, since I’m sharing with my neighbours (they don’t know yet). There’s no where you can turn it down or even off unless you know what you’re doing. Kservice carries on uploading even after you’ve shut down 4oD which sucks.