The MPAA's recently announced campaign against websites hosting BitTorrent trackers seems to be paying its initial dividends: a few BT sites have shut down, including the relatively venerable Suprnova.org.

Some folks thought that Slovenia-based Suprnova would be immune, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Legal action isn't shutting these sites down, so jurisdiction is irrelevant. The threat of legal action is all that's required; some schmo from Slovenia is likely to be bankrupted just by going through the process of figuring out if the MPAA can come after him; if the answer turns out to be yes, he'd REALLY screwed. The only viable option is to fold up shop.

In fact, while it's obvious that these sites aren't operating in good faith, it's not clear that any of them are actually breaking the law. Since the INDUCE act failed to pass, the crucial distinction seems to be whether torrent sites can be considered "common carriers" -- clearinghouses of information for which the site's owners are not ultimately responsible. One of the most effective ways to find pirate torrents is Google, after all, and nobody's going after them.

Well, all that's a bit irrelevant, right? The question is where to go now when you find out your VCR didn't tape Lost. There are plenty of answers:

• There are still a lot of suprnova-style torrent sites that haven't yet succumbed to the MPAA's campaign, thanks either to their small size or a foolishly brazen appraisal of their legal liability. No one knows if they'll be able to tough it out, but for now TorrentSpy, FileList, EliteTorrents and The Pirate Bay are all still up.
• As always, IRC remains the internet's wild west, and torrent traffic seems to be retreating there. EFNet hosts the channels #bt and #bt-gm -- which conveniently provide web interfaces here and here so you can find what you want before wading into IRC. You'll need an IRC client, but from there you just need to hop on the network, join the channel, and type !rules or !triggers or whatever the welcome message tells you to. That should provide you with instructions for connecting to an FServe bot, from which you'll be able to download the torrent file. It sounds complicated, I know. I'll be honest: it sort of is. But only at first -- once you understand the system, it's not a bad one to navigate.
• Finally, there's the aforementioned Google. A particularly neat development is a little program called GTorrent. Behold the power of Slashdot! Someone posted an idea for the program at 2pm, and the idea was implemented and available online by midnight. Not bad. The program sends a google search for torrent files, then tries connecting to each returned result to see if the torrent is still active. Pretty slick, although it's Windows-only at the moment -- and you'll need the .NET environment installed (win2k and xp should already have this; downloads are available for 9x).

There are also some efforts underway to build BitTorrent clients that look more like traditional P2P apps -- Suprnova was working on such a system, called eXeem, although it's not clear if they'll continue to pursue it in light of their decision to shut their website's doors. I have doubts about this endeavor -- I think such a design mistakenly assumes that BitTorrent as a whole is suffering from the liabilities of a centralized architecture simply because individual torrents have a somewhat centralized nature. Creating a distributed system may seem like it would make the network harder to track down, but in practice it'll necessarily codify a specific port range and actually make it easier to locate and shut down BT traffic. On the other hand, technical merit frequently takes a back seat to novelty and stealth -- witness the uselessness of FreeNet versus the technically ho-hum but excellent-in-practice SoulSeek -- so if it's ever released, eXeem might be worth a look.

excuse me, but what the fuck? i don't often order things from online sites, and my current experience with amazon is not encouraging me to do so more in the future. i ordered a slew of christmas presents from them on december 12th and ordered standard shipping (3-5 days). i tracked my packages over the weekend, as i hadn't received a notification of shipment email from them, and was dismayed to find out that they had not yet shipped, and in fact wouldn't be shipping until december 20th at the earliest. i freaked out and upped my standard shipping to two-day shipping, because with standard shipping they "estimated" it would get there by december 24th. yes, leave me with 12 hours or less to receive and wrap a dozen presents - thanks, asshats. so now i'm paying extra money, and they only upped my date of receiving the order to december 23rd. a whole day earlier than what they promised me with standard shipping. today's the 20th, and they STILL haven't shipped out my packages.

is this normal operating procedure for amazon? what's going on? are they going to RUIN MY CHRISTMAS?

In her last post, Catherine mentioned a ceramic monkey that we won at my office Christmas party. Well, here are some photos. I couldn't be more pleased with this little monstrosity. The photos don't quite capture the sense of aggressive butt-pointing that forms the fundamental concept behind (cough) the piece. But I do think they'll give you an idea of why I have no regret about winning this, rather than the "12 Months of the Governator" calendar.

There are two more after the jump.

merry early xmas everybody! this weekend was holidayastic. first off was the much-vaunted holiday party at our apartment. it went off without a hitch, even though i had previously felt like i was going to die as a result of my over-indulgence at the DCist happy hour (btw, drew has got some photos of the happy hour here; i'm in the brown sweater and beige scarf). but i rallied, and decorated, and watched as jeff and tommy made fantastic egg nog, and then i proceeded to make the Worst Mulled Wine Ever, that tasted like toilet cleaner (if toilet cleaner were made with too much cheap brandy), but jeff also doctored that with just enough sugar to make it drinkable, and when i say just enough sugar, i think he maybe used like 3 pounds.

we probably had about 30 people at any given point, including my lovely ex-roommates; several awesome DCist-ers; geremy heitz, whom i hadn't seen in something like three years; jason and corbin, who announced that their wedding will be black tie, to the squeals of girls and the groans of their male friends; many of the usual suspects; and the girl to whom i must now award the Party Trooper of the Year Award, miss smith, who came to the party even though SHE HAD A 6AM FLIGHT THE NEXT MORNING AND AS I HAVE JUST NOW DISCOVERED WAS ALSO AT THE SAME TIME SUFFERING FROM A TERRIBLY INFECTED TONSIL AND STILL WILL FLY TO KIEV TOMORROW TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY, WORLD PEACE, AND CHOCOLATE, AND SACRIFICE HER CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEARS. there are not enough capital letters in the world to express my amazement. anyway, i took some pictures, so i'll try to put them up this evening.