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Geocities Lives On as Massive Torrent Download

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:33:53 +0000

Right now, you can download the bulk of Geocities in a single, giant 652GB file over BitTorrent.

The seminal free web hosting site has been off the tubes since last year, when its owner, Yahoo, shut it down.

Most of us probably didn’t care about Geocities disappearing. Its content was outdated. The design of most pages made MySpace look like something created by Edward Tufte. And the HTML tables — oh, the tables!

However, enough people did care about the demise of Geocities to form a group that calls itself The Archive Team, which began grabbing as much of Geocities as it could before Yahoo killed it. On Sunday, that archive of Geocities was made available in torrent form — a 652GB torrent.

If you don’t want to download 0.65 terabytes of the web equivalent of space junk, you can merely browse one of the several mirrors the Archive Team has set up at reocities.com, geociti.es, geocities.ws and oocities.org. At once of those sites, you can get your fill of jazz midi files, learn about the totally amazing all-female grunge band L7, and pay a visit to Spanky’s mushroom-infested link compendium without downloading the entire payload.

It’s easy to joke about Geocities. After all, Geocities looks very primitive from this web X.x vantage point. But the archive team has a point, both about our “digital heritage” and the short-lived nature of popular websites.

What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words and digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call “regular people” joining the World Wide Web. A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.

But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So the Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved.

If you’d like a little bit of internet history (OK, a massive bit of internet history) head on over to The Pirate Bay. And please, remember to seed.

Screenshot: Red Turboranger’s Home Page.

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New µTorrent Features Better Vista Support, IPv6 Upgrades

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:45:13 +0000

The popular, lightweight Windows torrent client, µTorrent, has released its first major update in some time, packing in some significant new features.

From a layout and UI standpoint, not much has changed, but under the hood µTorrent now supports Teredo, which promises much improved IPv6 support. Teredo is a tunneling protocol that allows even IPv6-unaware NAT devices to handle IPv6 traffic.

The end result is IPv6 connectivity without needing to upgrade NAT hardware, meaning better connections and improved torrent performance.

Other features in µTorrent 1.8 include better Windows Firewall registration in Vista, better skin handling for customizing the look and feel and quite a bit more. Check out the µTorrent forums for the complete change list.

Also welcome news is that with the release of 1.8, the µTorrent team plans to focus its effort on the long-anticipated Mac OS X version. No time line has been announced, but µTorrent developer Greg Hazel hints to TorrentFreak that “the first public Alpha version will be released in just a few weeks.”

As always µTorrent is free and you can grab the latest version from the downloads page.

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Transmission: New Version Offers Remote Control Torrent Tools

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:52:11 +0000

A new version of Transmission, the popular Mac/Linux BitTorrent client, has been released. This is a significant update that adds a new browser-based interface for managing your torrents remotely. The remote features come from Clutch, which has been included with the latest version of Transmission.

The new remote management feature is listed as experimental, but I didn’t have any trouble setting it up and was able to browse and control torrents from other machines on my home network. Firefox 3 didn’t load the stylesheet quite right on my Mac, but the Windows version had no trouble.

The Transmission web interface uses a CSS skin that makes it look indistinguishable from the actual app, so there’s no hunting for menu items in unfamiliar places. All permissions and IP whitelists are handled through the client, but otherwise the web interface has the same basic feature set.

Also new in this version of Transmission is support for Leopard’s Quick Look feature — just select a torrent and hit the spacebar. Of course if most of your torrent downloads are folders or disk images there isn’t much to see in Quick Look, but it’s there if you want it.

As commenters on Lifehacker have pointed out, the ability to serve Clutch out over SSL has been removed. But, as also discussed in the comments, you could set up SSL encryption if you have access to an Apache server you can use as a proxy.

Transmission is free and you can grab the latest Mac and Linux versions from the download page.

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