Our conclusion: Spotify is using DRM to prevent things legally permitted even by overly strict US copyright law, making Spotify defective by design.

new winetricks 20110123: work around bug in wine-1.3.12. new winetricks-alpha 20110123: ditto, plus new verbs cnc3_demo, guildwars, hphbp_demo, nfsshift_demo, sims3, spotify, vc2005trial.

Another week, another winetricks.

winetricks-alpha version 20110123 adds the following new verbs:

* cnc3_demo: Command and Conquer 3 demo
* guildwars: Guild Wars

Spotify is a free and legal service which gives you access to millions of songs. They achieve this by licensing the tracks from record companies in a similar way to radio stations, and they pay for it with advertising. When I first heard about it, like many others I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I also discovered there was no Linux version, so I pretty much gave up on it.

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name "Squeeze"). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a "technology preview".

FrostWire is a peer-to-peer file sharing program for the Gnutella and BitTorrent protocols. FrostWire is written in Java, and is a fork of LimeWire, another popular Gnutella client. Released under the GNU General Public License, FrostWire is free software and is a good alternative for Limewire.

RMS: « It is very important to promote peer-to-peer methods of doing various collaborative tasks, because servers cause issues of control vs freedom, and peer-to-peer is the only way to avoid them. »

One of the touted features of the $200 OLPC laptop is the peer-to-peer mesh topology networking feature that can theoretically bring an Internet infrastructure where there is no network infrastructure. The problem is that peer-to-peer wireless LAN mesh topology sounds better than it actually works and there’s a good reason it isn’t used commercially.

"Peer-to-peer systems have existed since the first incarnation of the Internet. In recent times the Internet has taken on a more hierarchical form, power has been taken away from the individual and placed in the hands of operators of large servers. However, with the re-emergence of p2p the individual is gaining more freedom.

Apt-p2p gives you the ability to download Debian packages via a peer-to-peer protocol. Apt-p2p will try to get the packages from peers before it resorts to pulling them from the repository. This saves bandwidth for the repository servers, can speed up your download speed, and ads to the sense of community which Debian is so rich with.