An alternative to P2P

I don’t know what the world is coming to these days.  Its like companies actually feel like they should be making money off of their intellectual property, and that its wrong to steal it?  Craziness.

Anyway, I’m no lawyer, and don’t really have any idea what I’m talking about, but from what I know, most of the ways you can get in trouble from stealing IP over the internet is because its very illegal to give that information to other people (check out the DMCA).  For that reason, the downloading part of P2P is bad, but based on law the very bad part is sending pieces of that data back to other people, which all P2P programs do by definition.

So how can you get the shit you want, without disseminating that information back to other people?  Simple, just drop the P2P, and move onto some system that uses a tradditional client/server setup (there’s nothing wrong with tradition).

Back in the day that would mean trawling around IRC forums and hitting ratio based FTP sites, but thank god those days are over.

Rapidshare is basically a website where people can just dump files, and then share the links to those files with other people.  The trick is how to find those files.  Rapidshare doesn’t provide a way to search for files on their servers, so you have to use 3rd party Rapidshare search engines.  I like rapidlibrary, or their MegaUpload search engine 4MegaUpload.

The biggest problem with Rapidshare though is the file size restrictions – you’ll usually have to download multiple pieces of the file in .RAR format and then piece them back together.  Just get free WinRar, and it’ll take care of everything automatically.