The old adage tells us that if something is just too good to be true then it probably is. So it was with the free file sharing system Ares Destiny that I tried out recently. I’d heard mixed reviews and just wanted to give it a test run. It’s free so I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to try. How wrong I was: it hurt a lot.
First off the Ares Destinysoftware is nothing special. There is nothing particularly wrong with it either: it is just mid range stuff that is easily bettered by searching around. This didn’t surprise me a great deal since Ares Destiny is relatively new to the market and I didn’t expect them to get it spot on first time around.
The big surprise – and it is not one of those nice surprises like you would expect on a birthday or at Christmas – is that during installation (which was, unsurprisingly in hindsight, pretty much an automatic affair) it had managed to squeeze Dealio onto my computer. Dealio is spyware, pure and simple, and unless you really like popups every few minutes it will get annoying very, very soon.
As a parting shot, it turns out that Dealio is pretty much impossible to get rid of. Steer well clear of Ares Destiny!
Rebecca Eskin asked:
Remember when Napstar and Kazaa were like secret words passed around in code by teens at risk of getting busted by their parents for downloading music for free online? While parents for the most part were more concerned about protecting their computers, even then we understood that file sharing was the next big thing to take the IT world by storm and any attempts to contain it were futile.
The music industry, dominated at the time by the “big four” namely Sony Muisic Entertainment, Universal, EMI and Warner accepted no such pretext as they watched music sales drop from approximately $38 billion to $32 billion over the same three year period that P2P software was launched.
While we felt for the poor artists who were no doubt being short changed in royalties, we all knew it was the guys at the top who were suffering the most, calling foul play in the names
of the musicians they represented. No one cared that much,record producing suits never impressed sixteen year olds, who just want to listento music without having to work hard for
cash that’s hard to come by.
My teenage daughter shrugged her shoulders saying music like love should be free, and off she went to downloadher favourite song. Even though legal action was being taken against students on campus’s across the states, kids and even the odd parent, continued to download music for free. As much as the cost, it was the form that was so tempting. You could
download your favourite songs and not be held ransom by the record companies packaging of single hits on expensive albums filled with songs nobody wanted to listen to.
In a paper presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2008, Mark Cooper, Directorof research presented the following idea. He suggested that the dramatic decline in record sales had less to do with piracy and more to do with the natural changes brought about by the technology ,ie. Consumer demand for singles over albums. He proposed that”technological change shifts the balance of interest between private rights and social goals and frequently triggers”piracy panics,” wherein the gatekeepers of content feel the financial security of their intellectual property is at risk. These panics play out in furious legal battles.”
What folowed was exactly that – a series of ‘furious legal battles’ between the music industry and peer to peer software companies, such as Napstar and Kazaa. What was most surprising was the media’s lack of support for the technology that would ultimately be embraced. An older generation of reporters backed an even more out touch record industry who refused to agknowledge that peer to peer software was already embeded in the consumer psyche, and that no amount of money wasted in messy court cases could prevent its use.
Kids continued file sharing, new content sharing sites emerged, and even though Napstar and Kazaa lost their battle in court, the war on the fronteer of technology vs piracy was won – with record companies now embracing the technology that once threatened its very existence. Peer to peer software is now being developed to redirect traffic to legal music files for downloading.
Will my kids stop downloading music for free, probably not, but if the software proves to be able to redirect traffic from other harmful sites where illicit files are shared in the same way it redirects consumers to legal music download sites, the great battle will have been worth it.
Perhaps then the media will get on board and support the inevitable fact that we have to work with what we have not against it.
Remember when Napstar and Kazaa were like secret words passed around in code by teens at risk of getting busted by their parents for downloading music for free online? While parents for the most part were more concerned about protecting their computers, even then we understood that file sharing was the next big thing to take the IT world by storm and any attempts to contain it were futile.
The music industry, dominated at the time by the “big four” namely Sony Muisic Entertainment, Universal, EMI and Warner accepted no such pretext as they watched music sales drop from approximately $38 billion to $32 billion over the same three year period that P2P software was launched.
While we felt for the poor artists who were no doubt being short changed in royalties, we all knew it was the guys at the top who were suffering the most, calling foul play in the names
of the musicians they represented. No one cared that much,record producing suits never impressed sixteen year olds, who just want to listento music without having to work hard for
cash that’s hard to come by.
My teenage daughter shrugged her shoulders saying music like love should be free, and off she went to downloadher favourite song. Even though legal action was being taken against students on campus’s across the states, kids and even the odd parent, continued to download music for free. As much as the cost, it was the form that was so tempting. You could
download your favourite songs and not be held ransom by the record companies packaging of single hits on expensive albums filled with songs nobody wanted to listen to.
In a paper presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2008, Mark Cooper, Directorof research presented the following idea. He suggested that the dramatic decline in record sales had less to do with piracy and more to do with the natural changes brought about by the technology ,ie. Consumer demand for singles over albums. He proposed that”technological change shifts the balance of interest between private rights and social goals and frequently triggers”piracy panics,” wherein the gatekeepers of content feel the financial security of their intellectual property is at risk. These panics play out in furious legal battles.”
What folowed was exactly that – a series of ‘furious legal battles’ between the music industry and peer to peer software companies, such as Napstar and Kazaa. What was most surprising was the media’s lack of support for the technology that would ultimately be embraced. An older generation of reporters backed an even more out touch record industry who refused to agknowledge that peer to peer software was already embeded in the consumer psyche, and that no amount of money wasted in messy court cases could prevent its use.
Kids continued file sharing, new content sharing sites emerged, and even though Napstar and Kazaa lost their battle in court, the war on the fronteer of technology vs piracy was won – with record companies now embracing the technology that once threatened its very existence. Peer to peer software is now being developed to redirect traffic to legal music files for downloading.
Will my kids stop downloading music for free, probably not, but if the software proves to be able to redirect traffic from other harmful sites where illicit files are shared in the same way it redirects consumers to legal music download sites, the great battle will have been worth it.
Perhaps then the media will get on board and support the inevitable fact that we have to work with what we have not against it.
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