Monday, November 5, 2007

Waffles.fm vs. What.cd vs. Libble vs. Stmusic Vs. Funkytorrents

So we're almost 2 weeks into the Post OiNK Internet.

Let's check in with our favorite trackers and take a look at stats, Shall we?

Waffles.fm
Registered users 2,262
Torrents 13,566

STMusic.org
Registered users 42,455
Torrents 23,971

FunkyTorrents.com
Registered users 12,500
Torrents 10,016

What.cd
Registered users 8,584
Torrents 14,739

Libble.com
Registered users 5,473
Torrents 9,976

So as you can see Waffles.fm has the highest torrent to user ratio which bodes well for a community. You need some really dedicated users to bring in the casual users that don't upload torrents but are happy to seed the stuff the download.

Libble had the smallest gain from last week. Here are the numbers from the last time we checked in:

What.cd 5,458 users 9,997 torrents

Libble.com 5,566 users 9,028 torrents

stmusic.org 33,686 users 19,834 torrents

Funkytorrents.com 12,500 users 9,669 torrents

What's crazy is all the hype around Waffles where as STMusic still has it's torrent count beat by almost double. But if Waffles gained 13k torrents in less than a week with only a fraction of the users STMusic has this could bode well for them.

Stay tuned....

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Wired Article on Waffles.fm Causes Mod To Leave

Since cooperating with Wired on an article on Waffles.fm the mod "dead1" has since left waffles.fm

his post on the waffles.fm forum:

Well, sorry everyone. But I will be leaving Waffles. Apparently, my effort's of trying to clear up any misinformation in the first Wired article, has made the staff here at Waffles upset. I guess we should have not cared if one of the largest technology magazines in the country had an article on the web that contained wrong info, and that could have been easily corrected, which it was by my interview with them. If said interview had not taken place, they would have no doubt continued posting more misinformation to there readers, and to the web. I apologise to any that think I am an elitist, or "power hungry". I will agree, that a few of my past actions were unnecessary, including a private message to a non-staff member of what.cd, of which I merely attempted to defend Beau, when his private information was posted publicly, but the work I have put into Waffles surpasses that, ten fold. I thank the remaining staff for allowing me to try and bring waffles to a new level, unfortunately my efforts went unrecognized.


Once again, I thank all of you whom I invited, and whom I have just recently met, you are all wonderful individuals. Please continue helping Waffles.fm grow, and show your support by merely remaining a community member. Take care everyone.


-dead1


and the wired article


Oink Wannabe -- Waffles.fm -- Scrambling to Fill Membership Orders; Feeding Frenzy Underway
By David Kravets EmailNovember 02, 2007 | 4:39:31 PMCategories: BitTorrent

Wafflelogoturntablelogo4

The site moderator of waffles.fm, the invite-only replacement to OiNK, on Friday tells THREAT LEVEL that the illicit music-sharing site already has some 1,700 exclusive members in less than 24 hours of sporadic operation.

Thousands of invitees are waiting in the wings, as registration is tentatively closed because of server capacity, says site moderator Dead1, who in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL spoke on condition that his real name not be published. "We've closed invites due to the extreme amount of traffic," Dead1 says.

Many of those invited were former members of OiNK, he says, and thousands of torrents are being uploaded and seeded.

"We were getting upwards of 100 torrents a minute uploaded," Dead1 says.

The site, running on servers in Amsterdam's Ripe Network Data Center, was the subject of a denial of service attack following its initial launch Thursday, says Dead1. The DoS attack was at 90MB/s per second, he says.

"That's pretty big. Whoever did it was pretty pissed off, to put it politely," Dead1 says. "They said they were upset they weren't sent an invite."

The response to waffles from the BitTorrent community has been overwhelming, he says. When the site went live Thursday, it crashed after its servers were clogged by a barrage of 300 registration requests a minute. "It's unbelievable," Dead1 says.

The music-sharing-only site, launched nearly two weeks after British authorities raided and shuttered its predecessor OiNK, is a non-profit operation run by a network of 10 people in their twenties or younger, Dead1 says. "It's purely a hobby," he says. "It's for fun."

"Most of the staff is in Europe. A couple are in America. A few are in Canada," he adds. "They're scattered everywhere."

Dead1 says waffles will attempt to follow in OiNK's footsteps and is not affiliated with any other torrent-tracking site.

"When the link went down, everybody was pretty pissed," he says.

The site is looking to upgrade its servers again, Dead1 says. For now, the site runs off two server boxes, each with 3 gigahertz, dual core Pentium processors, and 4 GBs of RAM, he says.

"We're not doing this for the pirated material. You can get that anywhere," Dead1 says. "We're doing it to increase the popularity of artists everywhere no matter who they are."

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Waffles is starting to seem pathetic - by Anonymous

This was submitted as a comment. I thought it made some very valid points so I decided to post it.

Waffles is starting to seem pathetic.... First this article:

http://enjoys.it/2007/11/01/what-against-waffles/

now one on facebook that among other things is summarized in this part of it:

I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but I keep my ear to the ground and I like to think that I'm not entirely oblivious to what I hear...and right now, I dunno about anyone else, but my instincts are screaming bloody murder. This all seems a little expensive for some bratty 17 year old porn site admin in Ireland, not to mention requiring a little more depth of character to set up.
Even if it is all kosher, something in here isn't quite adding up:
#1. This kid's obviously intelligent enough to set up Waffles - it does exist, after all...nobody's denying that.
#2. And yet, he's dumb enough that all of his private information - full (real) name, address, phone number, high school, etc - are easily found through an online search.
#3. But even if he really is that dumb, he should at least be wealthy enough to pay someone who does know how to do these things to do it for him - switching servers like that costs money, and as pointed out above, it's certainly not money he's afraid to spend.
#4. How on earth does a bratty 17 year old porn site admin have that much cash, and where on earth is he getting it from?
#5. It states on the Wikichan that one of the major reasons for his porno site shutting down was his parents finding out about it. What happens when they find out about this? After all, if he's not intelligent enough to hide his info from me, he's certainly not intelligent enough to hide it from his parents. And while porno may be unarguably legal, however morally objectionable it is, the legal status of filesharing is anything but clear right now, and I doubt his conservative Roman Catholic parents would want their son taking part in such a thing, let alone orchestrating it.
#6. Why all the location changes? Why not just base the bloody thing in Sweden to begin with and avoid all the hassle?

I dunno. I'm almost certain that something's not right here...keep your eyes peeled, and if you're not a member already, I certainly wouldn't recommend becoming one.

and then this added on:

http://85.17.19.102/

http://ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=85.17.19.102&do_search=Search

Its in NL.

Only after being based in (in order) Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States. Why all the moving...especially through countries with notoriously draconian copyright laws?

Thursday, November 1, 2007

OiNK.cd updated! OiNK looking for work, uses one of our images

OiNK.cd has been updated with the following message:


Since this whole thing has cost me my employment, I'm currently job-seeking.
If you think my PHP/MySQL/memcached/general optimisation expertise or programming skills can help your business, drop me an email: alan.ellis.jobhunting@googlemail.com.
I didn't work for Virgin Media as has been wrongly reported in the media (along with all the other inaccuracies). I worked for a large, multi-national chemical company.


We wish you luck little buddy.

Edit: Why are people freaking out over the "little buddy" comment? It's what the Skipper called Gilligan. It's a term of endearment.

If you check the top of the page you'll notice that he used one of the images we posted during the "OiNK Memorial logo Competition". Don't get us wrong. We're not complaining. We're happy to have provided something OiNK approves of. The image was made by a loyal OiNK user for the competition. Sadly we can not remember that user's name to give proper credit. If you're out there and want a link to your site please drop us a line via AIM to oinkmemorial.