Thoughts and Theories From Roger Andre
for the curious, and people getting to grips with computing and computers.
Monday 23 March 2009, 11:08 PM
How Not To Let Your Bandwidth Slip Away All Day Long
A quick note to inform those of you that don't read the E.U.L.A. when installing software and use the SPOTIFY music streaming service, that your computers are also being used as servers to distribute material to other users of the service as stated in part 10 of the SPOTIFY End User License Agreement What I'm talking about here, is not to be confused with the 4OD fiasco.
Channel 4 On Demand puts a service on your computer that starts up on every boot, and is also called the 'kontinki service'. This service is designed to make use of what is sometimes precious bandwidth, even if you're not using it. When I took issue with this and killed off the kontinki distribution service, I found no issues whatsoever with my ability to stream from 4OD. 4OD was given the boot from my machines a long time ago, and C4.com did the right thing and allowed for fuss free steaming with no client being involved.
Interestingly; the BBC i player will also make use of kontinki for streaming distribution if it “happens” to be on your system, but not otherwise. To users of windows, you may be pleased to know that SPOTIFY does not put a start up entry on your computer, so 10/10 in that regard.
The deal with SPOTIFY is this. If you close the program, it will leave the file sharing part of the program running and you will see the icon in the task bar. If you want to switch this off, you need to right click and exit.
It is also worth bearing in mind that this will be HIDDEN in Windows 7 unless you enable the task bar settings to 'show all' or click on the tiny upward pointing arrow on the task bar.
Really, I can't imagine why the record companies are so frightened of using the words; torrent, file sharing, and peer to peer. This is exactly what SPOTIFY does.
Now that's out of the way, I would like to say a big thankyou to all the record companies involved with this project. It's a dream come true!
Channel 4 On Demand puts a service on your computer that starts up on every boot, and is also called the 'kontinki service'. This service is designed to make use of what is sometimes precious bandwidth, even if you're not using it. When I took issue with this and killed off the kontinki distribution service, I found no issues whatsoever with my ability to stream from 4OD. 4OD was given the boot from my machines a long time ago, and C4.com did the right thing and allowed for fuss free steaming with no client being involved.
Interestingly; the BBC i player will also make use of kontinki for streaming distribution if it “happens” to be on your system, but not otherwise. To users of windows, you may be pleased to know that SPOTIFY does not put a start up entry on your computer, so 10/10 in that regard.
The deal with SPOTIFY is this. If you close the program, it will leave the file sharing part of the program running and you will see the icon in the task bar. If you want to switch this off, you need to right click and exit.
It is also worth bearing in mind that this will be HIDDEN in Windows 7 unless you enable the task bar settings to 'show all' or click on the tiny upward pointing arrow on the task bar.
Really, I can't imagine why the record companies are so frightened of using the words; torrent, file sharing, and peer to peer. This is exactly what SPOTIFY does.
Now that's out of the way, I would like to say a big thankyou to all the record companies involved with this project. It's a dream come true!
