Today's Downtime

[News Service]

<div style="color: #000080; padding: 2px;">Today's Downtime</div><div style="font-size: .9em; margin-bottom: 12px; border-bottom: 1px solid #000080; padding: 2px; border-top: 1px solid #000080;">Saturday, July 26, 2003 by Kevin Stange (kevin [at] simgames [dot] net)</div><div style="font-size: 1em;">Warning to all members! The MPAA/RIAA are serious about trading copyrighted works. A user on our system was doing just that and it is HIS FAULT today that the server was down for a couple hours. The server was disconnected from the internet at the request of the MPAA because they detected several movies available via bittorrent. If I catch anyone on this server using any kind of file sharing system such as bittorrent or anyone posting any kind of illegal content on the server, your site will be permanently removed from our server. You will receive no warning, and no excuses will be accepted. You will be billed for any damages incurred. This sort of abuse will not be tolerated on our system.

I will begin running scripts to detect common illegal file types starting this weekend. If I find bittorent files, movies, or illegal software, your site will be immediately deleted. If I find audio files I will make sure they are original works, or the files themselves will be deleted from your site without warning.

If these things continue to be a problem for us, we will begin to institute restrictive storage and bandwidth quotas. We will also consider other methods such as automatic rejection of unacceptable file uploads if necessary. Do not ruin SimGames.net for other people.</div>

[icely2000]

I'm currently looking at edonkey trying to find a good use for it. I have a good use for it too just right for The Sims Community we could easy get a site or a person to setup a edonkey server some where and have it limited to .zip files and to about 10mb per file and then we can the webmasters can put up a little site that provides images of there work and then have a link (which I heard that they have) where when the user click on the link it download that file off of that network that can save a lot of resoucres. I think we might have to look at this for the sims 2 if the user created object be a huge file. So the program them selfs are not bad, it's just the way people use them.

"Gun's not kill people, people with gun's kill people".

That apply.

Thanks,
William M Gary

[KStange]

Quite true. However, it is also true that while these systems can be, and often are, used for legitimate trading purposes, the illegal swapping is what causes the most problems for us. It represents the largest slice of bandwidth usage, and it also opens up the floodgates to legal problems down the line.

It's easier, and safer, for us to block the entire systems than to have to try to police them for content control.