And 2 weeks until The Man burns :-D.

A lot of people probably wonder why in this age of high speed internet, pirates still release everything in multi-archive rar files. The main reason for this is because releases are posted to FTP and IRC first, not torrents, and they are usually uploaded in parts by more then one person to maximize bandwidth. But why doesn’t the person creating the torrent just unrar the files before making it? After all, bit torrent does the splitting on its own, and maximizes bandwidth usage pretty effiecently most of the time. While it’s true that a torrent having multiple RAR files downloading probably won’t go any faster then a torrent with just one, the multiple archives still end up giving you a huge speed boost if your using a remote seedbox. I took a screen cap while downloading some files from my seedbox at feral hosting. You can see in it that my speed almost doubles when i double the amount of files transfering at once. So while a single video file might only get 300kbps, that same video split into 8 rars will go at around 1.8mbps. My ftp client will allow up to 10 transfers at once which offers a small boost over 8. 

It’s not something I’m personally into, but being a fan of getting around such restrictions, I thought i’d post some info on watching the Olypics on BBC. Apparently NBC’s coverage in the US is less then great, and to stream it online from NBC requires you subscribe to cable TV service. 

So to get around the BBC’s UK only restriction, http://www.expatshield.com/ is a free VPN service that will give you a UK IP and you can then head over to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/bbc_one_2012_hd and watch all you want.