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Proprietary Vendors Make Open Standards Look Broken and BitTorrent's History
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Unicorn Media ☛ How Proprietary Vendors Make Open Standards Look Broken
Proprietary formats, rendering choices, and font restrictions don’t just create interoperability failures, they make open alternatives appear unreliable and keep institutions locked in.
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The Verge ☛ BitTorrent’s disastrous, legendary, and controversial story
In the following years, BitTorrent quickly became the world’s most popular file-sharing app, unleashing a massive wave of piracy that upended Hollywood forever. At one point, BitTorrent was said to be responsible for a huge amount of internet traffic — some widely cited metrics peg it at half of P2P and one-third of all internet traffic in 2004. And while the entertainment industry succeeded in shutting down file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, it largely failed to curtail the massive flood of BitTorrent piracy.