You remember Jotly, right? The hilarious and absurd spoof of our mobile/local/social app obsession? To refresh your memory, Jotly’s humor was so on target, people wondered if creator Alex Cornell (founder of Nosh) was actually making fun of Kevin Rose’s Oink with this parody video. He swears he was not, just of the “proliferation of absolute ridiculousness when it comes to apps and startups… → Read More
In two and a half weeks since its launch, micro-recommendation app Oink has clocked in a 100k downloads, with a symmetrical 100k items added and tagged. A product of Kevin Rose’s Milk Studios, Rose tells me that the app is now seeing a new Oink (rating) every four seconds and almost a million user sessions.
The app has also dropped the “Oink Builder” label and the invite only sign up… → Read More
So Nosh founder Alex Cornell came up with and shot a promo video of this parody app that allows you to review anything in the world, “launching” it on October 3rd. This is doubly hilarious because a week after the world met Jotly, superfounder Kevin Rose launched Oink, which is also an app that allows you to review anything in the world EXCEPT IT’S REAL. And really noisy. → Read More
As we heard in April, Kevin Rose and former Digg designer Daniel Burka have teamed up to start Milk, a mobile app development lab in San Francisco. The company also raised $1.5 million from a number of all-star investors, including our own Michael Arrington. Now, we’ve just found a little more information on the first app that will be debuting from the incubator, Oink.
It appears from the site… → Read More
One year ago today OiNK’s Pink Palace was shut down by police. It’s only appropriate to pour one out for it today. OiNK had been in operation for a little over three years; I had joined exactly one year before it was shut down, invited to the party by CrunchGear alum Vince Veneziani, who’s now kicking about over at GearFuse. Be sure to say hi. The thing about OiNK (and its… → Read More
A new study says what we’ve been saying for God knows how long: [music] piracy is here to stay. It’s now up to the industry to figure out how to move forward. The study, by the MCPS-PRS Alliance (the record companies) and Big Champagne (they measure stuff online!), looked at piracy through the lens of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, the album that was released last fall as a digital… → Read More
More information has emerged on the OiNK-related arrests of last week. (Please don’t call it “oinkgate;” The “gate” suffix is banned here.) A total of six people were arrested in Cleveland (in the UK), all of them for sharing “pre-release” albums. All those ADVANCEs you downloaded? They range in age from 19 to 33. Oh, boy, this is getting interesting. → Read More
A former OiNK user was arrested last week, TorrentFreak has learnt. The user, who was not identified, was later released on bail. More arrests are expected. This news should concern a lot of us here, I’m going to assume. For one, if the police are involved, and not some anti-piracy watchdog like MediaDefender, it suggests that the post-OiNK investigations are criminal in nature (as opposed… → Read More
[photopress:vuzesplash.jpg,full,center] Does the current invitation system used by so-called private BitTorrent sites need to be changed? TorrentFreak, a source of inspiration to nearly everyone on staff here, thinks out loud about this very subject in a recent column. At first, these private sites were largely under the radar of the average after school pirate. A small, trustworthy user base was… → Read More
[photopress:2600winter08.jpg,full,right] We wrote a brief primer on piracy a few months ago, discussing the ins and outs of several different methods of getting your free, daily fix of music, movies and software. This quarter’s issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly (you can usually find it semi-hidden in the computer magazine section of Barnes & Noble) has an article on piracy you might… → Read More
What.cd?, one of the two main OiNK successors, is developing an entirely new set of site code, promising to be faster and more secure than the old TBsource. (TBsource is used by several private BitTorrent trackers and is among the least efficient and horrifying code to look at. So I’m told. I don’t speak programmer language.) It’s going by the name of Project Gazelle, which not… → Read More
First OiNK died, then came the replacements. Now one of those is gone, never having gotten of the ground. BOiNK, the Pirate Bay’s planned all-music BitTorrent tracker, has been cancelled. It seems TPB’s powers that be figured that there were enough OiNK replacements out there, so there was no real reason for yet another one. This leaves Waffles.fm and What.cd?, the former, I feel, will… → Read More
And people wonder why kids these days resort to piracy. I was just browsing Beatport looking for a certain mix of The Gossip’s “Jealous Girls.” Lo and behold it’s on the site, mine for $1.49, which isn’t entirely unreasonable (I once paid $2.49 for a single MP3), especially considering it’s a DRM-free 320kbps MP3. So I go ahead and click “buy,” only… → Read More
You know, in this post-OiNK world, music fans can’t be too careful when it comes to picking a new BitTorrent tracker. That’s why when I woke up this morning I was fully convinced that that RIAA had shut down What.cd?, one of the two biggest trackers comprised of former OiNK users (the other being Waffles). It seems someone is out to “get” What.cd? for whatever reason… → Read More
Poor Wired. Its post on how to “cheat” the music industry could be one of the lamest I’ve ever seen. It’s essentially Digg bait, despite the fact that, at this point, everyone everywhere has already done such an article, including us. “But it’s up to you to fill in the blanks.” Sure, OK. Listed sites/services include Lala.com, Last.fm, BOiNK (oh, you mean… → Read More
I’ve gotten into both Waffles and What.CD? and while they don’t quite match OiNK on all levels, it’s still a great effort by both parties. I’ve found myself uploading and using What.CD? more than Waffles though, mostly due to the fact that Waffles is down and sucking. If it boiled down to making a choice right now, I’d definitely choose What.CD?. The funny thing is… → Read More
It’s no secret that OiNK was full of different people, ranging from teenagers in high school to accountants from Sweden. Now Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor himself is publicly admitting he used OiNK for pirating music. “I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t” says Reznor. In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Reznor talks about how OiNK was the… → Read More
Rob over at Demonbaby is pissed. At the music industry, at the takedown of OiNK – everything is driving this guy mad. Hence why he took to his blog and decided to really let the public know the state of today’s music industry. Rob used to work for the big labels from the late 1990s into the 2000s and knows a thing or two about how they work and what they loathe. In the end, as you… → Read More
It won’t be private and it won’t have many torrents, but Oink Boink will have the might of TPB behind it, allowing us all to rest easy tonight knowing that you’ll be able to get all your music for free. The best part? The most important thing about BOiNK is perhaps the message it sends out to the IFPI and the BPI: It shows that that if you stop one tracker, others will pop up… → Read More
OiNK users don’t have to worry about being prosecuted, according to the site’s admin. OiNK, the man, the myth, the legend, gave an impromptu IRC interview following his release from custody. In it, he tries to reassure fans, saying that the authorities had little to no technical knowledge (neither, it seems, does the mainstream media, judging by its reporting of the site’s… → Read More
After a two-year investigation the torrent directory site Oink has been taken down in a series of raids and arrests in both The Netherlands and England. OiNK was an invitation-only private tracker that mostly dealt with members trading new release or pre-release albums, and primarily in FLAC (lossless) format. The administrator of the site was a 24-year old from the UK employed in the IT field… → Read More
Police raided and shut down the OiNK BitTorrent site earlier today after a two-year investigation, shocking users across the BT community. Additionally, the 24-year-old man who ran the site was arrested. Good luck, bro. I really love this quote by one of the anti-piracy guys that make OiNK users sound like war criminals: OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. → Read More
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