A thing called the P1i

I have a Sony Ericsson P1i. Got it about 6 months ago. Must say, it the most marvelous thing that I have come by. Especially the wifi. It is an exhilarating experience if you can access your Gmail from office whereas your seniors cant! Just looks a candy bar, but my, looks can be deceiving. Other news worth gibberish is the launch of the A-star. The new model seems to be getting quite some attention. Especially the way Hyundai has launched a campaign promoting the Santro against the A-star. Shrewd guys, these Hyundai people. They haven’t benchmarked it against the i10, rather they have used a much lower priced model – the Santro! Remains to be seen in the months to come as to who comes out on top. Babu is coming down. For old times sake.

Who is axxo?

After a brief hiatus, I return. Today, I was searching for good quality movies to download on mininova when I found an interesting pattern. Almost all the movies with the highest number of seeds were uploaded by a person going by the name of axxo. Intrigued, I did a google search on ‘axxo’ and boy, was I suprised. axxo is a faceless, anonymous person in some corner of the world who is causing millions, if not billions of damage to Hollywood. So what does he do? He just picks a DVD off the shelf in his neighbourhood movie store, puts it into his computer and rips into a super-quality 700 MB which is downloaded by millions around the world. I wonder how he manages to pack that kind of quality and bitrate into a 700 MB file. I have had some experience at ripping ( I use AutoGordianKnot ) but the countless settings leave me somewhat flummoxed.

 

What suprised me was the fact that he has managed to remain undercover for so long. Nobody, not even the Feds, have traced him so far. His popularity has spurred many people to come out claiming themselves to be axxo and giving out interviews. Check out one such interview here. There are so many fans of axxo worldwide that the slightest calumnious comment about axxo in any torrent forum would leave your email inbox spammed out of the planet. Of course, I kid but I wouldnt advise you to try. I suspect he lurks somewhere in Sweden. And now, ladies and gentleman, I also have joined the legion of axxo fans. Hail the faceless hero!!

 

 

I am posting his interview below from torrentfreaks.com

 

 

For those of you who never heard of aXXo, he is responsible for hundreds of DVDrips that find their way to millions of PCs around the world. Most of the rips are 700MB, made to fit on a single CD. Some have criticized his preference for single CD rips because of the inferior video quality, but most pirates agree that he does a great job.

Earlier this year aXXo temporarily stopped uploading movies because axxotorrents.com was trying to profit from his name. After a few weeks that site went down, and aXXo continued releasing DVDrips.

Most of the time it is impossible to track down the source of DVDrips, especially with people from “the scene“. But aXXo is not a member of the scene, and although was not very talkative either, he was at least willing to answer a few questions.

TorrentFreak: When did you start ripping / uploading DVDrips?

aXXo: When I was about 15 or 16 I got into backing up my old DVD’s. History from there.

TorrentFreak: What motivates you to share these movies?

aXXo: Why not? If I see a great film I believe everyone has the right to be entertained by it.

TorrentFreak: Don’t you think that ripping and uploading these (copyrighted) movies is wrong?

aXXo: No not really. It was just for me and some mates at first.

TorrentFreak: Are you alone in this, Or do you get help from others?

aXXo: No help, It’s all me.

TorrentFreak: You seem to prefer 700MB rips, and not higher quality ones, why is this?

aXXo: Very little (if any) Loss of quality, and will fit on a Single Music CD.

TorrentFreak: On which torrent sites do you release this movies, and why not just on one?

aXXo: There are quite a few I release to. Many people prefer one site over the rest, and I want to spread these as much as possible.

TorrentFreak: What do you think of sites that (mis)use your name, like axxotorrents.com?

aXXo: This is a touchy subject. I have nothing against any of them, it was a complete misunderstanding and the issue has been cleared up. They are reliable, And I have checked every torrent on there thus far to be real.

TorrentFreak: How can people tell if the torrent is not a scam, or a fake torrent?

aXXo: If it’s a RAR archive, It’s not mine. My rips will contain 2 or 3 files. One info and one .avi files. On occasion a .txt file but that will stop.

TorrentFreak: Where do you get the movies, and do you use scene releases as well?

aXXo: …

TorrentFreak: Do you think that distributing these (copyrighted) movies is morally wrong? That is, do you consider sharing shows to be the same as stealing?

aXXo: Thank god in this country we don’t believe in copyright infringement. It’s just sharing entertainment, nothing more.

TorrentFreak: Okay, perhaps this one is easier to answer. What is your favorite BitTorrent site?

aXXo: I don’t have one. Darksiderg.com is where my original releases are, But I release to many. Superfundo, Demonoid, MiniNova, The Pirate Bay.

TorrentFreak: Anything you want to add to this?

aXXo: Upload what you’ve downloaded, and then some.

TorrentFreak: Thanks!

aXXo: You’re welcome.

A Loooonar certificate

you moon dwellers.. watch out for me

NASA has finally agreed to put me on the next shuttle to the moon. I am leaving earth for good. Eh.. You could actually come with me too. All you have to do is visit this site. NASA collects all the names, prints it on a A3 sheet, seals it in a tin container and sends it on the next shuttle for your eternal glory. All this for free. Well, the most likely scenario is only the first part of that sentence. The next installment would most likely carry strands of your hair so that your clone could be made a trillion years from now.

Why do cover songs always sound better?

Why is it that cover songs always sound better than the original tracks? Take the most covered song in history – Yesterday by The Beatles or Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan. The covers never cease to amaze inspite of the artist. I could play the KOHD version of Avril Lavaigne all through the night and wake up the next morning with little grievances against her. Some bands like Metallica went on to release a double album which entirely consists of only covers – like the Garage Inc album. Whatever it is, I cant help saying – Heil Metallica!

Katyn – tragedy of a lifetime

I have a weakness for European cinema, esp the ones that have anything to do with the Great War. Torrent downloading of bootlegged movies  is one of my delectable sins although it has to be said that it is not easy to get many European movies with 10+ seeds. Yesterday, after a long wait, the download Katyn was completed. For the uninitiated, Katyn is a Polish movie based on the 1940 massacre of Polish POWs by the Red Army. The movie is based on a book Post Mortem and directed by lifetime honorary Oscar winner, Andrzej Wazda.

Katyn movie poster

During the World War, Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union and Germany on two fronts. At that time, the Soviets and the Germans were bound by a pact not to attack each other (It was later  that Hitler broke the pact by invading Russia and paid the price for it). The Polish Army was rounded up by the two invading armies and some of them were sent to Germany and the rest to the Soviet Union. In March 1940, Stalin decided to exterminate the Polish POWs as he felt that they were a potential threat to Soviet expansion plans in the East. What followed was the systematic shooting of nearly 22,000 odd Poles. Apparently, all of them were shot in the same fashion: a bullet in the back of the head which came out through the temple. Among the dead were generals, admirals, majors, captains, NCOs, lawyers, engineers and even a painter.

The movie is about the anguish, fear and helpness in wartime Poland told through the eyes of the widows of the Polish POWs. I am not going to go through the plot as the story is out there all over the web. I had some difficulty in finding the correct subtitle as all subtitles available were insanely out of sync with my avi file. Thanks to Ctrl-J feature of the VLC Player (it delays the text of the subtitle), else I’d never have seen the movie.

It was really touching and gruesome, esp towards the end where the Russians put the Poles to death in a systematically, horribly repugnant manner. The manner of killing is said to be enacted in exactly the same way as the real incidents of 1940. The prisoners are brought to the ’slaughter house’ in black Marias (that is similar to our mortuary vans).  Each prisoner’s hands are tied up, then led through a felt-lined room where a soldier hidden behind the door shoots him dead before he even knows what hit him. The corpse is taken out through another opening in the room, loaded into a truck (like our kuppa lorry) and the next prisoner is led in.

 It reminds one of the horrors of war, where humanity loses out to brutality and cold bloodedness. The most shameful part of the entire incident is the entire cover-up of the entire episode by the Red Army. Stalin claimed the Germans were in control of the region and that they were to blame for the mass killings. The Germans, in turn, used the gruesome pictures and videos for propoganda against the Red Army and also to hijack the symbiosis between the Allies and the Soviet Union.

 

I had my own misgivings about the final scenes in the movie: it could have very well sparked off another war between the Russians and the Poles!! In fact, the comments page on the torrent site was loaded with snide remarks by both Russians and Poles alike, with the Russians thrashing the movie as junk fiction and the Poles retorting back. I salute the generation of Poles who bore the tragedy of a lifetime.