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      The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Yesterday - 21:24 · 3 minutes

    fanimatrix In 2003, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. Dial-up connections were still the default and YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail had yet to be invented.

    There was a new technology making waves at the time. BitTorrent made it much easier for people to transfer large files, opening the door to unlimited video-sharing without restraints.

    Many people started experimenting with BitTorrent by sharing pirated films and TV shows. These files made their way all over the world and remained available as long as all pieces were shared in the swarm.

    Most of these early releases remained available for a few days or weeks, and some lasted well over a year before people lost interest. In extreme cases, some torrents have managed to survive for over a decade.

    The Fanimatrix Torrent Turns 20

    The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film “ The Fanimatrix ”. The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement.

    The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.

    While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn’t exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly.

    Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn’t an option. Luckily, however, the group’s IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

    Promising New Technology

    Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for.

    “It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost told us earlier.

    After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly.

    fanimatrix-torrent

    Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it’s the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books.

    A Proper Celebration for the 25th?

    Initially, there was a plan to celebrate the 20th anniversary but that hasn’t come to fruition. Some of the original cast members have fairly successful careers now and are scattered around the world, so getting the team back together is a challenge.

    Director and writer Rajneel Singh, who is still active in the film industry, would like to do something special for the 25th anniversary. Frost says that there is a plan to get the cast together to shoot and release a new clip, perhaps coupled with some fresh “Fanimatrix” merchandise.

    Whether the torrent will still be going by that time is unclear, but Frost will do everything in his power to make that happen.

    “I never expected to become the world’s oldest torrent but now it’s definitely become a thing I’d love to keep carrying on. So I’ll be keeping this active as long as I physically can,” Frost tells us.

    There were a few times that the torrent almost died but after the news broke that this was the oldest active torrent, dozens of people stepped forward to donate their bandwidth.

    “It’s really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily.”

    “We’re super pumped that it’s still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world,” Frost concludes.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Le film Barbie est-il le nouveau Matrix ?

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Thursday, 20 July - 14:13

    Barbie, le film porté par Margot Robbie et Ryan Gosling est pétri de parallèles avec Matrix. Et l'œuvre de Greta Gerwig s'en rapprochait vraiment, sous une forme de relecture : la matrice du patriarcat ? Cette analyse contient des spoilers sur le déroulé et la fin du film. [Lire la suite]

    Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

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      Le film Barbie sera Matrix avec Margot Robbie, la bande-annonce le prouve

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Saturday, 27 May - 15:05

    Dans la dernière bande-annonce de Barbie, le film avec Margot Robbie et Ryan Gosling, on trouve une immense référence à Matrix, sur laquelle tout le film semble bâti. Et si le long-métrage de Greta Gerwig était un remake de Matrix ne disant pas son nom ? [Lire la suite]

    Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

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      La Matrix en ligne, faite avec amour et pleins de paramètres trop cools

      news.movim.eu / Korben · Thursday, 17 November, 2022 - 08:00 · 1 minute

    Ah Matrix ! Quel film ! Quel univers ! Quel mythe !

    Combien d’entre nous ont succombé au fameux économiseur d’écran de la matrice qui fait défiler les fameux caractères verts de recettes de sushis sur fond noir.

    Mais vous ne le savez peut-être pas, il existe différentes versions de cette matrice selon les films, sans compter toutes les versions non officielles.

    Difficile alors de trouver celle qu’on préfère. Toutefois, le développeur et artiste Rezmason a mis au point une version de la matrice entièrement personnalisable avec du JS et des SVG .

    Ainsi, vous pouvez déjà autohéberger votre propre version de Matrix, mais également la mettre à vos couleurs grâce à de nombreux paramètres comme la vélocité, l’angle, le style, les effets, la densité, la volumétrie, la lueur des lettres…etc.

    Ainsi, vous pouvez passer très facilement de ça :

    https://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?width=50&fallSpeed=0.1

    à ça :

    https://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?width=50&fallSpeed=0.1&version=3d

    en passant par ça :

    https://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?width=50&fallSpeed=0.1&effect=pride

    Vous pouvez même mettre une image en fond :

    https://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?width=50&fallSpeed=0.1&effect=image&url=https://korben.info/app/uploads/2018/01/site_logo-768x768.png

    Bref, tout est personnalisable, le code est tout vert ouvert et dans le futur, le développeur prévoit l’ajout d’un audio pour donner encore plus de réalisme à cette matrice ainsi que la mise à dispo d’une interface de configuration plus sympa que de devoir rajouter des paramètres dans l’URL.

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      Matrix vs. XMPP | Luke Smith's Webpage

      What are XMPP and Matrix and what makes them special? XMPP and Matrix are two decentralized and federated free sofware projects for chat, including true end-to-end encrypted chat. Users can either install the software on their own server if they want, but they can also easily register on any public server—both allow any XMPP or Matrix user to talk to users on their server or on any other one. In essence, it works like email: you might have an email account on a different site than your friend, but all accounts on all sites can communicate.

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      3 Like

      Jan Ubermensch, adx, Ryu Shirogane

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      Serious vulnerabilities in Matrix’s end-to-end encryption are being patched

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 28 September, 2022 - 16:00

    Serious vulnerabilities in Matrix’s end-to-end encryption are being patched

    Enlarge (credit: matrix.org)

    Developers of the open source Matrix messenger protocol are releasing an update on Thursday to fix critical end-to-end encryption vulnerabilities that subvert the confidentiality and authentication guarantees that have been key to the platform's meteoric rise.

    Matrix is a sprawling ecosystem of open source and proprietary chat and collaboration clients and servers that are fully interoperable. The best-known app in this family is Element, a chat client for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, but there's a dizzying array of other members as well.

    matrix-640x351.png

    (credit: Hodgson)

    Matrix roughly aims to do for real-time communication what the SMTP standard does for email, which is to provide a federated protocol allowing user clients connected to different servers to exchange messages with each other. Unlike SMTP, however, Matrix offers robust end-to-end encryption, or E2EE, designed to ensure that messages can't be spoofed and that only the senders and receivers of messages can read the contents.

    Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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      Téléchargez la spectaculaire démo de Matrix sous Unreal Engine 5 avant qu’il ne soit trop tard

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Thursday, 7 July, 2022 - 07:13

    Epic Games a annoncé que la démo interactive The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience ne sera plus disponible sur PS5, Xbox Series S et Xbox Series X à compter du 9 juillet. [Lire la suite]

    Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

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      Newsletter: Cheogram Android Release, Matrix Alpha

      Stephen Paul Weber · Tuesday, 29 March, 2022 - 03:00 · 2 minutes

    Hi everyone!

    Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

    In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

    This month marks the first release of the Cheogram Android app we have been sponsoring.  This app is a fork of the excellent Conversations, and will stay close to upstream going forward.  Some of the improvements relevant to JMP users include:

    • Add contacts without typing @cheogram.com
    • Integrate with the native Android Phone app (optional)
    • Address book integration
    • Messages with both media and text, including animated media
    • Unobtrusive display of subject lines, where present (such as on voicemails)
    • Links to known contacts are shown with their name (improves group text UX)
    • Show timestamps for calls
    • Missed call notifications

    All of these features have been built in a standards-compliant way and do not rely on anything particular to Cheogram or JMP at all, so they could be reused with other gateways as well.  You can also get the app from F-Droid.

    In other news, we’ve heard for some time that some users want to try using JMP from Matrix.  Since we are so big on bidirectional gateways, we have decided to add support for signing up with JMP using a Matrix ID.  This should be considered an alpha test at this time, and most notably voice does not work with the gateway yet so you will need to use SIP (or forwarding) for voice if you use a Matrix ID.  SMS, MMS, and Voicemail will all be delivered to Matrix just as they are to Jabber.  For this we are using the excellent gateway instance at aria-net.org.  To get started, just head to JMP.chat, choose a phone number, and select “I am a Matrix user” on the next page.

    To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

    Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

    Art in screenshots is from Pepper & Carrot by David Revoy, CC-BY. Artwork has been modified to crop out sections for avatars and photos, and in some cases add transparency. Use of this artwork does not imply endorsement of this project by the artist.