The Brits shut down two giant sites in one week; TVLinks and OiNK. In this one rare instance the internet download community’s treatment by the United Kingdom is like my neighborhood. I watch cops round up criminals all the time in my neighborhood, so let me tell you how this is gonna go down. They are NOT going to change the root of the problem. It’s a trimming of the hedges, not an uprooting. Those guys running the sites are gonna pay a fine. Theymight do a teeny tiny amount of time-but that’s it.

For those of you who don’t know, OiNK was a music download site. Years ago I used to be a member and it was a bit torrent site. The internet is jam packed with these torrent sites, since peer to peer lost its luster. But TVLinks was an entirely different animal. It wasn’t p2p and it wasn’t torrents, it was stop by and watch. It was like nothing I had ever seen on the internet. Visit the site, and just watch TV shows and movies. Just watch stuff. Old stuff and brand new. And from the minute I saw it I said, “this bad boy is goin’ down.” Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon. So the law came after both of these sites because they got too popular-remember Napster? But it was a show. When they took the guy down from OiNK the camera crews were there AHEAD of time. The BBC news says the cops wanted to catch him in the act so they waited until they were positive he was logged on before entering. And they brought the guy out of his house in cuffs. And guess what? He was out within hours. Now, here’s what I know. If a rapist is caught in the act he will not be out within hours. But with this internet thing it’s all about making a show of “cracking down.” I would not be surprised if they actually arrested him the day before, and said “we‘ll shave this amount of time off your sentence if you agree to let us publicly bring you out of the house tomorrow-with the news crews there.”

How do I know about this? Because I live in a ghetto. I mean the deep dark part. I was raised in a ghetto, I moved out, and now I’m back. Comparable to, Jerry Blank from Strangers with Candy. I’m on the South Side of Chicago. It doesn’t have that sort of world wide, name brand fear inducing recognition as “the Bronx.” But trust me; people know the South Side. It is EASILY the largest, most heavily populated, area of Black people in the country. I’ve been around and I haven’t seen anything that can compete. They call DC “Chocolate City” but people of other colors freely, if not quickly, wander through their Black neighborhoods all the time. Not happened out here. We have a few unofficially designated “everybody allowed” areas, but it’s pretty much Black for miles and miles and miles. In fact I recently met a woman on Match.com, and things were looking very promising; she offered me her number, asked me call, we talked, laughed about having attended the same university, had a great old time chatting. Then she asked where I live. And I said “oh I’m living in a house, that I’m rehabbing, on the South Side.” Now, this young lady wasn’t from Chicago, but she knew about the South Side. That conversation got very quiet as we talked about life over here, and after that I never heard from her again.

It’s not all bad; it’s just spotty. My area is pretty nice, but my mom’s place is near, possibly, one of the worst corners in the city. It’s got one of the blue lights. These are cameras mounted high on street lights with flashing blue strobes to indicate to the criminal element that their asses are being watched. The irony of the blue lights is that they put them in crime prone area to watch the criminals and/or deter them from doing crime. But in my mom’s area it’s round the clock street dealing. In perfect visual range of the camera. They actually lean on the camera pole to do crime. So about once or twice a year they police put on a show and for about 2 weeks they publicly arrest people. It’s either for the press or the local community, but it’s a show. In fact the theatricality of it can be quite humorous. The police slam guys against car hoods, have people “spread ‘em,” blast their sirens in short burst to make crowds disperse. In the last sweep I even had a relative, who was wandering the streets late at night with criminals, get arrested. He had a record; so they locked his ass up. After two weeks everything goes back to “normal.” Expect the same for the download community.

*Nov 10 update*, man was that last prediction right!

Also here are some other ways to watch movies and TV

 fatboymedia.com

veoh.com

blog.buttermouth.com 

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Tags: Chicago, Computers and Internet //