Good news, everybody! Chris Ballinger has built upon the earlier work of Joao Almeida to create a version of Anomos 0.9.2 which works for OS X.

You can download it here.

To install it, you must copy both Anomos.app and CANVAS_OSX to your /Applications folder. Apparently, there are a few minor flaws (particularly, the info window doesn’t display), but transfer works. At least now it works at all, and we can start fixing the things that are broken.

It also looks like butt, but I’m convinced that if somebody were to dig around in the GTK themes, they could come up with something nice looking (Aqua on GTK on OSX? It’s theoretically possible, people have done it before. I just can’t do this myself because I don’t have a Mac.)

Anyway, great job Chris. As a test, the Anomos 0.9.2 DMG is also available to download via atorrent.

Happy atorrenting!,
Rich

This is a minor but important update – all Windows users must switch to this version if they want to be able to transfer files. This introduces a lot of bugfixes and some changes to match recent modifications to the protocol (nothing major, just reducing some overhead). Apparently it’s also much better on Windows 7.

Windows users should click here to download the latest version! Linux users should pull from the git repository (more info on the Downloads page).

I’ve created two test atorrents for you to experiment with. The first is Patent Absurdity, a new documentary about software patents (CC-BY-SA). It features interviews with Tim Lee, who I met at the Free Culture X conference in DC. He is the man, you should listen to what he has to say!

The other is Collateral Murder, the complete footage of the film recently released by WikiLeaks.

If you download either of the atorrents, please seed them for as long as you can! I’m seeding them, but I don’t have very much bandwidth (1 DSL shared by twelve machines..) The network around our tracker is getting dangerously small, which is why transfers aren’t starting for some people. Also, please make sure that you forward your ports to your machine so that other people can connect to you! By default, Anomos uses 5061, but you can change this in the settings if you want to use the BitTorrent default of 6881.

Happy seeding,
Rich

We’ve spent the weekend working on the Anomos specification as we prep for 1.0, and now we have this fancy document:

Before we stabilize the protocol at 1.0 and focus on stability and community development, we’d like to have as many people as we can look at the documentation and look for problems, either technical or linguistic. It’s not exactly light reading, but we’ve tried to write it so that anybody with a knowledge of BitTorrent will be able to read and comprehend it. If you do read it and you find any technical problems or grammatical mistakes, if you think something needs clarification, or if you have any other comments, please send an email to partners@anomos.info so we can bring your suggestions and changes into the 1.0 version.

Also note that this version describes changes which will break compatibility with the current builds, so those versions will stop working as we move to to test versions which match this protocol. We’ll be releasing new windows builds as we approach final testing.

Your help is very much appreciated and your contributions will be noted!
Rich

Here at ALE we’re getting ready for our big 1.0 release, and to ease the transition from BitTorrent to Anomos, I’ve just committed a new script which will convert a .torrent file or a directory full of .torrent files to .atorrent files which use our tracker.

As The Pirate Bay released their own database of torrents, with this script, it would be easy to move the world’s largest collection of torrent data to Anomos format with a single command. If anybody is interested and tries this experiment, send me an email and let me know how it went.

To use the script, get the latest version of Anomos from the testing git branch (see the Downloads page), and then run:

python anomosify.py --path /path/to/torrent/directory/

and watch it go! You can also use the –announce argument to supply a different announce URL.

Keep your eyes open, we should be releasing the complete 1.0 documentation some time in the next week for all you hackers and geeks interested in the design of Anomos networks.
Rich!