BitTorrent is dead. Long live BitTorrent?
Published: 05 Jan 2005 16:15 GMT
SuprNova was one of the sites that vanished not long after the MPAA announcement, along with Youceff.com and several others. Another, LokiTorrent.com, remains operating despite having been sued by the MPAA in Texas, and has already raised close to $34,000 in donations to a legal defence fund.
Exeem is aimed at eliminating these easily targeted central points. Like other file-swapping applications, a decentralised service would be made up only of individual users, none of whom control the network.
"Basically it is a P2P program with the same specifications as BitTorrent had, but with its own network and its own files on it," Sloncek said in last week's interview, now reposted at the SuprNova site. It's "Kazaa and BitTorrent all together".
However, Sloncek's announcement has raised as many new questions as it has answered. The program itself is being developed by an anonymous company that contacted him several months ago, the SuprNova administrator said. He's now officially working for that company as its representative, he added.
Some hints may be given by the Exeem.com domain name, which is registered to a Swarm Systems. The listed address for that company is in the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts & Nevis, at the local office of IFG Trust Services, a company that helps set up and administer offshore companies.
A telephone number provided along with the domain name information appeared to be incomplete or out of service. An IFG representative did not return calls seeking comment.
Older file-swapping companies have tried to incorporate themselves outside the reach of traditional legal or tax authorities. Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent company, is based in Australia but incorporated on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, for example. That hasn't prevented the company from being sued in courts in the United States and in Australia, however.






