I thought people might be interested in the article from today's Guardian Online about peer to peer pirate radio. It is now possible for anyone with a PC to run a radical pirate radio station peercasting protest songs, anti-war songs, etc and even interviews with interesting radical people. The music is broadcats or, more accurately, "peercast" over the Gnutella network that the Recording and Movie industries have been trying to shut down, but cannot.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,762410,00.html

Here's is how to become a radical pirate radio station step by step:

Streaming music to peercast is easy:

1) Download the latest Peercast.exe file from www.peercast.org

2) Download Winamp from: www.winamp.com

3) Download and install the SHOUTcast DSP Plug-In for Winamp from:

 http://www.shoutcast.com/download/broadcast.phtml#plugdownload

4) Start Peercast. It should connect automatically to the peercast network and after a while some channels should appear

5) Start winamp (make sure you have the latest version)

6) Select the shoutcast dsp plugin and click configure (right click on the top of the winamp interface and select options --> prefernces -->plugins

7) Configure it. In the output tab use localhost as the server. The portnumber is the portnumber listed in the peercast window minus 1. Leave the password field blank (you may set one later if you like). Click on the yellow pages button and give your stream a name.
Select the encoder tab and choose a bitrate (your connection must be able to handle the bitstream).

The shoutcast window stays open. Load some mp3 files in the playlist and hit play.

In the shoutcast window's output tab click on the connect button. It should now be streaming music to the peercast program. In the peercastwindow, your stream should be visible in the 'available channels' with the label broadcasting

Congratulations, you are now streaming music. The presence of the channel will automatically propagate through the peercast network and due to the nature of the peercast network the network load on your side will never get higher than whatever bitrate you selected, even if thousands are listening to your music. Isn't that cool :-)