bittorrent

—>At first we thought this was a new Black Eyed Peas video, but then we watched from the beginning and realized that it's actually an attempt to convince you that you should not copy that. Our favorite bit starts at the 2:24 mark, when the little girl's criminal activity leads to government agents bashing down the door to her house and attacking her poor mama.  More »

—>The Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory X AB has purchased The Pirate Bay for $7.7 million, and plans to transform the embattled file sharing site into a legitimate peer-to-peer service. "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," the buyers said in an ambiguous statement. The Pirate Bay's current administrators did offer up one undeniable truth to comfort the site's fans...  More »

—>Update: It turns out the problem is with OpenDNS, not Qwest. The original post is below.  More »

—>NPR spoke with Daniel Roth, a senior writer at Wired Magazine, over the file sharing fiasco that Comcast found itself in about a year ago—the one where a Comcast customer discovered that the company was secretly impersonating his computer to interrupt bittorrent transmissions.  More »

—>Google has assembled a suite of free tools (developed by researchers, not by Google itself) that let you measure things like BitTorrent throttling, upload/download speeds, and last mile snafus. In exchange for "free," the test data is being made public to enable further study of broadband connections. You might want to bookmark the site for future reference when you're trying to figure out what's going on with your ISP.  More »

—>Last week, Walmart sent out emails to its online music store customers letting them know that on October 9th, 2008, they will no longer be able to play any DRM-crippled tracks. Unlike Yahoo, which did the right thing by offering free replacement downloads of unprotected songs when they killed their DRM program, Walmart simply brags about its new unlicensed model and tells you to burn your protected tracks to CD if you really want to listen to them in the future. Good job, Walmart, there goes another betrayed consumer into the welcoming arms of digital piracy. And another. And another...  More »

—>When we read stories like Tanya Andersen's and consider the countless others who have been wrongfully targeted by trade groups like the RIAA, it becomes evident that the system by which DMCA takedown notices are issued is very far from perfect. For the uninitiated, DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices are official statements which assert that an artist's or company's intellectual rights have been violated (i.e. copyright infringement) and often threaten legal action against an individual. In a study conducted by the University of Washington, researchers proved that this system is seriously flawed, according to the New York Times. In one experiment, the team received takedown notices from the MPAA which accused 3 laserjet printers of downloading the latest Indiana Jones movie and Iron Man. More, inside...  More »