Clipmarks | Peer-to-peer Clips

ARE YOU A COUNTERFEITER ? ARE YOU SURE ?

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:29:01 GMT

clipped by: jt3600
clipper's remarks: This agreement has been done in secrete until it was leak the other day and it needs everyone attention !

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

The Heat Is On for Details of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are two public interest groups leaving no stone unturned when it comes to trying to uncover details about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Details of the proposed multicountry accord are sketchy at best. Speculation is running rampant that, if ratified, the agreement might criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers' communications.

1) Participant lists, agendas, presentations and documents distributed at, or received at,
meetings of United States Trade Representative staff with agents and representatives of the recorded music, motion picture, software, video games, electronics, fashion and luxury goods and pharmaceutical industries, concerning the ACTA;

VP Candidate Biden Is No Friend to File Sharing, Net Neutrality Protection or Online Privacy

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:47:41 GMT

clipped by: The REAL Napster
clipper's remarks: I wonder how many young voters know this about the choice their 'messiah' has made for them? I'll bet very few. I'll make sure the word quickly gets out.

Clip Source: gizmodo.com

VP Candidate Biden Is No Friend to File Sharing, Net Neutrality Protection or Online Privacy

CNet's Declan McCullagh wrote up an informative history of Joe Biden's tech-related voting record—if Biden's name rings a bell, it's because he's the guy Barack Obama picked to be his vice president last Friday night. Maybe you don't care about the doings in Washington, but you may want to know that Biden considers a lot of what you do care about criminal activity. Here's what I'm talking about:

• He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity. (In fairness, much of this is to prevent child pornography, but the tactic is apparently a little blunt.)

• He has expressed support for internet taxes and internet filtering in schools and libraries.

• Biden was one of just four senators invited to attend a celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti and the RIAA's Hillary Rosen, two of American file-sharer's most wanted.

Tags: joe biden, riaa, net neutrality, taxes, p2p, jail

Biden's tech voting record

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:31:51 GMT

clipped by: n2sooners

Clip Source: gizmodo.com

CNet's Declan McCullagh wrote up an informative history of Joe Biden's tech-related voting record

He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity.

Two Biden bills have been explicitly anti-encryption, because you know, encryption makes it hard for the FBI to read people's e-mails

He has expressed support for internet taxes and internet filtering in schools and libraries

iden sponsored a bill that would restrict recording of songs from satellite and net radio, and another one that would make it a felony to "trick" a computer into playing back unauthorized songs or running bootlegged videogames.

Biden was one of just four senators invited to attend a celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti and the RIAA's Hillary Rosen

When he was asked in 2006 about proposing net-neutrality laws, he said there was no need,

Tags: biden, internet, file sharing, music, politics, election

FCC Hands Win to Net Neutrality Advocates

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:23:07 GMT

clipped by: Wisco
clipper's remarks: However, the reasoning wasn't entirely based on neutrality issues. The FCC also considered Comcast's actions to be anti-competitive:

Martin said Comcast managers were not "simply managing their network, they had arbitrarily picked an application and blocked their subscribers' access to it."

The agency said that Comcast had a motive to interfere. Peer-to-peer applications are used to load video that "poses a potential competitive threat to Comcast's video-on-demand service," it said.

Still, a win's a win and NN advocates should be happy to take it.

Clip Source: rawstory.com

A divided Federal Communications Commission has ruled that Comcast Corp. violated federal policy when it blocked Internet traffic for some subscribers and has ordered the cable giant to change the way it manages its network.

In a precedent-setting move, the FCC by a 3-2 vote on Friday enforced a policy that guarantees customers open access to the Internet.

The commission did not assess a fine, but ordered the company to stop cutting off transfers of large data files among customers who use a special type of "file-sharing" software. Associated Press reports on Comcast's activities led to the complaints filed with the FCC.

Tags: news

Open Money-The Next Global Currency

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 05:28:19 GMT

clipped by: allenmarkowski
clipper's remarks: I'm all in favor. No more federal reserve/world banks. I like the point made that it's open source. We don't need money, what we need to do is the right thing like the rest of the creation around us.

Clip Source: www.thetransitioner.org

Open money is intended to become the next global currency system, at front end and infrastructure levels. It allows any community at local or global levels (groups of people, regions, countries, corporations, NGOs,...) to create currencies among its marketplace. Open money is always in sufficiency. Therefore people never get short of money, they can continue to proceed to their market exchange.

Consequences will be global and probably experienced as more profound than the emergence of the internet itself.

Advantages of open money

Decentralized: no need for a centralized issuer like a bank, which means no threats from a centralized power.

Free: no interest is practiced because there is no issuer that makes a business of it.

Peer-to-peer: the total quantity of money in the community is determined in realtime by peer-to-peer exchange.

Controlled by the people: the rules of circulation, credit limits, taxes, decision making processes, etc, are controlled by the community itself.

Sufficient

Why BitTorrent causes so much latency and how to fix it

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:27:38 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: www.formortals.com

Why BitTorrent causes so much latency and how to fix it

Anyone VoIP or online gamer who has a roommate or a family member who uses BitTorrent (or any P2P application) knows what a nightmare it is when BitTorrent is in use. The ping (round trip latency) goes through the roof and it stays there making VoIP packets drop out and game play impossible. I've personally experienced this and many of my friends have experienced it. When I had a roommate in 1999 and I had my first broadband connection, my roommate started using the hot P2P (peer-to-peer) application of its day called Napster. As soon as he started sharing, my online game would become slow as molasses and I'd experience a huge 500ms second spike in round-trip latency and any gamer knows that pings over 100 are problematic.

(2) -Top 50 Tech Visionaries 9-14

Wed, 21 May 2008 09:54:43 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: www.pcworld.com

Top 50 Tech Visionaries

Without the imagination and hard work of these fifty innovators, technologies you use every day might never have been invented.

9. Shigeru Miyamoto

almost singlehandedly kept the industry alive with his creation of an animated character named Jump Man, who soon became known as Mario.

10. Shawn Fanning

traffic from peer-to-peer programs

All of this because a guy was looking for an easier way to share a few tunes with strangers

Clip Source: www.pcworld.com

11. Gordon Moore

Intel, predicted that the number of components on a computer chip would double every year

Moore's Law remains the "guiding principle for the semiconductor industry";

12. Bill Atkinson

Mouse up to your PC's File menu, open a new window, and thank Bill Atkinson for being able to do that.

13. Steve Case

a service that offered online training wheels for millions of intrigued but trepid people looking for an introduction to the World Wide Web.

14. Martin Cooper

patent responsible for the mobile phone as we know it.

MP3 Files Aren't Safe

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:08:46 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: news.softpedia.com

- A McAfee report shows that a number of MP3 files are infected with Trojan horses

Lots of users have already realized, over the past years, how skillful and dangerous a hacker can prove to be. It seems that almost anything you do on the web can infect your personal computer. Yesterday, security

vendor McAfee has reported that a large number of fake MP3 files are spread on peer-to-peer networks. The announcement came to help users realize that they can get their PCs infected by just downloading a simple MP3 file.

After downloading the media file, which can be of either MP3 or MPG form, when users try to play it, they will be prompted to download a file dubbed "PLAY_MP3.exe". Victims should realize that the downloaded "music" or "video" file is actually fake and that no media file would be rendered.

Tags: virus, internet, mp3, trojan horse

DRM Is Dead, But Watermarks Rise From Its Ashes

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:09:21 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.wired.com

After dumping DRM, Sony is experimenting with digital watermarking.
Photo: Associated Press

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.

Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites

Tags: drm, watermarks

AT&T And Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready To Filter

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:10:22 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.

“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”

Clip Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.

After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.

Tags: filter, network, comcast, at&t, earthlink, bittorrent, peer-to-peer, youtube, copyright, fair-use material

For djiezes - browsing history visualization tool

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:05:09 GMT

clipped by: ghiberti

Clip Source: selectparks.net

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

Packet Garden is an artwork commissioned by Arnolfini. It is developed using open source software components and can be freely downloaded. You can read more about Packet Garden here

Download Version 1.0 for Linux, Windows and OS X

Tags: djiezes, visualization, browsing, art, internet

I'm so glad I don't use LimeWire.

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:23:01 GMT

clipped by: purrgrowl
clipper's remarks: This is crazy!

Clip Source: tech.yahoo.com

File Sharing Opens Users to Identity Theft

Surprise! When you share files on your computer with the teeming masses on the Internet, you might be sharing more than just music and video files. Numerous peer-to-peer users are learning, the hard way, that file sharing is a quick and easy way to open yourself up to identity theft.

The story isn't at all new, but the Wall Street Journal is bringing it into better focus, with specific examples and an indication that this trend is exploding. One man pleaded guilty last week to stealing tax forms, credit reports, and loan applications from more than 50 people, through the file-sharing program LimeWire. He then used the info to open credit accounts in those people's names, the usual form that identity theft takes. In September, Citigroup lost more than 5,000 Social Security numbers because one of its employees was using LimeWire and shared the wrong network. Ditto for Pfizer in June, which lost 17,000 employee records the same way.

Tags: id theft, computer

P2P? Big Brother (RIAA & Co.) IS Watching YOU!

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:16:27 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: Let's be careful out there. READ THE CLIPPED SOURCE.

Clip Source: arstechnica.com

A trio of intrepid researchers from the University of California-Riverside decided to see just how often a P2P user might be tracked by content owners. Their startling conclusion: "naive" users will exchange data with such "fake users" 100 percent of the time.

the UC-Riverside researchers came to several conclusions:

If you don't use a blocklist, you will be tracked.

Trackers aren't that hard to avoid.

Content owners hide their tracks.

P2P users who don't utilize the blocklists are just about guaranteed to be tracked by "fake users" operating out of those ranges, and thus seem to open the door to possible litigation should the dice be rolled against them.

Tags: peer-to-peer

OpenOffice Bugs, For All OS

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:18:37 GMT

clipped by: dme3ha

Clip Source: www.news.com

Security experts have discovered vulnerabilities in OpenOffice.org that could allow attackers to remotely execute code on Linux, Windows or Apple Mac-based computers.

OpenOffice version 2.0.4 and earlier versions are vulnerable to maliciously crafted TIFF files, which can be delivered in an e-mail attachment, published on a Web site or shared using peer-to-peer software. The next version of OpenOffice (version 2.3) arrived on September 17 and is not affected by the flaw.

TrustDefender co-founder Andreas Baumhof said: "This vulnerability allows someone to execute malicious code on your computer. It's an OpenOffice bug so it doesn't matter what type of operating system you run; it allows you to run malicious software with the same rights as the user who runs OpenOffice."

In June, OpenOffice users were warned about a worm called "Badbunny" that was spreading in the wild through multiple operating systems, including Mac OS, Windows and Linux.

Tags: open source, bug

Skype Shifts The Blame To Microsoft

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:59:21 GMT

clipped by: Jeffro2pt0
clipper's remarks: Wow. Skype initially blamed their own software, now Microsoft is the culprit. MS always seems to get the blame

Clip Source: www.neowin.net

Skype is pointing the finger at Windows Update for a critical system crash that wiped out the VoIP service for two days. Previously they had reported that the outage was to do with its own software.

In a statement posted on the company's support page, the company claims: "The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user's computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update." This is presumably the Windows updates that were sent out on Patch Tuesday last week, which required the PC to be restarted.

"The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources," the company adds. "This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact."

Tags: microsoft, blame, skype, outage, voip, peer2peer, windows updates