No, this isn't a rehashing of news from last year. Voltage Pictures, the maker of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker, has filed a new lawsuit targeting 20,000 more alleged BitTorrent users. The anonymous defendants are accused of pirating the film over the p2p protocol. This brings the total number of users sued by Voltage Pictures to 24,583.

According to several people in the know, the Internet will run out of new IPv4 address space in less than a year. As more internet enabled devices flood the market place, we're moving inexorably towards the day when the new IPv6 standard will have to save the day. But will we be ready?

IPv4 addresses are limited to 32-bit numbers, thus about 4 billion unique addresses exist. The IPv6 standard uses 128-bit numbers. So that works out to a few quintillion addresses. That should certainly be enough to tide us over until we entrust our network infrastructure to the loving embrace of Skynet. Most of the hard work to get ready for the changeover needs to be done by ISPs, which need to deliver addresses as IPv6.

Large content providers like Google and Facebook aren't just sitting back though. They will need to work with ISPs to ensure their content is implemented as IPv6. Do you foresee any issues with the IPv6 transition? 

Gmail added a new security feature today to alert users of suspicious activity that may indicate unauthorized access. Gmail already has a feature that lists IP addresses the count is open at, but the information is at the bottom of the page and Google found that most users don’t know it’s there. Now Google will use a banner right up front to alert users proactively of strange activity.
 
The warning will show a brief description of the activity and link to a list of current and recent sessions identified by IP and geographic location. Google says the warning will only be triggered if the system considers the account to be at risk. For example, if you usually log in from a certain geographic area, then a log in occurs from outside that area, the alert would be triggered. The interface also allows users to change their password if they believe their account is indeed compromised.

We always like to see better security options for users, but it will be interesting to see if Google gets a lot of false positives. Keep an eye out and let us know if you get this warning and what caused it.