Posted 08/17/09 at 09:12:52 AM by Paul Lilly

Jammie Thomas is running out of options. Found guilty in 2007 of copyright infringement and ordered to pay $220,000 for willfully making available 24 songs via peer-to-peer, she now owes a whopping $1.92 million following a retrial earlier this year. Surely the Department of Justice would step in and find the nearly $2 million fine unconstitutional, right?

Wrong. According to ArsTechnica, the huge of amount of damages (Thomas ended up owing $80,000 per song) were not intended just to apply to big corporations, but also to "deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights." The only time the DOJ would have a problem with a fine is if it become "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportional to the offense and obviously unreasonable," something for which a $1.92 million fine for sharing 24 songs doesn't qualify.

"We are pleased the Administration has filed a brief supporting our position," an RIAA spokesperson told ArsTechnica. "Its views are consistent with the views of every previous Administration that has weighed in on this issue."

So where does Thomas go from here? Probably bankruptcy court.

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Posted 07/22/09 at 06:05:39 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Many people are worried cloud computing will leave them in nominal control of their data. As cloud computing is still in its infancy we can expect these fears to be addressed soon. Scientists at the University of Washington have come up with a tool that will make online messages, including emails and Facebook messages, self-destruct after they attain a pre-specified age. The tool is aptly called Vanish.

The process begins when a message encrypted using Vanish is sent. The message can only be read until a pre-specified time is reached, after which the message can not be decrypted, as the encryption key is permanently “lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes.”

Vanish works by shattering the encryption key and distributing the various fragments among computers on a peer-to-peer network – both parties holding the online conversation don’t possess the key. The pieces of the key begin to vanish due to the fact that “machines constantly join and leave the P2P network.” A prototype of the tool is now available. It supports timeouts of 8-9 hours, which simply means your messages will vanish without a trace after that time.

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Posted 10/22/08 at 12:27:07 PM by Paul Lilly

Do you do a lot of uploading? If so, chances are high it's of the the P2P variety, according to a new study. You'll have to take the research with a grain of salt, as the company who performed the study, Sandvine, is the same one that manufacturered the hardware for Comcast's now infamous intentional throttling.

Be that as it may, Sandvine reports that while P2P traffic accounts for 22 percent of downstream bandwidth, upstream remains much more busy at just over 61 percent. A distant second is web traffic, which only accounts for 17 percent of bandwidth used, according to the report.

"Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization," says Dave Caputo, Sandvine's co-founder. "This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage."

Do the numbers surprise you? Hit the jump and let us know.

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