News

• Judge throws out mass John Doe porn copyright lawsuits

  A judge in New York has shot down the attempt of three pornography studios to sue nearly 80 people for allegedly downloading movies on BitTorrent, with the judge slamming the studio's efforts to file lawsuits against multiple anonymous defendants.

• FTC: P-to-P software shared personal info from smartphones

  Peer-to-peer software developer Frostwire has agreed to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission charges that its software would likely cause users to unknowingly share sensitive personal files, including pictures, from their Android devices, the FTC said Tuesday.

• CBS sued for distributing LimeWire software

  An entrepreneur and over a dozen hip-hop artists are suing CBS over its part in contributing to piracy. The suit, filed by FilmOn founder Alki David in federal court on Wednesday, accuses CBS's CNET arm of exacerbating piracy problem by distributing LimeWire software on its website.

• Google Instant bans 'BitTorrent' word

  What do curse words, porn terms and the word BitTorrent have in common? They're all blacklisted from Google Instant.

• MIT pioneers ad hoc network-bottleneck breaker

  Two researchers may have found a way to greatly reduce traffic bottlenecks that could take place in ad hoc networks. Such work may be essential for the future development of sensor networks, they say.

• P2P-based alternative to DNS hopes to challenge ICANN

  A group led by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is forming to develop a peer-to-peer-based alternative to today's ICANN-controlled DNS system, according to a blog posted on Tuesday.

• LimeWire is quietly resurrected: It's baaack!

  Less than a month after its "permanent shut down," LimeWire has been resurrected by an anonymous dev team -- and it's better and more powerful than before. Or, well, something like that.

• LimeWire shut down permanently

  File-sharing program LimeWire has been permanently shut down after a federal judge found it guilty of assisting users in committing copyright infringement "on a massive scale."

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  Court orders LimeWire to cease file-sharing business

  In a major victory for the music industry, a New York federal judge has ordered embattled P2P software maker LimeWire to immediately and permanently stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software.

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  Hacker cracks Pirate Bay, exposes 4M pirates

  Use Pirate Bay to find or swap files? If so, about 4 million of you have just had your accounts hacked and user names, e-mail and Internet addresses compiled by a 23-year-old Argentinian (and two pals) exploiting the site's SQL vulnerabilities.

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  British Internet legislation causes rising tension

  A package of legislation designed to combat copyright infringement in Britain is stirring more controversy as it moves through Parliament.

• Viruses and spam an issue on Gnutella p2p network: LimeWire

  Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing client LimeWire has admitted that security is an ingoing issue for users of the Gnutella file sharing network.

• Prospective Pirate Bay buyer loses key technology partner

  The deal between Global Gaming Factory (GGF) X and Peerialism, whose P-to-P (peer-to-peer) technology was supposed to be a key component of the new Pirate Bay's infrastructure, has been called off, according to Peerialism's CEO Johan Ljungberg.

• Seattle man used Limewire for identity theft

  A Seattle man was sentenced to more than three years in prison Tuesday for using the Limewire file-sharing service to lift personal information from computers across the U.S.

• Pirate Bay founders to launch new service

  The founders of widely used BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay are getting ready to launch IPREDator, a network service that makes people online more anonymous by using a VPN (virtual private network).