Today is an important day for network neutrality, as the FCC’s Broadband Network management hearing has been discussing Comcast’s attempt to slow down BitTorrent traffic. One of the panelists said Comcast uses “hacker techniques” to manage their network.

When we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds, we never expected that it would lead to a FCC hearing, but it did. Let’s hope it’s for the better.

The second half of today’s hearing (pdf link) started with a number of network and technological experts telling us about the Internet, its history, and its makeup. Of main contention was the line between acceptable, and unacceptable traffic management.

Wise things were said, and the panelists made some good points about the unfairness of the traffic management tools that Comcast uses. There was emphasis on the TCP reset, which means that a few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops.

Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP. Read the rest of this entry »

A company trying to pass itself off as vendors of the open-source file-sharing software Shareaza, has set the legal dogs on the real Shareaza forum. Discordia Ltd, who earlier turned Bearshare and iMesh into pay services, demanded action after a member of the real Shareaza forum suggested a DOS attack on the site.

When the news started to break in December last year, it looked bleak for the real Shareaza project. A company had somehow gained control of Shareaza.com, the domain name used previously for the real, open-source Shareaza P2P client, and was now passing its own pay service client off as the real thing. Something was seriously wrong, with many putting the pieces together into what could only be described as a conspiracy.

Now, lawyers for the “fake” or “imposter” Shareaza are threatening the real Shareaza team for a comment made by a user on their forum - things are getting out of hand. So how did this begin?

Last year a company associated with the French RIAA somehow obtained the Shareaza.com domain name from its owner, Mr Jonathan Nilson, who was given the domain in the belief he would keep it safe. Nilson would neither confirm nor deny that he had sold the domain, but speculation suggests that he may have sold it to avoid legal action. Others suggest the domain expired. Either way, the original owners of the domain (the Shareaza creators) don’t have it anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

It happens almost every year, a few hours after the Oscar winners are announced, people fire up their BitTorrent clients. The day after the award show is traditionally Oscar winner download day, as people are desperately trying to find that Oscar winning movie they haven’t seen yet.

Winning an Oscar is probably the best thing that can happen to a movie. DVD sales sky-rocket, and even more importantly, the number of people downloading the movie through BitTorrent increases dramatically.

Mininova’s search cloud is a nice illustration. Below is a screenshot of the search cloud on Mininova 12 hours after the Oscar winners were announced, and for comparison, here is another one taken two days ago.

Most prominent in the search cloud is yesterday’s winner “No Country for Old Men”, that received four Oscars, including the one for the best movie.

There is more though. Almost all awarded movies are in the list of most popular searches - There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose, Juno, The Counterfeiters, Once, Sweeney Todd, Taxi to the Dark Side, Elizabeth, Ratatouille and Golden Compass. There is only one remarkable absentee from the list, and that is The Bourne Ultimatum.

People are not only trying to find the movies on BitTorrent, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the award ceremony as well, because search terms like Academy Awards and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Last year we reported on the OscarTorrents site, a site where BitTorrent users could choose their own winners. Unfortunately, the site was not available this year as the creators have no time, but they’re promising to be “back next year” In the meantime (and as usual), the full range of movies will be available at dozens of other torrent sites, right around the world.

Oscar Winners 2008 Popular on BitTorrent

Over the past week, some servers used for updating the anti-virus software NOD32 were labeled as anti-Ѣp by a popular list maker for PeerGuardian. In response, NOD32’s company, ESET, has categorised PG2 as malware in some of its latest updates.

It started off with Bluetack adding some IP addresses to its “Level 1 blocklist” that belonged to ESET (NOD32) update servers. “Level 1” is the term that Bluetack use for their lists containing (according to site admin ‘monk’):

• Companies (Or organizations. I won’t repeat orgs. over and over) who are clearly involved with trying to stop filesharing.
• Companies which anti-Ѣp activity has been seen from.
• Companies that produce or have a stong financial interest in copyrighted material.
• Government ranges or companies that have a strong financial interest in doing work for governments.
• Legal industry ranges.
• IPs or ranges of ISPs from which anti-Ѣp activity has been observed.

The IP addresses added were 89.202.149.32 to 89.202.149.63, 89.202.157.88 to 89.202.157.95 and 89.202.157.128 to 89.202.157.159, according to this forum post on the NOD32 support forum. These blocked IP ranges contain many of the servers used to provide anti-virus signatures for NOD32. These were added to the blocklist for alleged anti-p2p activities. However, what kind of anti-p2p activity was taking place is unclear. Read the rest of this entry »