p2pnet World Headlines – July 20, 2009
Kazaa to rise from the dead Sydney Morning Herald
The notorious Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service is back from the dead three years after it was shut down by the music industry in a $150 million lawsuit. But the software looks entirely different this time around, with users forced to pay for their music instead of trading tracks illegally. Kevin Bermeister, who was behind much of the technology in the original Kazaa, is leading the relaunch of the new service through his company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Bermeister is based in Rose Bay in Sydney but the company has offices in Los Angeles and New York. One of his unlikely offsiders is Michael Speck, who ran the music industry’s case against Kazaa as the head of its anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations. m”Only one in 20 of all [music] downloads gets paid for and no legitimate operator has been able to change that, until now,” said Speck. The new Kazaa, to be announced on Tuesday, will initially only be available to people in the United States due to licensing issues but Bermeister said he was expecting it to be available to Australians within six months. [Also see Kazaa, the RIAA and Jammie Thomas and KaZaA Offers Unlimited Music Downloads for $19.98 p/mo.]
DDoS attacks on South Korea and USA originated in the UK Heise Online
The South Korean secret service has blamed North Korea and its ‘hacker army’ for three waves of DDoS attacks on US and South Korean government and company servers. The botnet of zombie computers, of which 20,000 alone were reported to be located inside South Korea, were not just used for carrying out the DDoS attacks, but also to spread the MyDoom trojan, programmed to delete the host computer’s hard drive at a specific time although erasure only occured in a few cases. No specific evidence that the attacks were connected with North Korea has been found. Experts from internet security organisation Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis), which is based at Hanoi University of Technology in Vietnam and is a member of the Asian Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team (ACERT), now claim to have succeeded in hacking two of the eight command and control servers that control the botnet. This has reportedly enabled them to determine that the IP address of the master server, which is running Windows Server 2003, is 195.90.118.xxx and that it is located in the UK. The server IP address has been passed on to KrCERT and US-CERT in order to try to track down the owner. The fact that the master server is located here does not mean that the attackers are from the UK. The perpetrators may have hacked the server in order to use it for the attacks.
Curran suggests ISP levy for copyright Computerworld
Shadow minister for ICT Clare Curran says a licence fee attached to internet connections should be considered to break New Zealand’s copyright law impasse. In a blog post this morning, Curran suggests any future regime should enable people to access the information or material they seek. To do that, she says, we should consider introducing a licensing fee attached to internet connections.”This fee would then be collected and distributed by an external agency amongst copyright holders. In order to work, it would need the buy in of all ISPs and rights holders. It would likely be focussed on New Zealand copyright content first,” she writes. Curran says an independent rights agency could be established to distribute fees and rule on disputes.
Concerns raised as LA looks to Google Web services Associated Press
Security and privacy concerns have been raised over a multimillion-dollar proposal by Los Angeles to tap Google’s Internet-based services for government e-mail, police records and other confidential data. At issue is the security of computerized records on everything from police investigations to potholes as the nation’s second-largest city considers dumping its in-house computer network for Google e-mail and office programs that are accessed over the Internet. Paul Weber, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, complained Thursday that the union had scant information on the plan or what it would mean for the safety of sensitive records, such as narcotics or gang investigations. His worries came just one day after the online-messaging service Twitter acknowledged hackers were able to access confidential information stored with Google, which has been promoting greater use of “cloud computing” â storing data online rather than on individual computers under a company’s or government agency’s direct control.
Goldman makes peace with blogger in trademark case Reuters
Goldman Sachs Group Inc has quietly reached an agreement to end a legal dispute with a blogger who will be allowed to keep running a website critical of the investment bank. The agreement required blogger Michael Morgan to post a disclaimer on his goldmansachs666.com website, saying it has no affiliation with the financial firm. Morgan, a Florida investment adviser, uses his blog — whose name combines Goldman’s name with numbers used to evoke connotations with the devil — to criticize the bank and its large profits. The bank this week posted a 33 percent increase in quarterly earnings on blowout trading results, putting its employees on pace for big bonuses at a time when many Americans are struggling.
Armstrong: Think of AOL Like Disney, a Company ‘That Delights You’ Advertising Age
It’s been 100 days since Tim Armstrong, 38, leapt from Google to become CEO of AOL, charged with spinning it off from Time Warner and redefining it as a stand-alone entity. He’s spent the better part of those days on various planes, visiting the company’s offices around the globe as part of a crash-course in all things AOL. Along the way, he came up with a new structure for the company, which will be divided into five key areas of focus: content production (MediaGlow), the world’s largest display-ad network (Platform A), local information and services (MapQuest), communications (AIM, ICQ) and AOL Ventures (Bebo). Now comes the harder part: executing the plan.
Tweleted: Making Mischief on Twitter Time
Get past the cheesy name â honestly, this Twitter-izing of words needs to stop â and you’ll find Tweleted is an occasionally useful service. Set against clouds on a bright blue background, Tweleted promises to recover any Twitter posts you may have accidentally deleted. A nice feature, but one hardly worth, well, twittering about. But across the top of the page, there’s an option to switch the site into evil mode. Click on it and the blue skies disappear, replaced with the fires of Hell and an ominous message: “Recover embarrassing deleted tweets for fun and profit.” Because Tweleted uses publicly available records, the website can recover not only your deleted tweets but also everyone else’s. And since Twitter users aren’t exactly known for filtering their thoughts, the few things they think twice about should be interesting.
Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community Microsoft
Today, in a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.
Sex chat woman loses sickness benefits The Local
A Malmö woman has been ordered to repay 18,000 kronor ($2,300) by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Forsäkringskassan) for sickness benefits received while working on a phone sex chat line. The woman, who is in her thirties, was at the same time employed by a telemarketing firm but argues that she was never employed for more than the 25 percent of work time that the agency had approved. The agency meanwhile argues that the woman showed, by soliciting for further clients on the sex chat phone in, that she was capable of gainful employment and therefore not entitled to sickness benefits, according to the Sydsvenskan newspaper.
…and now we do it again The Pirate Bay
Yeah, if you thought the last couple of weeks had stopped us, we are pleased to say that we just got back from a well deserved vacation. On the moon, of course. Actually, even though we haven’t communicated this as well as we probably have should, our plan is to use th SEK 60M to build us our own moon base. I mean, as sure as we are of the moon landing beeing a straight up hoax, we are also sure of making our dreams come true. If you have noticed some unexpected downtime the last couple of years it’s probably a result of the nonfunctioning ip routing between the moon and your computer. As a matter of fact, our server park has been placed on the moon since the time of the famous raid. Along with our long time BFF Buzz Aldrin we have investigated the possibilities of having our own networking hiq on the moon. This seems to be quite possible, as long a Buzzter is working that al-anon program the right way.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
July 20th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
(Allegedly) getting to the moon in the first place cost NASA over two billion dollars. Has the price gone DOWN since then?