New data from Arbor Networks shows that global P2P traffic is continuing to decline. In fact, P2P apps are the fastest declining application group, according to a report presented at the 77th IETF meeting in Anaheim last week. Here’s a graph showing the rate of decline, in relationship to overall Internet traffic, from 2007 to 2009:

And here’s a list of apps and their weighted average grow and decline over the last two years: Read more »

(And Other Ideas To Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal)

As of July 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing in just under three years. In 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) joined this misguided, anti-consumer crusade.

Filing lawsuits against anonymous “Doe” defendants, the RIAA and MPAA seek to uncover the identities of P2P users and force them to pay thousands of dollars in settlements. Many innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.

While there is no way to know exactly what the RIAA and MPAA are going to do or who they are going to sue, users of publicly-accessible P2P networks can take the following steps to reduce their chances of being sued: Read more »

The Pirate Bay has ambitious plans to bring end-to-end encryption to all network activity, essentially blacking out a user’s traffic from deep packet inspection gear and other prying eyes. Interesting project, sure, and definitely ambitious, but will it work? We doubt it, at least in the near term, and here’s why.

NewTeeVee has a nice writeup on the proposal by Pirate Bay cofounder Fredrik Neij for a system which he calls IPETEE. The system either replaces or sits atop the basic operating system network stack, encrypting and decrypting all communications that pass through the the computer.

Diffie-Hellman key negotiation is used to generate session keys for the computer on each end of the network connection, though the system is smart enough to revert to standard, unencrypted TCP/IP or UDP should the target computer not support the encryption scheme. (Rudimentary information is on the project’s wiki.)

Apart from the obvious drawback of CPU and bandwidth overhead, such a project could no doubt be completed (eventually) by the Jolly Roger-waving lads of The Pirate Bay, but its hurdles to adoption are legion. For one thing, there’s the practical matter of what benefit it would have.

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Mininova has just launched their new bookmarking feature for registered users. One of the benefits of your mininova bookmarks page is that generates a personalized RSS feed which allows you to automatically add bookmarked torrents to your BitTorrent client.

Importing torrents via RSS can be very useful if you’re at work, school, or at a friends place. With this new feature from mininova you only have to bookmark the torrent, and it will start downloading automatically when your BitTorrent client is running at home.

Here is how it works. First of all, you’ll have to be a registered user at Mininova to use the bookmarking feature. Then, when you come across a torrent you would like to download, simply click on the “Add to bookmarks” button. The torrent will then be added to your personal bookmarks page, which has its own RSS feed.

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If Rodney Dangerfield were to have left this world prior to BitTorrent’s debut, I suspect it might be plausible to assume the man had been reincarnated to consist of code and a mission to peer. Or something less ridiculous sounding, maybe.

BitTorrent is hardly the technical target of governments and copyright-owning corporations and ISPs. But it has played the victim of their data filtration and server disconnection exercises again and again, and to ill effect.

Just this past week a story by TorrentFreak emerged describing Malaysia’s government as playing part to suspensions of BitTorrent trackers hosted within the country’s jurisdiction. BitTorrent truly gets no respect. At least among authorities and big business groups.

You have of course heard these lines repeatedly. To exhaustive degree, I’m sure. Yes, these stories have surfaced far too often for most anybody’s liking. Even some of those doing the shafting aren’t likely to enjoy a number of their actions’ aftereffects. Read more »

Reports are coming in that the government in Malaysia has ordered the immediate suspension of all BitTorrent trackers hosted in the country. In a shock move, the government – citing the ‘Copyright Act 1987′ has ordered hosts to suspend servers that host BitTorrent sites, pending an investigation. Many sites are currently offline.

+When BitTorrent sites get into legal trouble or other pressures force a move to a new location, the speculation begins on the safest place to go.

For instance, would a site bail out of the Netherlands and move to Canada? Is Canada too dangerous now, and would a move to Sweden be more appropriate? What about moving to Ukraine-based hosting like Demonoid or further afield – China or Russia maybe? Inevitably, discussions usually involve ideas of moving sites east, to countries like Malaysia.

Fairly high-tech countries like this seem an attractive proposition, particularly given their government’s track-record in failing to do much about piracy.

Given this background, BitTorrent tracker admins with their sites hosted in Malaysia were confronted by a very unpleasant surprise today.

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The six individuals who are arrested for allegedly sharing music on the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, are due to report to police at the start of July. The five men and one woman, who are suspected of conspiring to defraud the music industry, will have their bail extended. Unsurprisingly, the police need more time to make their case.

On Friday 23rd May, three people were arrested by police, followed by another three on Wednesday 28th May. All six – five men aged between 19 and 33 and a 28-year-old woman – were arrested in the UK on suspicion of “Conspiracy to Defraud the Music Industry”, and other copyright offenses.

It is alleged that the individuals were users of OiNK who uploaded music to other users in advance of its commercial release date.

Suspects were taken to their local police station for questioning and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Sources close to those arrested confirm that most accusations relate to the uploading of a single album by each suspect but despite the fact that uploading music is not a crime in the UK if done for no profit, somehow this civil issue had been transformed into allegations of serious crime, with police paying close attention to donations the suspects made to the site, presumably in an effort to find some financial motive.

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The British government appears to be running out of patience with ISPs as they struggle to come to an agreement with the music industry on P2P music piracy. One ‘top-level’ ISP executive says “The British government just put a gun to our head.” Major UK ISPs are now in “serious” talks with the music industry.

Recently we reported on the agreement between UK ISP Virgin Media and the British Phonographic Industry to start sending out warnings to Virgin’s subscribers who the BPI accuse of uploading copyright music.

Now, according to a Digital Music News report, the British government has started urgently applying pressure to prominent ISPs to find a solution to the ‘problem’ of file-sharing. The pressure includes a threat to bring in new laws, should ISPs and the music industry not come to a solution of their own.

The government previously set a deadline of April 2009 for the parties to reach an agreement but according to sources, pressure is intensifying to deal with the issue sooner. A “top-level executive” gave an indication of the level of pressure stating: “The British government just put a gun to our head.”

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing, the EFF goes for the jugular and shows that the RIAA’s entire approach is wrong.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing (PDF), the EFF goes for the jugular, seeking to show that the RIAA’s entire approach to file-swapping cases is flawed.

Not only does the Copyright Act not grant a “making available” right, the EFF said, but trade groups also shouldn’t be allowed to claim that an actual distribution took place based solely on downloads from their own investigators.

Together, this two-part theory would effectively eviscerate the RIAA’s current legal campaign by making it nearly impossible for copyright holders to show that infringing distributions to the public have taken place over P2P networks.

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Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year’s NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecommunications industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches.

Internet service providers’ methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast Corp. was actively interfering with P2P users’ ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset.

Because the RST packets did not appear to be sent directly from the company, critics accused Comcast of deceiving its customers and actively blocking their ability to share files online.

Although Comcast has said it doesn’t actively block any P2P protocols and merely “delays” P2P uploads during times of heavy congestion, the company has agreed to change its P2P traffic management policies and stop targeting traffic such as that of BitTorrent. Read more »