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The Future of P2P File-Sharing Networks

The debate about whether peer-to-peer applications, which were first made popular with the Napster file-sharing network, should be legitimate or illegitimate continues to rage. On one side are applications like Morpheus and Kazaa, whose makers claim their products have many uses. On the other side a...

Faced with a far more urgent need to support more Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, the Asian nations of Japan, South Korea and China are looking to lead the move to IPv6, considered by many to be the next-generation Internet. Unlike the United States -- which still has a bountiful supply of the Int...

Topping other popular culture icons including Harry Potter, American Idol and Britney Spears among Web searches by millions of Yahoo users worldwide, the Kazaa file-trading music tool was the number one search subject of 2003, Yahoo reported this week. Pew Internet and American Life Project senior r...

The past year was a good year for bad guys on the Web. Fraud complaints surged 60 percent to 120,000 from 75,000 a year ago, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in Fairmont, West Virginia. The Center, which changed its name last week from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, maintains a...

Making a set of New Year's resolutions for myself is certainly helpful but generally not nearly as much fun as making them for others. The year 2003 has been a time of change. It has brought a lot of exciting new experiences for me, and, frankly, I'd like fewer of them in 2004. It is at this time of...

A New York technology industry research firm confirmed the complaints of consumers, analysts, office workers and lawmakers by blaming the unsolicited e-mail known as spam for nearly $20 billion in lost time and expenses worldwide. On the basis of several factors, such as productivity and bandwidth l...

BEST OF ECT NEWS

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Hacking the Xbox

It seemed like a no-brainer for Microsoft: Use its massive software market share to win over game players to its Xbox console. It could sell a powerful, graphics-enhanced computer for about $180 and sit back as the dollars rolled in from royalties for every Xbox game sold. The plan to practically gi...

BEST OF ECT NEWS

Corporate Trademarks and the Future of Domain Disputes

What's in a name? Not much, according to Shakespeare. But today, the answer is "plenty" -- especially when you're talking about the intersection of domain names with trademarks. ICANN was set up in California to administer several core Internet structures, including the first round of top-level doma...

Apple has responded to a series of security threats, including a vulnerability that might have granted would-be attackers root access and total control over systems running Mac OS X 10.3.2 and earlier versions. That Directory Services vulnerability, patched along with other holes in a security updat...

The rate at which Americans are adopting cable and DSL high-speed Internet connections and going online slowed at the end of the year. But this slowing rate of growth is balanced by U.S. subscribers using the Internet for more types of activities, such as online banking and financial transactions, w...

Distributing software for sharing files on the Internet is legal even if the application is being used for illegal activity, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands has ruled. In upholding a lower court ruling, the high court found that Sharman Networks, maker of the Kazaa file-sharing application, did...

Not to be left out of lawsuits being launched by rivals AOL and Amazon, Microsoft has announced that after a six-month investigation and collaboration with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, it has filed parallel lawsuits against a New York spamming ring accused of sending billions of "i...

A Norwegian court has upheld a lower court exoneration of the man charged with cracking Hollywood's copy-protection technology for DVD movies. The software crack, known as DeCSS, earned then 15-year-old Jon Johansen the nickname 'DVD Jon.' Now 20 years old, Johansen was cleared when a three-judge pa...

Through much of the year I hear complaints about personal computers -- whether they are running Windows or the relatively rare alternatives. These complaints are typically about systems reliability, the costs resulting from migrating employees to new hardware, the cost associated with new employees ...

All of the thousands of subpoenas filed by the Recording Industry Association of America in its legal pursuit of accused illegal Internet file traders have been invalidated by a court ruling against the industry association. Since September, the RIAA has launched three waves of lawsuits against indi...


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