What’s new in Azureus 2.5.0.0

1.1 Send to Friend

A wizard to simplify sending a link to content to a friend or to embed in a web page (e.g. a blog).

1.2 Auto upload speed

This feature controls your upload speed based on the latency of your internet connection as gauged by pinging other members of the Distributed Database.

1.3 Other new features

• OSX: Open .torrent files into Azureus via Finder/Desktop/etc.

• ‘Do not download’ files handled more consistently with respect to download completion.

• Renaming of a download directories.

• Moving of data files on torrent removal from Azureus.

• Signed updates and plugins for improved security.

• Interface improvements - more information: date added, idle times, new info view, file piece view; more per-torrent options.

• Debug information generator.

• More in the changelog.

1.4 Bug fixes and performance improvements

Notable fixes:

* LAN Peer Finder retains peers more effectively; explicit LAN peer identification.
* Reduced CPU usage when connected to large numbers of peers.
*

2. Full ChangeLog

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/changelog.php?version=2.5.0.0

One thing about us Internet users: We like our music, we like our pictures, we like our sex — and we like them all free.

Last week, AOL released a trove of what it thought were anonymous Web-search data from 650,000 of its customers. While intending to help researchers, AOL instead set off a privacy controversy because some of the users could, in fact, be tracked down. But taking up AOL on its original intentions, I got hold of the data set — 2.27 gigabytes’ worth, loaded it into my shiny new SQL Server database software, and started my own research project into how people really use the Web.

One learns, for instance, that excepting prepositions and conjunctions, the most commonly used word in the 17.15 million separate searches was “free.” If something isn’t free, it better at least be “new,” as that was the next-most common word.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115568221756536623.html

IMesh is set to unveil Thursday (August 17) the latest version of BearShare, its recently acquired fellow peer-to-peer network.
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The new and legal service, BearShare 6.0, will continue to offer the traditional benefits of a P2P file-sharing experience but with additional features, iMesh executive chairman Robert Summer said. Among these are a “ToGo” portable music subscription service and social networking capabilities.

Subscriptions will be free for the next 30 days, after which the service will introduce an as yet undetermined monthly fee.

“Ours is a unique offering that addresses that massive audience of free music downloaders that the industry is trying to bring to heel,” Summer said.

Controversial Russian music site AllofMP3.com has suffered more unexplained downtime.

Back in May the site all but disappeared for three days, leading to fears it had been crushed by Russian authorities stung into action by the US. A group of US senators asked George Bush to block Russian entry to the World Trade Organisation unless he took a firmer line on intellectual property.

AllofMP3 has been down for just under 11 hours today. It was down for three hours and 22 minutes yesterday. So far this month, it’s been out of action for a total of one day, seven hours and 29 minutes.

Its sister site alltunes.com has suffered the same outage time.

Peter Alguacil, from monitoring company Ipwalk, said: “It’s weird to have so much downtime during the day - last time it happened as they launched the new service. Maybe all the publicity has brought them a lot of visitors.”

ON May 31, the Swedish police raided the headquarters of a major file-sharing Web site and hauled off hundreds of computer servers along with two men, in handcuffs, they suspected of being movie pirates.

The raid was an evidence-gathering exercise, and no charges have yet been filed, but Sweden, it seems, has finally become serious about cracking down on digital piracy after years of complacency. Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, crowed that the raid showed that “there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves.”

But just a month later, Quinn Norton, a reporter, sat in a living room in Malmo, Sweden, with the same men who were detained, and a third who was not, as they laughed and watched an illicit copy of the movie “Spanglish.”

Pirate Bay — the most notorious, most hunted digital-piracy outfit in the world — was back. Ms. Norton tells their story in a two-part series for Wired News (wired.com).

Cachelogic today finally released its VelociX™ Accelerated Media Delivery Platform. I say finally because I’ve had an interview with CTO and co-founder Andrew Parker (left) in my own cache for over a week, awaiting the breaking of the embargo.”Pure peer to peer (p2p)  has some fundamental problems in how it scales and operates. What’s needed for this to become commercial is a hybrid between p2p and content distribution. That’s what we’ve built.”

In building VelociX™ Cachelogic had to work with a lot of open source projects, such as BitTorrent, and make them DRM-friendly. The result, out of necessity, is technology available under an open source license, Parker said.

“In order to get our Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP), which is like DHCP for caches, into all sorts of different clients, it has to be under an open license. They need open reference implementation.”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=736

The RIAA continues to fire flaming subpoenas against suspected file-swappers across the country, many of whom lack the resources with which to defend themselves. Those without cash find themselves hard-pressed to even begin defending against a federal lawsuit of the kind that the RIAA usually files, and few legal firms are willing to help.

Ray Beckerman is one of the few lawyers who has taken a stand against the RIAA, and he recently took part in a conference call organized by Defective by Design, an anti-DRM coalition. Beckerman gave a broad overview of the RIAA’s tactics; not surprisingly, he was opposed to them on the grounds that the group’s investigations turn out very little actual evidence.

“They say the defendant downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution certain song files. But they have no evidence of any downloading, they have no evidence of any distributing, and at most they can say that someone who might somehow be associated with the IP address might have made some files available. But they certainly don’t know what the defendant did. All they know that the defendant did was to write out a check for internet access.”

Despite these key weaknesses, the RIAA uses its resources to file suit against individuals and then presses them to settle out of court for cash—usually $3750 or $4250.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060721-7322.html

According to a couple of reports circulating the Internet the last couple of days, and bolstered by recent RIAA lawsuit losses, the best way to defend yourself against a lawsuit from the RIAA is to open up your WiFi network.

From CD Freaks:

Earlier this month, the inability to prove who actually did the file sharing caused the RIAA to drop a case in Oklahoma and now it looks like the same defense has worked in a California case as well. In both cases, though, as soon as the RIAA realized the person was using this defense, they dropped the case, rather than lose it and set a precedent showing they really don’t have the unequivocal evidence they claim they do.

Of course, I don’t know many people who are too keen on sharing their Internet connection with all their neighbors, but this is an interesting development in the ongoing RIAA lawsuits that sheds even more negative light on the RIAA.

http://mp3.about.com/b/a/256814.htm

The record industry sued four St. Louis-area residents, two other Missourians and people in nine other states this week, claiming they illegally downloaded copyrighted music.

In all, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued 18,200 individuals over songs the industry says have been illegally downloaded or made available for uploading by others online, spokeswoman Amanda Hunter said Thursday.

In Missouri, the RIAA has filed 119 cases and settled 63, she said. Some have been settled for thousands of dollars, according to court records, but Hunter said she did not have total figures on Thursday and could not access current figures for Illinois lawsuits.

Read more »

Warner Bros. Records Sony BMG and Virgin Records, have filed a lawsuit against LimeWire. The RIAA said in a statement that they had tried numerous times to engage LimeWire but the site owners have “shown insufficient interest in developing a legal business model”.

The recording industry is asking for compensatory and punitive damages, such as $150,000 for every song distributed without permission. LimeWire is “devoted essentially to the Internet piracy of plaintiffs’ sound recordings,” the record companies charge in their suit. “The scope of infringement caused by defendants is staggering.”

In a gesture that mirrors a petition the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is presenting to Congress, Flowerburger Records is circulating a petition requesting that the British Parliament and the BPI, Britain’s recording industry trade group, stop the lawsuits against music fans and develop constructive alternatives aimed at compensating artists.

“Fans generally want payment for musicians but cannot always afford to buy CDs or downloads and will therefore naturally use P2P file-sharing and other downloading methods to listen to music,” the petition states. “The music industry is a creative industry that should be exploring ways to earn money for its artists from P2P, not using the destructive force of litigation.”

Read more »

The virus, MSH/Cibyz, which is based on Windows PowerShell, was released by members of the RRLF virus group, according to an advisory from McAfee.

PowerShell is a command line shell and scripting language that runs on Microsoft XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista and Longhorn operating systems.

The malware is a low risk to home and corporate users, according to a McAfee advisory. However, it can create a copy of itself in the Windows system directory and then modifies registry keys so users cannot view hidden files and extensions.

Read more »

About 1.8 million people in Japan are active users of file-sharing software, a sharp increase from a year ago, according to a survey by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), TV broadcasters and other industry groups.

The figure is equal to about 3.5 percent of all Internet users and represents a jump from last year’s survey, which put the number at about 1.3 million, or about 2.7 percent of Internet users. The survey was conducted online in mid-June and gathered 18,596 responses.

The average number of downloads per user per year was 194 files, of which about 87 were music, 79 were movies, 11 were images, nine were software applications and eight were documents.

The most popular file-sharing application being used was Winny, according to the survey. WinMX was ranked second and Limewire third. BitTorrent clients, popular in the West, were fifth on the list, with only 6 percent of people using it as their main application.

Read more »

Forty songs are being downloaded illegally for every legal music download, according to estimates produced on Thursday as the record industry scored one of its biggest victories against online piracy.

Some 20bn songs were downloaded illegally last year, compared with a legal digital market of about 500m tracks, the IFPI, the international music industry lobby group, said.

The estimate was disclosed as the IFPI and its US counterpart, the RIAA, confirmed a settlement with Sharman Networks, which distributes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software applications that are thought to account for up to 15 per cent of music file-sharing.

Under the terms of the deal, Sharman will pay Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music more than $100m (€79m, £54m), the biggest settlement fine by far in any music piracy lawsuit. The music companies will also receive 20 per cent of future income from Kazaa after it agreed to adapt to a legal model.

“Kazaa was an international engine of copyright theft which damaged the whole music sector,” said John Kennedy, the chairman and chief executive of IFPI. “This brings the biggest piracy brand in the world into a legal model.”

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14062997/

THE music industry hailed a victory in the battle against illegal downloading yesterday after forcing one of the world’s most prominent file-sharing sites to pay $100 million in damages and become a legal business.Kazaa, a longstanding source of illicit music and film downloads, enjoyed 4.2 million simultaneous users worldwide. The “peer-to-peer” network acted as a free jukebox, making files accessible to any computer user. In 2003 Kazaa became the most downloaded software with 239 million.

Sharman Networks, which is based in Australia and is the owner of Kazaa, agreed yesterday to pay the world’s four leading music companies — Universal, SonyBMG, EMI and Warner Music — more than $100 million (£54 million) in compensation for lost sales.

Kazaa had been under mounting pressure after a series of landmark court rulings, instigated by the music and film industries. Australia’s Federal Court found Sharman Networks guilty of encouraging its users to swap songs illegally, breaching copyright law. In June last year the US Supreme Court ruled that file-sharing companies could be held accountable for promoting copyright theft by users of their services.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,26909-2288888,00.html