“In Rainbows”, Radiohead’s new album is now available - at a price you, the buyer, set - for download in 160kbps MP3 format . via Guardian Unlimited

P2P is making headlines these days for all the right reasons. BitTorrent is helping Brightcove deliver high quality videos, Joost is signing major content partners left and right, and this little company called … via Pando Blog

The latest version of financial analyst firm Piper Jaffray’s biannual survey of high school students and technology states the obvious, but also contains some interesting tidbits. via CNET News.com

“We believe if your music is great, the people will pay for it.”

Back in the day, fans would have congregated at midnight at their local music stores to get first crack at a new Radiohead album. via MyTELUS

“Using this information users can reduce their chances of being tracked to just about 1%”

P2P:- Do you believe entertainment cartel enforcement units have spies lurking on the P2P networks, ready to trap the unwary? You know they do. via P2pnet.net

“Why would I want to get it on an (illegal) file-swapping service when I get it just as good when I go to ABC.com?”

Internet television is growing fast, but it faces one big disadvantage: The picture quality on a regular TV is still much better than on a computer screen. via Media Info Center

Capitol v. Thomas: The Key Appeal Issue : ” In the upcoming appeal of the $222,000 judgment against Ms. via Privacy Digest

“Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?”

By Greg Sandoval , News.com Published on ZDNet News : Oct 9, 2007 4:00:00 AM Almost everybody agrees Jammie Thomas is thumping the recording industry in a battle for hearts and minds. via ZDNet

“Users are aware of that when they read the user agreement when they download the BitTorrent (software) client.”

BOSTON - BitTorrent Inc., which was co-founded by the developer of a software program widely used to share pirated music and video over the Web, plans to start helping media companies stream videos over the … via The Globe and Mail

Disclaimer: The following is opinion. Don’t like opinion? Don’t read on. Completely subjective piece based on the little facts I have about the trial from my linked source on the trial and my own expertise on … via Life.firelace.com

PeerGuardian and PeerGuardian 2 are free and open source programs developed by Phoenix Labs. They are capable of blocking incoming and outgoing connections based on IP blocklists. The system is also capable of blocking advertising, spyware, government and educational ranges, depending upon user preferences.

The original PeerGuardian (1.0, led by programmer Tim Leonard) was programmed in Visual Basic and quickly became popular among more knowledgeable P2P users despite blocking only the common TCP protocol and being known for high RAM and CPU usage when connected to P2P networks. The original version was made open source, and development began on a new version (2.0, led by programmer Cory Nelson) to resolve the shortcomings of the original. The latest version, PeerGuardian 2, is coded in C and C++. It can block all IPv4 protocols and ports. Windows Vista and IPv6 are currently unsupported but there is a test version that does work with them.

Although IP addresses of government and business entities are easily added to a list of IP addresses to be blocked, there is no means for PeerGuardian to block access by a government or business using an undocumented IP address to identify people engaged in software piracy or other criminal misconduct.

PeerGuardian 2 does not support Windows Vista at the moment.

We and the PeerGuardian team do not condone copyright infringement. There are many legal uses of P2P and we are sick of being treated like criminals! We want to keep organizations and individuals from collecting data about us without our consent

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows 98/ME

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows 2000/XP/2003

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition

PeerGuardian 2 source code (for programmers)

PeerGuardian Website

The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a federal jury found a Minnesota woman shared copyrighted music online and levied $222,000 in damages against her.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs online in violation of their copyrights.

In the first such lawsuit to go to trial, the record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn’t have a Kazaa account.

Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 over file-sharing, which has hurt sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars.

The RIAA says the lawsuits have mitigated illegal sharing, even though music file-sharing is rising overall. The group says the number of households that have used file-sharing programs to download music has risen from 6.9 million monthly in April 2003, before the lawsuits began, to 7.8 million in March 2007.

CNN