For those of you who have been living in a cave, this might be news to you. The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most popular websites for illegal downloading of movies, has increased its traffic by more than 300% after Swedish police shut down the site for three days. They are back up and running, but for how long, that remains the question.

Having all this traffic is however nothing more than a flash in the pan if we look at the graph attached from Alexa. Looking at the stats, we note with interest that the traffic is running back down to where it was before the raid. The average “Page Views per user” is coming back down as well as its reach.

Read more »

This is a court case from Virginia where officers searched a man’s car because they saw what appeared to be home made cds on the seat of the car. They then found marijuana and arrested the man. He appealed the decision and the eveidence of the marijuana was thrown out because of the unlawful search. What I find very interesting is the officers had “training from the recording industry in recognizing pirated cds.”

What if the guy was a musician and it was his music? Talk about guilty until proven innocent. Where does the recording industry’s influence stop? They are conducting raids in foreign countries, training police here, what next? Their own terror squad?

Microsoft is cutting the cord on its antipiracy tool.

The software maker this month plans to update the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program so that it only checks in with Microsoft once every two weeks, instead of after each boot-up, a company representative said Friday. By year’s end, the tool will stop pinging Microsoft altogether, the representative said.

Read more »

What exactly happens in the event that the tool finds a PC that is suspected of running a counterfeit version of Windows (what info, if any, is then shared with Redmond)?:

“WGA Notifications is for Windows XP users. Our client software does not collect any information that can be used to identify or contact a user. We use the same process used by many popular search engines and Web sites to determine where their users are from — a form of IP lookup. This IP lookup process does not include any information that is used to identify you or contact you, and only gives a rough geographic representation of where users are located.”

We’re really excited to tell you about StopBadware.org, a new initiative aimed at combating the growing problem of spyware and other deceptive software. This project is led by Harvard’s Berkman Center and the Oxford Internet Institute to independently evaluate downloadable applications, publish objective information for consumers, and provide an easy web-based way for users to describe problems they’ve encountered. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid advisor to the effort. Google, along with Sun Microsystems and Lenovo, are co-sponsors.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/putting-stop-to-spyware.html 

Yahoo Inc. helped Chinese police identify an Internet activist who was sentenced to four years in prison for his pro-democracy postings, according to a copy of the verdict obtained by a human rights group.
Jiang Lijun, 39, was sentenced for subversive activities on Nov. 18, 2003. He was accused of being the leader of a group of political dissidents and of seeking to use violence to impose democracy, including a plan to disrupt a Communist Party Congress by phoning in a false bomb scare to police, according to the copy, obtained and translated into English by the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco human rights group.

Read more »

Publishing a photo of a man in his own home without his consent was a breach of his privacy, according to a ruling from the Press Complaints Commission today. The photo was included in a Sunday Mercury article on “the greediest man in Britain”.

West Bromwich resident Christopher Bourne had complained to the press watchdog over a 4 December report by the local paper portraying him as a “modern-day Scrooge” because he had purchased 30 Xbox 360s to sell them on eBay, taking advantage of the pre-Christmas shortage of the games consoles.

Read more »