An industry standards group has made a preliminary decision to include Microsoft’s video compression technology in a next-generation DVD format, giving the company a key boost in the digital media arena. The steering committee for the DVD Forum on Friday announced provisional approval for Microsoft’s VC-9 and two other video technologies–H.264 and MPEG-2–as mandatory for [...]

A California appeals court on Friday reversed a 4-year-old order barring the publication of a DVD-cracking tool on the Internet, finding the injunction violated the defendant’s free speech rights. The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies can expect in California for trade secrets that become widely distributed online. The [...]

According to Freenet’s web site, a new stable build of Freenet is now available. It includes a new load balancing mechanism called “rate limiting” which by almost all accounts is working much better than expected, and the network’s performance has already improved dramatically.

No other P2P network has as many clients as the Gnutella community. Several clients, such as LimeWire, Shareaza, Morpheus and BearShare have been among the more popular programs. Other, more obscure clients such as aBitCool, VPutella, and HelloWorld manage to float around among the nearly 30 different Gnutella iterations. The improved crawler is an effort [...]

It seems that ftp://products.321studios.com/, maker of DVD duplicating software for windows, recently under pressure from the courts, was open (as of late yesterday) for anyone to download everything and anything. A final yah-boo-sucks to the courts, perhaps? By the time YOU read this message, the FTP server will surely be clogged or offline, but clean [...]

Myster Public Release 7.6 is out and can be found here:Public Release 7.6 brings the following advances to Myster:-Zipped files are now read for relevant contents and are shared appropriately-Many new server statistics-Optimized download information-Added AAC and and Mpeg 4 audio file support-Multisource Downloads are now resumable across quits, and re-launchesMyster Public Release 7.6 remains [...]

P2P United, an alliance that represents several commercial P2P operators, has delivered a letter to the RIAA, demanding that the recording industry lobby group proves its claims that the filtering technology RIAA demonstrated to the U.S. Congress actually works in live P2P environment. The technology, developed by a company called Audible Magic, was used when [...]

As ants marched with impunity through the Santa Cruz, Calif., home of the programmer, frustration turned to inspiration and Mute was born. The program, which seeks to hide the source of downloads by passing files between computers along twisting pathways, is gaining attention as an interesting solution to file swapping’s hottest problem: privacy. “If you’re [...]

The FBI said Thursday it is giving Hollywood film studios, music companies and software makers permission to use its name and logo on their DVDs, CDs and other digital media in hopes the labels will deter consumers from making illegal copies. FBI officials said the idea was conceived jointly by the agency’s cyber crime division [...]

Rapper Eminem’s music publisher is suing Apple Computer Inc., claiming the company used one of the hip-hop superstar’s songs in a television advertisement without permission. Eight Mile Style filed the copyright infringement suit late last week against Apple, Viacom Inc., its MTV subsidiary and the TBWA/Chiat/Day advertising agency. At issue is an ad for Apple’s [...]

P2P technology has come a long way since a college dropout named Shawn Fanning created the first server based P2P program, dubbed Napster. After the inception of Napster, the internet underwent nothing short of a revolution. Following the revolution, came a flurry of lawsuits and technological advances. A pseudo guerilla war between Recording Industries such [...]

What is Bit Spirit?Bit Spirit is a easy-to-use BitTorrent client which provides not only full BitTorrent protocol implementation but also many personalization functions as list below. Main features:1. Cache mechanism when downloading/uploading. 2. Only save files onto disk when it is in need. Now, you wouldn’t be bothered by those mess files any more 3. [...]

From Slyck News: Earth Station 5, the long questionable “anonymous” P2P network, has frequently been the target of heavy criticism by virtually every segment of the legitimate file-sharing community. Its brazenly anti-copyright stance and horrific public relations policy has made it a bad apple of the P2P community; leading to its virtual excommunication. Much dissent [...]

Japanese electronics and entertainment company Sony has canceled the planned sale this spring in Japan of two portable MP3 digital music players because of problems with the built-in FM radio tuners, the company said Monday. The AZ-FS256 and AZ-FS1 players were announced last month with great fanfare as part of the company’s effort to overhaul [...]

Napster®, a division of Roxio, today announced that it has recently become the first PC-only digital music service to sell over five million downloads. The Company also announced that it has served hundreds of millions of page views since its late-October launch and has attracted over 1.5 million basic and premium members. Napster, which generates [...]

MUTE is a new peer-to-peer (P2P) network that supports anonymous file sharing, including search-and-download functionality. Using mechanisms inspired by ant behavior, MUTE can route information between two users without revealing the identity of the users to each other or to the rest of the network. In the wake of the recent RIAA lawsuits against individuals, [...]

Ares is a peer to peer file sharing program that enables users to share any digital file including images, audio, video, software, documents, etc. You may now easily publish your files through the Ares Network. As a member of the network, you can also search and download just about any digital media file. You can [...]

Usenet, or the Newsgroups, has been a part of the Internet since the late 1970′s. It also happens to be one of the oldest methods of sharing information and files. Verizon has long been known for being one of the better Newsgroup providers. In the past, it has kept an extensive collection of Binary newsgroups. [...]

A variant of the MyDoom virus has started spreading, albeit slowly, and security experts expect it to target the main Web site of the music industry. The variant, MyDoom.F, deletes several different types of files stored on an infected computer and aims to attack the Web sites of Microsoft and the Recording Industry Association of [...]

A federal court has ruled that privately held 321 Studios must stop making software that allows users to copy DVDs, handing Hollywood’s major movie studios a victory in their ongoing battle against copyright piracy. “This court enjoins plaintiff 321 Studios from manufacturing, distributing, or otherwise trafficking” in the software, Judge Susan Illston of U.S. District [...]