Pirate Bay loses IFPI domain

Kopimists around the world are grieving the loss of the IFPI.com domain (which stands for International Federation of Pirates Interests) in a WIPO dispute over its ownership. The owner, as such things stand, was the Pirate Bay. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry initiated a domain name dispute with Read more…

ISPs acting on Bittorrent

(via Ars Technica) EFF has released a report outlining several practices at Comcast, a popular American ISP. This is controversial, because some ISPs sell themselves as high-speed with no restrictions, which would be violated by bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping. Comcast claims that it delays bittorrent traffic, and does not Read more…

Virtual week

Last week I was rather quiet for several reasons. On Wednesday I presented a paper entitled “Build Your Own World” at the beautiful Glasgow venue called The Lighthouse (available from the awesome Slideshare website). I was very impressed with the knowledgeable and diverse audience, but I am now a complete Read more…

France set to punish pirates

President Nicolas Sarkozy has a new target: Internet pirates. According to Reuters, France is set to punish illegal downloaders by cutting off their broadband. Apparently, they will receive warnings, and at the third their ISP will be forced to cut them off. I am sure that many people will make Read more…

Another academic scam

I’ve just received a second academic scam. My comments in green: From: un.academicawards@katamail.com [this would be more convincing if it was masked as a UN addres] UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY AWARDS COORDINATOR [actually, there is such thing as the UN University!] BRENT ADAMS (UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL GRANTS)UNIVERSITY STAFF AND UNDERGRADUATE AWARD Read more…