Remember the Florida veterinarian who caught the wardriver jacked into his wireless Internet access outside his home? Has Aunty impressed upon you strongly enough yet that wardriving is serious, and wardriving can happen to you? This is, of course, the reason that we now have products on the market like…

The new W32/Nopir-B virus is a worm with a mission: to search and destroy MP3 files on its victims hard drives. Ouch. While it seems to be aimed at trying to target music pirates who populate their music collection with pirated MP3s through peer-to-peer networks, the worm can’t tell the…

Although modem hijacking (also known as “modem jacking”) is not entirely new, New York State is set to become the first state to outlaw the practice. Modem jacking is when someone hijacks your modem and uses it to make long distance (usually international) telephone calls, or calls to premium phone…

A group of British ubergeeks calling themselves the “Drink or Die”, or “DOD”, gang has found itself on trial through the trials of several Drink or Die members, with the last – that of Drink or Die members Alex Bell and Stephen Dowd – wrapping up this week. Bell and…

For those of you not aware, there is a trial ongoing down under in Australia, pitting record labels, among others, against Sharman Networks, the current owners of Kazaa. The trial is about the usual beefs between the record companies and peer-to-peer networks, which we are not going to rehash here,…

The next time you are tempted to borrow someone’s copy of their favourite software, take note: software developers, sick of having their software pirated, are starting to boobytrap it. That’s right. In an interesting twist, it is being reported that Anton Tomov, author of, among other things, Pocket Mechanic for…

William R. Trowbridge, of New York, and Michael Chicoine, of Texas, will be going from file sharing to cell sharing following their guilty pleas to Federal charges of using a peer-to-peer network. Oops, Aunty means of violating copyrights on peer-to-peer networks. Because of course just using a peer-to-peer network is…

Two bits of news this week should cause consternation in the peer-to-peer development and initiation worlds. First, California now has a bill wending its way through the law-making process which would require the developers of peer-to-peer and other file-swapping software to take “reasonable care” to ensure that their software cannot…

As if online downloaders don’t have enough to worry about (rightly or wrongly), now they have to worry about spyware being buried within the media files they download. I don’t think this is what Marshall McLuhan had in mind. According to a report in InformationWeek, hackers are taking advantage of…

This month’s issue of Wired Magazine has an absolutely brilliantly done piece by Clive Thompson in which he interviews and dissects Bram Cohen, the inventor and founder of BitTorrent. Thompson expertly brings Cohen to life on the pages for his readers, painting a picture of someone who is at once…

Overpeer, a division of Loudeye, Inc., has been caught putting infected files on peer-to-peer filesharing networks, and putting attractive and likely sounding names on the files in order to induce users to download the files. Thinking that they are downloading their favourite songs or other media files, the users only…

LokiTorrent, one of the latest targets of the Motion Picture Association of America’s legal crackdown on filesharing sites using the BitTorrent technology to allow users to download copyrighted movies, has vowed to fight the lawsuit, and is asking for donations to a legal fund to help defray an estimated $30,000…

Think that software pirating is just a problem for the big guys, like Microsoft, or maybe not even so much of a problem at all? Try telling that to Nigel Cross, owner of Xequte.com, developers of a number of software packages including SmartPix Manager, Mega View, Ez Pix, and Diji…

In April of 2001, a little known international cooperative aimed at stopping online software piracy had toted up an impressive 120 searches in 27 of the United States, and in 11 other countries. Dubbed “Operation Fastlink”, the project is billed by the U.S. Justice Department as “the largest multinational law…

Popular file-sharing service BitTorrent today took a double hit as a large BitTorrent server site was raided by police in Finland, while in the United States hundreds of peer-to-peer system operators were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The Finnish raid lead to the arrest of 34…