Obama owes Hollywood … and he is trying to pay them back for the money they have given him … Sneakily …
Be warned … me I just don’t watch. We have a great public library where we can borrow what we want for free.
A report released by computer scientists at the University of Birmingham reveal that the monitoring of online file sharing is more prevalent than previously thought, and has been taking place for at least three years. The monitoring is on a “massive” scale, keeping track of what’s going in and out of the most popular sites like The Pirate Bay and others.
But the monitoring methods are poor, the report reveals, indicating that the evidence gathered against file sharers may not stand up in court. To provide real legal evidence of file sharing, a monitoring company must make a direct connection to a suspected file sharer and log their activity. In many cases, that’s just not happening.
“All the monitors observed during the study would connect to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content and verify that they were running the BitTorrent software, however they would not actually collect any of the files being shared,” says Dr Tom Chothia, researcher at the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science. “Therefore, it is questionable whether the monitors observed would actually have evidence of file sharing that would stand up in court.”
The scientists – which also included Tom Chothia, Marco Cova, Chris Novakovic, and Camilo Gonzalez Toro – conducted their study by developing software that acted like a BitTorrent file sharing client, and logged all the connections made to it. Careful analysis of the logs revealed the presence and behavior of file-sharing monitors. In fact, on average an illegal file sharer – using BitTorrent to download the most popular content – will be connected to and have their IP address logged within 3 hours of starting a download (AKA joining the swarm).
