The FBI has recently adopted a new online investigative technique; posting hyperlinks that claim to take you to illegal content and then raiding the homes of people that are willing to click on them.
Not only did you not get to see the illegal content you wanted to see, you get busted by the FBI. The question has been raised whether this technique can be portrayed in court as entrapment by the FBI. Another argument is whether or not someone should be prosecuted for visiting a site that didn't even have any child pornography to begin with.
One of the most common complaints in PC software sales today is the amount of potential revenue lost due to illegal pirating. Many game developers have begun to shift focus on console development as a result. It seems every time a game doesn't do as well as predicted, the game developers immediately point the finger at pirating.
Brad Wardell, CEO of indie game publisher Stardock, hits the nail on the head regarding this topic. Wardell openly says that the problem isn't piracy, but the fact that "game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen." Makers of AAA titles are banking too much on the "cool" factor which targets the hardcore gamers. Unfortunately the good chunk of the hardcore gaming audience are piraters.
Verizon Communications Inc. has announced that it plans to help its users share files faster via peer-to-peer file sharing, or P2P. P2P is the primary method for illegal pirating and has always been unpopular with Internet service providers.
According to Arbor Networks, a company that tracks online traffic, file-sharing accounts for at least one-third of all internet traffic. Verizon has collaborated with Yale University and various other companies to enable faster downloads for consumers.
Verizon's new "P4P Working Group" was created to connect users to others close by, and not randomly across the internet. Currently, only 6.3% of the data that a Verizon customer downloads comes from a local user. In the P4P trial, 58% of the data came from nearby Verizon users. This drastically reduces the company's cost of carrying the traffic.
