X-traf. Privacy protection in the internet for dummies.

MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits

The Motion Picture Association of America said  Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

“Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,” MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

“It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement,” van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

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Hushmail Hands Info Over To Feds

HushMail, is an email service that was known above all else for it’s privacy. They market themselves by claiming “not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer.” This service has been around for a long time, and as far as I know, it was respected and trusted for providing private email services. Not anymore. According to this article, Hushmail has cooperated with government agencies by granting them access to over 12 CDRs worth of e-mails from three Hushmail accounts. Sounds pretty secure to me… What do you think?

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CIPAV: Big Brother Is Watching Via Spyware

If you’re one of those general public that is paranoid about who has access to your personal data, you may already know about CIPAV (The Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier). It’s a kind of spyware that was made by the FBI. It captures sensitive facts such as a user’s IP address, operating system, MAC address, running services, open ports, visited URL, bookmarks, and more.

You may wonder how the FBI could get away with developing and deploying such a program. It was ruled that the information gathered by CIPAV is “the legal equivalent of dialed phone numbers”, and therefore the government can obtain this information without needing to show probable cause or obtain a wiretap warrant. Shocking, isn’t it?

While most of us may not have a whole lot to hide from the FBI, we all deserve privacy. This topic will show how to “seek and destroy” CIPAV and other programs like this. If the FBI can develop and deploy crap like this without us knowing, we should be able to protect ourselves from it.

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Less AdSense = More Money?

If you are even the least bit familiar with web-based proxy sites, you know that there is no shortage of them. A simple Google search will reveal thousands of them. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many of them, the answer is simple: money. People create these sites and put ads on them in order to make a profit.

The ad program that is most commonly used on proxy sites is Google’s AdSense. For those of you out there that use AdSense on your site(s), this article may be of interest to you. It summarizes an experiment where less adsense ads on a site resulted in more money in the long run. This happens because if less ads are shown, higher bidding advertisements will appear in those ad spots. The opposite of this is also true, where if you show more ads, lower bidding ads will appear on your page, resulting in a lower CPC - It’s worth a shot, right?

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