The takedown of the Internet service provider, Triple Fiber Network, comes after a months-long investigation by the FTC in collaboration with other government agencies and industry.

The takedown is an unprecedented move by the FTC and marks an escalation of the government and security community's investigations of the Internet service providers that facilitate online crime.

The ISP hosted the command-and-control servers for the Cutwail botnet, among others, according the security firm Symantec. The security company found more than 600 IP addresses controlled by 3FN that were also launching attacks.

The Beatles catalog, including dozens of the top pop songs ever recorded, has famously never been licensed for sale as digital downloads.

The entire catalog of stereo Beatles albums will soon be legitimately available in digital, albeit physical, form.

The complaint, which is not yet available through the court website, accuses the defendant of "copyright infringement and misappropriation of pre-1972 sound recordings."

It's quite a statement - especially the 24-bit depth of the lossless files, which allows more gradations between volume levels than standard 16-bit (CD-quality) audio files. The only catch - they cost $280.

The treaty pushed South Korea to implement new copyright laws that are perhaps the most draconian around, getting the country to be the first to kick people off the internet based on accusations of file sharing, and putting so much liability on third parties that various user-generated content services have had to turn off the ability to upload all sorts of content (no videos on YouTube, no music on blogs) and has resulted in ISPs even banning any kind of advertising that might make them liable for copyright infringement.

Yet, because the American record labels and movie studios don't want to change with the times, they're pushing through these laws, outside the judiciary process, sneaking it through via a secretive international treaty they had a hand in writing.

Sun's Zettabyte File System (ZFS) now has built-in deduplication, making it probably the most space-efficient file system there is.

The deduplication is done inline, with ZFS assuming it's running with a multi-threaded operating system and on a server with lots of processing power. A multi-core server, in other words.

The beauty of ZFS dedupe is that you don't need special storage arrays to deduplicate data. Ordinary arrays are quite acceptable, and its applicability at a data-set level means that you need only to deduplicate the datasets with redundant data and not the others.

The Demos report, sponsored by Virgin Media, suggests file sharers aren't the wreckers of civilization they're painted to be - but failing to convert them into paying punters has cost the industry dear.

Two important strands emerge. Most of the population (74 per cent) pay for their music, and a majority - almost two thirds - never download unlicensed music.

This makes it harder to argue that P2P Pirates have brought the industry to its knees, rather than other factors such as unbundling or failing to innovate.

A document, apparently a 'confidential House ethics committee report,' was recently leaked through file-sharing software to the Washington Post.

Reader GranTuring points out that the RIAA took the opportunity to make a ridiculous statement of their own. They said, "the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on peer-to-peer software to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."

Facebook has rewritten its privacy policy to cut out legal jargon and has indicated it plans to broaden the types of user data it sells to advertisers.

User data will be "anonymised", the new policy says.

"Most advertisers already do this in other places on the web. Should Facebook provide this, we'll continue to respect your privacy by not sharing your information with advertisers, and we'll anonymize any information we receive."

The chipmaker will offer its design specification to the Server System Infrastructure Forum by the end of the year, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel's high-density computing group.

The present microserver uses a 1.86GHz quad-core processor, the "Lynnfield" model of Intel's new "Nehalem" generation. Its top power consumption is 45 watts, but early in 2010, Intel will release a dual-core "Clarkdale" model that consumes only 30 watts when running flat-out.

That's at the top end, though. Intel's goal is for the entire microserver--which also includes memory and supporting chips--to idle at just 25 watts of power.

He's back at it, pushing for the UK (and others) to pass laws kicking people off the internet (so-called "three strikes" laws) while insisting that due to piracy there's less money to make movies and fewer movies being made.

The problem, again, seems to be that the folks at the movie studios (just like those at the record labels) only like to count the big hits as successes -- rather than the smaller projects that actually make money and make up the majority of the actual market.

The People's Daily had reported on a Chinese group's complaint that Google's planned online library of digitised books might violate Chinese authors' copyrights.

For three days Google searches for the report, in the books section of the website, warned users the site might contain harmful software. The paper argues that the Chinese search engine Baidu did not return a similar warning.