On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

Kugler estimates that 2 million tapes are still sitting on shelves of his clients' stores across the country, but they are the last analog soldiers in the lost battle against the digital invasion. "I'm not sure a lot of people are going to miss VHS," he said, "but it's been good to us."

With the story earlier this week about Australia's Broadband Minister, Stephen Conroy, considering adding BitTorrent filtering to the country's ISP filtering/censorship program, it was notable that Conroy said he was paying close attention to the commentary about the program online.

While that post about BitTorrent filtering got a lot of attention, it also got a ton of comments, and now Conroy and his team are turning off their blog and closing down the comments.

The Recording Industry Association of America's new enforcement strategy is based on a questionable interpretation of what constitutes copyright infringement.

The RIAA uncovers what it claims is unlawful infringement by employing unlicensed private investigators, the subject of a federal lawsuit in Oregon seeking class action status.

Michigan and Massachusetts (.pdf) have recently ordered MediaSentry, the RIAA's investigative wing, to stop performing unlicensed investigations. South Carolina, Texas, Florida and New York were mulling similar action.

It didn't take long for anonymity on the Internet to become a contentious issue, and for good reason. Anonymity is problematic.

The founding fathers were serial anonymists. They wrote constantly for public consumption under pseudonyms, I suspect because personal attack in public debate was an even greater problem then than it is now.

Abusive people often hide behind anonymity to intrude on the privacy and rights of others, so services often need to insist in real identities.

Running Java benchmark tests on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux has shown that yet again, Vista came last.

The Successive Over Relaxation (SOR) test with Java SciMark also ran fastest on Ubuntu, as the test ran about 33 per cent faster under Linux than it did under Vista.

On the Monte Carlo test with Java SciMark, Vista was again blown out of the water, as the JVM was a whopping three times faster on Ubuntu.

Vista did come out on top in one test.

According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claimed that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits 'for months,'.

Knowing that the RIAA has a problem with telling the truth, I did a little investigating, and found out that the RIAA had, in fact, commenced a wave of lawsuits just last week.

This is an organization that has a tendency to misspeak a lot, if you know what I mean, even when under oath.

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers' identity.

Publishers don't tend to like secondary markets, as they usually get no cut of the revenues.

But the first sale doctrine, (relatively) straightforward in the physical world, has been complicated by the easy copyability of digital works, the rise of EULAs, and the use of DRM and activation systems.

It may seem axiomatic to consumers that a business or artisan makes its money only on the initial sale. The carpenter who built your dining table doesn't get a cut when you eventually hawk it on Craiglist, and Best Buy makes no money when you resell one of its computers to a friend.

Yahoo's announcement puts it months ahead of Google and Microsoft, which only begin really making data anonymous after 18 months.

In April, the E.U. Data Working party found that the large search engines were violating E.U. data laws and need to purge data within 6 months or explain very well why they need to keep the data.

China appears to have banned a number of foreign websites, including the BBC's Chinese language news site and Voice of America in Chinese.

The sites had been unblocked after journalists attending the Beijing Olympics complained that the government was censoring sites deemed sensitive.

More censorship and increased internal security are expected in 2009, our correspondent adds.