Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it's actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self.

In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time.

Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.

Lately Storm has been responsible for a large quantity of "pump and dump" spam, which tries to temporarily boost the price of penny stocks.

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

Comcast's approach to traffic shaping is different because of the drastic effect it has on one type of traffic - in some cases blocking it rather than slowing it down - and the method used, which is difficult to circumvent and involves the company falsifying network traffic.

Topolski agrees that Comcast has a right to manage its network and slow down traffic that affects other subscribers, but disapproves of their method.

The music-industry lobbying-and-litigation arm is protesting a federal magistrate's recommendation that it cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for an Oregon woman.

The RIAA dropped the case this summer against Andersen, months after concluding her hard drive didn't contain any purloined music tracks.

The RIAA is arguing in court documents that the association shouldn't have to pay defense counsel fees, because Andersen is probably guilty anyway.

Patton wrote in court records that the RIAA dropped the Andersen case because "the computer inspection was inconsistent and inconclusive insofar as digital evidence of the infringing sound recordings could not be found."

Major record companies have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com, Billboard.biz has learned.

The suit claims that the usenet.com service sells access to content that includes millions of unauthorized music files and "touts its service as a haven for those seeking pirated content."

Specifically, the complaint alleges, usenet.com loads online bulletin boards or "newsgroups" obtained from the usenet network onto its server. It then sells access to the newsgroups that it has chosen to host on its usenet.com service. The suit claims that many of the newsgroups that usenet.com chooses to offer "are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement."

The labels seek an unspecified amount of damages, an injunction and a declaration that the company is infringing copyrighted works.

Inventor-link purports to prohibit visitors to the site from using the company's name, linking to the site, or even "refer[ring]" to it without permission. Although the enforceability of these terms is extremely dubious, the company is nevertheless invoking them in an attempt to stop criticism of the company that appears on InventorEd.org, a website that provides information about invention promotion businesses and scams.

Inventor-link is represented by Dozier Internet Law -- the same law firm that threatened to sue for copyright infringement if one of its demand letters were posted on the Internet.

The firm's "User Agreement" prohibits linking to its website, using the firm's name "in any manner" without permission (the license specifically provides that even clients cannot say they are represented by the firm without asking), or making "any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us." These terms would appear to prevent even criticizing the terms themselves, as this post does, by linking to and quoting from them. And, very strangely, the terms prohibit even looking at the website's HTML code.

There have been a number of issues that Vista users have reported relating to copying and moving data, especially large numbers of files. Often there can be multiple errors at play making it difficult for Vista users to track down the problem, in fact very often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly. It's only when the user checks the number of files in source and destination that they realize they have a problem.

These don't have to be large files and the problem can also occur when copying smaller groups of files that in total exceed 16,400 files between reboots. Following the "Out of Memory" message a range of other errors can occur such as menus and tabs disappearing within the Windows environment and even reboots and BSODs are reported.

Software pirates have launched an astonishing smash 'n' grab raid on the music biz, stealing the domain name of one of its foremost anti-piracy bodies.

The Pirate Bay has now taken up residence at IFPI.com, a domain once owned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). The Pirate Bay now says the site will promote the International Federation of Pirates Interests.

"It's not a hack. Someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it."

Bill Gates was recently visiting Africa, but needed a visa to travel to Nigeria. Getting a visa cannot be that much of a big deal if you are a multibillionaire, or so you would think.

The Nigerian government initially denied the Microsoft kingpin's application on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration.

Meet the fit-PC, a tiny 4.7 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch PC that only draws 5-watts, consuming in a day less power than a traditional PC consumes in one hour. By today's standards, the fit-PC has very little horsepower, which makes it apt for web browsing and light applications; today's games need not apply. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech reviews the fit-PC and puts it through its paces, noting that performance is not this PC's strength, but rather its small size and price tag of $285.

A trio of intrepid researchers from the University of California-Riverside decided to see just how often a P2P user might be tracked by content owners. Their startling conclusion: "naive" users will exchange data with such "fake users" 100 percent of the time.

For years, P2P communities have suspected that affiliates of the RIAA, the MPAA, and others have been haunting P2P networks to look for those who might be swapping copyrighted files.

The takeaway here is simple: P2P users who don't utilize the blocklists are just about guaranteed to be tracked by "fake users" operating out of those ranges, and thus seem to open the door to possible litigation should the dice be rolled against them.