Over the months since Vista's release, there has been no doubt about the reduced level of network performance experienced compared to Windows XP. However, some users over at the 2CPU forums have discovered an unexplained connection with audio playback resulting in a cap at approximately 5%-10% of total network throughput. Whenever any audio is being sent to a sound card (even, several users report, while paused), network performance is instantly reduced. As soon as the audio is stopped, the throughput begins to climb to its expected speed. It's a tough one for users — what do you pick, sound or speed? So much for multi-tasking.

The California man is on the working end of a federal copyright lawsuit after posting code and instructions that allow shoppers to circumvent copy protection on downloadable, printable coupons -- the type used by General Foods, Colgate, Disney and others to sell everything from soap to breakfast cereal.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, last month, Coupons Inc. accuses Stottlemire of creating and giving away a program that erases the unique identifier, allowing consumers to repeatedly download and print as many copies of a particular coupon as they want.

Stottlemire, 42, of Fremont, California, insists there was no encryption or hacking involved, and therefore he did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "I honestly think there are big problems when you are not allowed to delete files off of your computer," says Stottlemire.

"All I did was erase files or registry keys," he says. "Nothing was hacked. Nothing was decoded that was any way, shape or form in the way the DMCA was written."

Stottlemire says he's being sued because Coupons Inc. "does not have the technology in place that would limit the number of times that a person could print a coupon."

The company wants Stottlemire to turn over the names of people he knows downloaded his software, and is seeking damages from the coder that could amount to hundreds of thousands -- or even millions -- of dollars.

The internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities, according to an analyst report.

Stan Schatt, research director at ABI, told Ars Technica: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace."

Cisco found that American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000.

Orange revealed in an ASA investigation into adverts for its unlimited broadband service that as of 31 March 2007 only 1.09 percent of customers exceeded the fair usage policy limitation for its service.

Orange said that it logged a breach of fair usage as being more than 40GB in March 2007.

Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads.

It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it's not a Comcast user.

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn't help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution.

One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: "The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It's an insatiable appetite.", and another one stated: "P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn't mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP's network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved."

The scene at RIAA headquarters this week must have been fascinating. The group yesterday announced that it has finished sending out a new batch of 503 "pre-litigation letters" to 58 different universities around the US, generously offering to let students settle copyright infringement claims "at a discounted rate" before those claims go to trial.

And then the RIAA learned that its aggressive litigation tactics have placed it on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those "who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement." In other words, a class of the innocent.

Whether deserved or not, these sort of cases are giving the RIAA a reputation for suing innocent people, a perception that a class action suit would only heighten. Expect a vigorous defense from the association.

A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.'

In Capitol v. Foster, one of the many RIAA lawsuits where it was later determined that the record labels sued the wrong individual, the judge decided (reasonably) that the RIAA should be responsible for the defendant Debbie Foster's legal bills.

Of course, as it always does, the RIAA asked the judge to reconsider, and the judge smacked the RIAA down with some pretty harsh words, chastising a number of RIAA practices. Apparently, this ruling stung so much that the RIAA simply decided to ignore it and not pay up Foster's legal bills.

Remember the MIT student who was told by the RIAA she should drop out of school and work in order to pay an RIAA fine? Perhaps it's time for the RIAA to get a real job as well, so it can afford to pay its fines.

MySQL has defended a decision to end free community access to the latest source code for its popular database in an attempt to snag paying customers.

The executives spoke up after a decision that's left some in its usually supportive and loyal ecosystem voicing concerns MySQL is taking another step away from the community that helped it build market share (50 per cent among developers) and to become synonymous with Web 2.0 and the LAMP stack.

Some have even voiced concern the Community Server will be dropped by MySQL, as the company focuses on commercial activities.

The main issue stems from MySQL's decision to remove source code tarballs - bundles - from its public ftp.mysql.com site and place them on the enterprise.mysql.com site with tarballs made available only to paying subscribers.

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

As of Saturday, it's a crime in Germany to build, sell, distribute or obtain so-called "hacking tools" designed to allow access to protected data or promote other illegal acts.

The intention of the lawmakers, who proposed the item last year and passed it in late May, was to crack down on attacks on government and private-sector computer systems. Penalties include prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines, IDG News Service reports.

"The serious criminal will just keep on going with their malicious activity, probably a little bit bolder--safe in the knowledge that the German government has just made it a little bit more difficult for them to be found."

The makers of a product called KisMAC, a wireless network discovery tool for Mac OS X, said in a note at their Web site that the law shows "complete incompetence" but vowed to resume their activities in the nearby Netherlands.

"Even worse politicians still believe in the successful ban of digital information, obviously not reckoning globalization," the KisMAC representative wrote. "We are heading straight to a country I do not want to be living in."