Future world according to federal judge: Turn off your computer, violate a subpoena?
As with most technical decisions made by the courts, this will have consequences well beyond its intended target (P2P).

Ari

Noticed Pandora on the Go while listening to Pandora just now. $3/month, on top of a data plan. It'll be interested to see whether this erodes the resistance to subscription-based models vs. "owning" (right...) your songs. If so, it would be ironic that a subscription model without much choice is what did it. I have very little perspective on these things, as subscribing to Pandora on my mobile isn't really my idea of fun.

Ari

Ran across a hotspot VPN service (routes all your traffic through their secure network so that when you're on a publicly accessible wireless connection your passwords, etc. can't be stolen) that seems to be quite good. Curiously, they claim that routing your P2P traffic through them will make you impossible to detect. They're correct, from a technical perspective. Simply having claimed this, though, may make it much harder for them to defend themselves in court. We'll see. It will also be interesting to see how they manage bandwidth issues, although all that fiber laid down in the .com boom will make this more practical than it was 5 years ago.

In other news, Accra--like Casablanca--has a lone anti-piracy billboard. It looks almost exactly like the much more prevalent ads there against drug trafficking. Police didn't seem to care when people sold pirated DVDs on the street. It will be interesting to see how commercial piracy vs. filesharing evolves there once the new undersea fiber gets there and they aren't bandwidth-starved.

Ari