peer

Skype has pinned the blame for last week's outage in part on a buggy version of its software for Windows.

In a blog posted today, Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe explained the house of cards that took down the service the morning of Wednesday, December 22, and kept it offline for many until the following day.

On December 22, a number of support servers that handle offline instant messaging became overloaded, according to Rabbe. Because of that, some Skype clients didn't receive responses as quickly as usual. A bug in one particular Skype client for Windows (version 5.… Read more

The public spat between Level 3 Communications and Comcast continues, as Level 3 now urges federal regulators to impose conditions on Comcast's merger with NBC Universal.

On Thursday evening, Level 3 sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission and U.S. Department of Justice, asking the agencies to impose conditions on Comcast's impending merger that would require Comcast to allow Level 3 and other Internet backbone providers to interconnect their networks with Comcast's network for free. The company also asked that Comcast be required to connect to Internet backbone providers "on nondiscriminatory, fair, and reasonable … Read more

The long saga of the Lime Wire company appears to be close to an ending.

The maker of the popular LimeWire file-sharing software--a peer-to-peer setup along the lines of the original Napster--has announced that at the beginning of next year, it will cease business, as originally reported by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital.

Owing to a copyright complaint filed against it in 2006 by the Recording Industry Association of America, Lime Wire had already been ordered in October of this year to shut down its peer-to-peer service. But, following Napster's example, it had previously opened a legitimate online music subscription service, … Read more

Internet backbone provider Level 3 says that cable giant Comcast is threatening the openness of the Internet and Comcast is accusing Level 3 of trying to get a free ride on its network.

Which one is right?

Accusations between the two companies have been flying since the end of the day Monday. Level 3 has accused Comcast of violating Net neutrality principles by insisting that Level 3 pay for sending more traffic over Comcast's network. Level 3 has recently won a contract to deliver video services for Netflix, which is the largest single producer of Internet traffic on the … Read more

NEW YORK--Last summer, Lime Wire began installing a secret upgrade to its software that enabled the company to shut down the peer-to-peer network whenever it wanted, music industry sources have confirmed.

The revelation was first reported Tuesday by PC Mag. According to the Web tech publication, reporters there were tipped off by a source on Monday night.

"LimeWire added the ability to send out messages to clients updating them with the location of their local peers via start-up scripts," PC Mag wrote, citing the anonymous source. "It will be these start-up scripts that will be disabled...largely … Read more

Digital music has not been altogether kind to Robin Kent.

Kent was once CEO and chairman of mighty ad agency Universal McCann, but since jumping to digital music, he has had the misfortune of working for one start-up that went bust (SpiralFrog) and another that has done little more than attract controversy (Qtrax). Kent is now walking away from the sector.

On Tuesday, Kent notified associates that after three years working almost exclusively for Qtrax, he will no longer provide consulting services to the much maligned legal peer-to-peer company, which is only available in a few overseas markets. Qtrax has … Read more

A federal court judge has likely dealt a death blow to LimeWire, one of the most popular and oldest file-sharing systems, according to legal experts.

On Wednesday, CNET broke the news that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood granted summary judgment in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed a copyright lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006. In her decision, Wood ruled Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, and engaged in unfair competition.

"It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them," … Read more

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has notified nearly 100 organizations that data from their networks has been found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the agency said on Monday.

The FTC notices went to private and public entities, including schools and local government agencies and organizations with as few as eight employees to as many as tens of thousands, the FTC said in a statement. The sensitive information about customers and employees that was leaked could be used to commit identity fraud, conduct corporate espionage, and for other crimes.

The FTC did not name the organizations involved. It said it has … Read more

As we close the book on 2009 and ready for 2010, a legal settlement takes us back to 2007 and 2008, when Comcast got into trouble with customers and the feds for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

Comcast has agreed to pay $16 million to end to a class action lawsuit alleging the broadband provider promised and advertised certain download and upload speeds, but blocked peer-to-peer traffic on its high-speed Internet network.

"Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation," according to … Read more