Right, blocking is a whole 'nother thing as compared to logging. In this case I don't think it'd go over so well with his roommate if he tried to block the torrent traffic, since the question was about protecting himself legally, not preventing the roommate from torrenting.

Granted it's a lot of logs - but if you put in a linux+iptables or bsd+pf box as your router, you could log every connection to file - at least text zips well. store them for 6 months, only log connections which become fully established (since if you log half-open connections you'll likely be logging orders of magnitude more). It probably wouldn't take up a huge volume of space if you compress them, and you could also probably not log outgoing connections terminating on port 80 or 443 (though undoubtedly peer clients try and use those from time to time, it'd help you shave your logs if you hedge your bets that someone looking to sue your roomate isn't using 80/443 for their endpoint).

This in addition to truthfully answering lawyers' questions should cover your ass plenty sufficiently.

Agreed. My first thought was that carmakers just need to leave the sensitive/important control elements of a car decoupled from those which are network-enabled. I believe that airliners are designed similarly in that their in-flight entertainment systems are always 100% not connected to flight systems (regardless of whether or not the entertainment systems are Internet-connected, there's definitely a parallel to be made here).

Doesn't wal-mart already own VUDU.com and has for some time now?

I should add that this kind of cause is why I intend to continue to make regular donations to the EFF as well. These are important issues for the tinkerers, geeks, researchers, developers and students amongst us.

While I don't care about modding systems for the purpose of playing pirated games (I own a PS3 and Wii and am fine with buying games), I think this is an important case for hobbyists/hackers and anyone who thinks they should have the right to hack on their own hardware - which as far as I'm aware is what Sony is trying to set a precedent against.

I want to be able to mod my PS3 or anything else I own for whatever reason I want - whether that's to put Linux on it or do something more unique with it as part of a research project or just for fun. The fact that this can be used for copyright infringement/piracy is secondary. It is the act of pirating the material that should be illegal and enforced, not any of the technological means that allow it to happen. (similar examples: outlawing VCRs instead of the sale/exchange of copyrighted material, outlawing torrent programs instead of the action of sharing copyrighted material, outlawing guns instead of crimes committed with guns, outlawing cars instead of hitting people with cars, etc etc.)

As such, I donated a nontrivial amount to Geohot's "give me donations to help my legal defense" plea a month or two ago. I want the ability to do whatever I damn well please with the hardware that I've purchased.

Aside: I think it's amusing that Sony requested Geohot's paypal transaction records to try and help prove parts of their case. I wonder if they'll be discriminating between "people who paid Geohot for modding-related things" and "people who donated for his defense." Clearly this should be easy based on the amounts there, but I almost wish I knew how much he was accepting for modding jobs before I donated, so that I could have donated that amount N times to approximate the amount I ended up donating, just with the hope that Sony would confuse defense donations for payment for modding jobs/chips/whatever and cock up their case against him even more.

http://www.twcableuntangled.com/2011/03/heavy-demand-crashed-our-ipad-app-last-night-it%E2%80%99s-not-a-good-party-unless-you-run-out-of-beer/

It was actually because they had capacity issues and have temporarily reduced the number of channels available so as to not knock the whole service offline again.

(full disclosure: I used to work for TWC)

For some number of companies I'm sure the publicity and thought that went into the [potential] Y2K problem helped them avoid problems. For others it didn't, but at least they knew it wasn't going to be a showstopper for them. Now, whereas Y2K was a "maybe it will impact us, maybe it won't" deal, IPv6 will eventually impact every person and business in that it requires the attention to equipment support and enabling v6 connectivity on their networks. Regardless, evaluating a company's IPv6 readiness likely won't hurt anything, just like it didn't hurt to be ready for (or better yet avoid) Y2K issues.

It looks like this really should be "Half of .gov sites are not signed, thus not in compliance with the mandate to deploy DNSSEC." Meaning "the sites cannot be validated because they're not signed" *not* meaning "people with validating resolvers can't get to these sites"

No, I think you were missing my point that an end to end path with a normal MTU has a slight edge over one that is slightly reduced, that's all I'm saying.

I wasn't trying to get into the details of how those mechanisms work, I understand them fine and wasn't commenting on the difference in mechanisms between IPv4 and IPv6, or commenting on the difference between IPv4 fragmentation or TCP segmentation.