Slashdot

EnvyRAM writes ""British and Dutch police shut down one of the world's largest sources of illegal pre-release music on Tuesday and arrested a 24-year-old man. The raids, in Amsterdam and Middlesbrough, followed a two-year investigation into a members-only Web site, www.OiNK.cd, which allowed users to upload and download albums before their release.""

alexhard writes "The Northeastern Echo reports that OiNK, one of the biggest private torrent trackers, has been shut down. The home of a 24-year-old IT worker was raided in Grange Road, Middlesbrough, and the website's server, which was based in Amsterdam, was also closed down by Dutch police."
http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/display.var.1779471.0.police_swoop_to_close_down_illegal_website.php

Fusen writes "Even though we are subjected to numerous reports on piracy destroying the earth as we know it, a recent MPA study reveals that revenue from all filmed media increased 8% in 2006.

"After a disappointing 2005, the six major companies have received official confirmation from the MPA that their all-media revenue from filmed entertainment — comprising money from home video, television, theatrical and pay TV — expanded by 8% in 2006 to reach $42.6 billion.""
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ic5575a8c4f61aadd68a0d344f476d5da

As you probably recall, the MPAA spent the first half of this year whining about what a huge problem piracy was in Canada. It spent a ton of effort getting press and government officials to claim that the movie industry in Canada was being threatened by pernicious piracy everywhere. In fact, certain MPAA members even threatened to stop distributing movies to Canada, saying the threat of piracy was just too high. Warner Brothers even went so far to stop showing promos in Canada. All that bluster (with nothing to actually back it up) resulted in Canada passing an entirely unnecessary law. Of course, if you'd been reading all those articles, you probably thought that this piracy problem was destroying the movie business in Hollywood. What the MPAA left out of course, is that this wasn't true at all. Canada actually is Hollywood's largest growth market last year (well before this law passed, or was so important to the industry). So, if piracy was such a huge problem... then how come so many more people were actually going and paying for movies?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070615/112537.shtml

Manequintet writes "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."