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Submission + - Prof. Johan Pouwelse to Take on RIAA Expert

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Marie Lindor has retained an expert witness of her own to fight the RIAA, and to debunk the testimony and reports of the RIAA's expert" Dr. Doug Jacobson, the "reliability" of which has been challenged by Ms. Lindor in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. Ms. Lindor's expert is none other than Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. It was Prof. Pouwelse's scathing analysis of the RIAA's MediaSentry "investigations" (pdf) in Foundation v. UPC Nederland in the Netherlands which caused the (pdf) courts (pdf) in that country to direct the ISP's there not to turn over the names and addresses of their subscribers, thus nipping in the bud the RIAA's intended litigation juggernaut in that country. Prof. Pouwelse testified in the Netherlands that the RIAA's MediaSentry investigation — upon which Dr. Jacobson relies and the veracity of which he 'assumes' — was 'limited' and 'simplistic', failing to "resolve... relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying....[failing to implement] "actual complete file transfer....simply [taking] filenames at face value and ...[failing to make] any correction for pollution on Kazaa [despite] [p]ollution levels [on Kazaa which] can be as high as 90% for some files....[not being aware of] the limitations of Kazaa in file searching.....[failing to take] computer hygiene precautions ..... [with respect to] multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, [making it] ... difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses ...[it being] possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, [with] ... involvement [but] ...no actual contribution". The notice of designation of expert witness and his curriculum vitae are here."
Space

ESA's Cluster Spacecraft Makes Shocking Discovery 137

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the celestial-shocker dept.
A recent observation by the ESA's Cluster Spacecraft was able to finally prove a 20-year-old theory. "On 24 January 2001, the four Cluster spacecraft were flying at an approximate altitude of 105 000 kilometres, in tetrahedron formation. Each spacecraft was separated from the others by a distance of about 600 kilometres. With such a distance between them, as they approached the bow shock, scientists expected that every spacecraft would record a similar signature of the passage through this region. Instead, the readings they got were highly contradictory. They showed large fluctuations in the magnetic and electric field surrounding each spacecraft. They also revealed marked variations in the number of solar wind protons that were reflected by the shock and streaming back to Sun."
Microsoft

Submission + - Why Microsoft Won't List Patent Violations

Submitted by
BlueOni0n
BlueOni0n writes: "Earlier today, Microsoft announced it will begin actively seeking reparations for patent infringement by Linux and the Open Source Community in general. One opinion on this issues is that it's fear of having these IP-infringement claims debunked or challenged that's keeping Microsoft from publishing these 235 alleged infringements to the public — and instead waiting until the OS community comes to the bargaining table. But a more optimistic thought is that Microsoft is afraid to list these violations not because it's afraid they're false but because it knows they can be worked-around by the open-source community — leaving Microsoft high & dry without any leverage at all."

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