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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 7 declined, 2 accepted (9 total, 22.22% accepted)

Submission + - Torrent to eliminate ISP's throttling (torrentfreak.com)

vintagepc writes: TorrentFreak reports that a redesign of the popular BitTorrent protocol allows clients to detect network congestion and automatically adjust the transfer rates, eliminating the interference with other Internet-enabled applications' traffic.
In theory, the protocol senses congestion based on the time it takes for a packet to reach its destination, and by intelligent adjustments, should reduce network traffic without causing a major impact on download speeds and times. As said by Simon Morris (from TFA), “The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does,”
Furthermore, the revision is designed to eliminate the need for ISPs to deal with problems caused by excessive BitTorrent traffic on their networks, thereby saving them money and support costs. Apparently, the v2.0b client using this protocol is already being used widely, and no major problems have been reported.

Software

Submission + - Losing my Software Rights?

vintagepc writes: Having written a piece of software as part of my research employment, I now face (and will later face again, with other software I've developed), the issue of intellectual property rights. The legal department stated that if I was paid by the University to produce the software, the University would own all rights to it. This is supposedly black and white, not a gray area.
However, I should point out the following: I was hired as a research student (not directly by the University, and also via a research award (NSERC)),
Furthermore, it turns out that faculty members here, in fact, retain their intellectual rights to any software they write.
At this point, I can still back out, since I have not explicitly agreed to the conditions, but this decision must be made soon.

So, I turn to the Slashdot crowd to ask:
Are they allowed to do this and completely strip my rights to the software?
If anyone has had any similar experiences, then what was the outcome?
Additionally, is this a normal action, or do I have some maneuvering room?

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