Vivendi Universal bought MP3.com, it was announced today for $372 million. The buy-out comes mere days after the two companies faced off at congressional hearings on music publishing rights. At the hearings, Real's Rob Glaser demo'd MusicNet, the competing service to Universal and Sony's Duet.

Whatever investors think of open source, peer to peer developers have embraced it. The early success of Jxta shows why.

In the context of a web of trust, it takes linguistic gyration to make the word "trust" useful. The reason it does get used is historical -- these ideas came out of the security community. But in a modern context the word "trust" is either is so vague that it's useless or is outright misleading.

In his Crypto-Gram today, Bruce Schneier writes that bits are inherently copyable. Trying to make them not so is like trying to make water not wet. "All digital copy protection schemes can be broken, and once they are, the breaks will be distributed...law or no law." Want to learn more about DRM? Read Lucas Gonze's DRM entry in the <decent> MemeBag.

More data on how UPnP NAT's and firewalls can be traversed in a standardized way. Still waiting for the API to be publicised.

If you get a call from a friend of a friend who needs to sleep on your couch for the night, should you do it? It depends on who the friend is and what the friend says about the person.

According to washtech.com, Roku is shutting down.

Some of the leading file-trading software companies are bundling ad-serving software into their products in an attempt to turn a profit.

Discussing IP issues, Street Performer Protocol, etc.

RFC 2775, Internet Transparency, gives a great overview of most of the network problems inhibiting p2p and shows that prospects are not good.