Things aren't exactly busy at work, so I just fired up a game of Halo. I got beat, badly, by virtually everyone in the last round. But that's not the problem. One of the competitors was twelve. And, when it was all over, the winner (not the twelve year old, although he beat me too) said, "You suck, old guys! You suck!"

Hard to argue with that.

Good for the EFF. They've put some money behind an open-source project called Tor that might do a lot to stymy anti-P2P efforts. It's basically a SOCKS proxy -- install it on your computer (linux, windows, os x) and you'll join an ad-hoc P2P routing network. When you send a request from a given application -- your web browser, IM, BitTorrent, almost anything -- it'll be encrypted and sent through a random series of peers in the network to disguise where it's coming from. This isn't foolproof, for a number of reasons that are better explained by the project wiki, but it'll be fine for most uses.

However, Tor is also a potential liability: while the whole point of the system is that a user doesn't know what traffic is going through his system, that doesn't mean the law won't try to hold you responsible for it. Some Tor users have reported getting C&D letters for traffic that didn't belong to them. It seems unlikely that you could be held responsible for other people's traffic that gets routed through your system -- industry lawyers have tried this already, and the courts, realizing that it could mean the end of the internet, have arrived at an at least somewhat-agreeable detente with the ISPs. However, you probably don't want to be the first person to go through the process of confirming my hunch. So: caveat emp-Tor.

More details of the MPAA's current campaign against BitTorrent are emerging. A cease & desist letter has leaked, addressed to the owners of demonoid.com. A couple of things jump out:

• The identities of demonoid's owners aren't known by the letter writers. The letter was sent to their ISP with a request that it be forwarded. Presumably this information would be subpoenaed when and if the MPAA decides to proceed with litigation. I haven't been keeping up with the state-of-the-art in DMCA interpretation, but the fact that they don't yet have these guys' names is encouraging.
• Although demonoid was certainly trading pirate material, actual evidence of infringement may be scarce. There's a warning in the letter not to destroy any evidence. If demonoid's owners were smart they just ran the tracker and didn't host any seeds (content). BitTorrent's pseudo-centralized, yet peer-to-peer nature means that the folks with the most important functional role in the distribution network may not be legally culpable.
• The letter-writers aren't very tech savvy. They repeatedly refer to an IP address that, by definition, cannot exist (66.250.450.10), and their list of infringing works includes a .nfo file (a metadata text file created by the original pirate, to which they presumably have no copyright claim), plus the listing of an archive AND its extracted contents -- it seems like they probably don't understand what all these files are
• The list of infringing files is depressing for two reasons. First, they include recently-aired broadcast television shows like Desperate Housewives. The law's unambiguous on this: the networks own these shows and have a right to control how they're disseminated. Still, they're broadcast for free over the airwaves, and it would have been nice if ABC/Disney had elected to grant (or continue to implicitly allow) some limited license allowing the transfer of these shows temporarily -- until the DVD release, perhaps. My worry is that a poorly-constructed court decision or piece of legislation could have negative effects on other kinds of fair use (like my beloved TiVo).

  Finally, the other depressing aspect of this is that someone might be going to jail or driven into bankruptcy for pirating the Garfield movie. How do you ask a man to be the first to go to jail for a shitty, shitty movie?