behavior
Google (still) pocketing dollars for free clicks
10 months of ‘conversion inflation syndication fraud’ Ten months after the behavior was first spotlighted, Google continues to charge its advertisers for “free clicks,” thanks to a partnership that sees its ads served onto a well-known example of online pop-up-ware.…
Continue reading »Comcast to Pay $16 million for BitTorrent Throttling
Comcast, the ISP that gained a bad rap when last year it was accused a number of times of interfering with the traffic of p2p users and pledged good behavior in January 2009, settled its class-action lawsuit yesterday. The company agreed to pay $16 million (minus $3 million in fees) damage compensation to those customers who had their bandwidth throttled. Comcast’s statement came shortly after: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement in these consolidated class action lawsuits.
Continue reading »Bizarre legal defense after EMI sues over Beatles MP3 sales
When the news broke earlier this week that the so-famous-you’ve-never-heard-of-it BlueBeat.com was both streaming and selling The Beatles remasters —and for 25¢ a track—we speculated that an entertainingly weird legal theory was at the root of this behavior. We just had no idea how weird it was.
Continue reading »Survey: 50 percent want to legalize file sharing through monthly fee
50 percent of the Internet’s most active users would pay a monthly flat fee to legally download content from file sharing networks, according to a new study by the German Institute for Strategy Development (IFSE). These results are based on a survey amongst almost seven million so called “power users,” according to a heise.de report . IFSE defines power users as users that contribute the majority of content to Twitter and the blogosphere and in general use the Internet more than just occasionally.
Continue reading »Radio astronomers seeking open-spectrum national parks
Readers of Ars will undoubtedly be familiar with some of the battles over spectrum allocation for wireless devices and services. As the number of wireless devices and their bandwidth requirements continue an apparently inexorable climb, the fight over who should get which chunk of the radio spectrum has generally played out between big business and public interests. One group that hasn’t generally appeared to be taking part in the scrum is the science community, but that’s not for lack of interest—the radio spectrum is used for both astronomy and the monitoring of the environment on Earth.
Continue reading »