The US Supreme Court has established quite clearly where its priorities lie: with large holders of intellectual property and copyright. In a ruling today the court indicated that networks are responsible for their customer's behavior. That is a real problem for media sharing networks -- even those that simply link customers together, rather than store the files themselves. What's deplorable about this is that suing ISPs won't be far off. If the networks can be held liable for the activites of subscribers independent activities, what about subscribers of ISPs and their activities. Bad, bad, bad.

I always find statistics interesting -- after all, part of my job is modelling utilization of Internet resources based on trends and changes in the marketplace. What is interesting about this report is the growth rate of broadband utilization in the UK. Among the G7 nations, the UK is seeing a 16.5% growth rate in the adoption of broadband. That is not a sustainable growth rate, of course, but it points to the success that broadband providers have had in the UK. It also points to the fact that new devices in the home will have to be supported with those broadband connections.

One of the most useful anti-spam measures is the authentication of the sender's SMTP server. This makes it possible to eliminate the phishing attacks that are so common. For instance, a mail message that appears to be from PayPal and requests that you update account data. The sender's email address looks valid and the mail looks genuine, but the links in the email take you to somebody else's site. Now it appears that two of the proposals for authenticating email (is the message really from who it says it is from?) have been approved by the IESG: this short article from Slashdot.

Rumors abound on the internet about Netflix "throttling" users. The basic idea is to ship movies later so that you get fewer movies a month and preserve revenue for Netflix. I'm not so sure that I'm a victim of this, but there is a site on the Web that shows my statistics at Netflix in the last year or so.