Altough the record industry currently seems to see the importance of their web presence and are building their own website to distribute the music, they also don't seem to forget about tracing music pirates. EMI Music has signed an agreement with Audible Magic to be their partner is content-based identification (CBID) technology services.

This technology is based on fingerprints of songs, that can be identified by using special software. Uses for this can be identifiying songs, if you only know a few seconds of them, but also tracing pirates on P2P networks:
    EMI will supply Audible Magic with music from its existing catalog, as well as all of the company's new releases, for addition to the Audible Magic song database, which is one of the largest in the world. EMI Recorded Music will also recommend use of Audible Magic's information services to its affiliates and licensees of EMI content. Some of these services include auditing and tracking of EMI content usage by licensees, real-time playlist monitoring for traditional and Internet broadcasters, audio content identification services for consumer entertainment software and devices, and monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic on networks.
Fortunatelt, the article only states monitoring and this is different from monitoring, tracking down and sue users of peer to peer networks. However this could be possible, but it could also be used to estimate numbers of pirated songs and to see what songs are the most populair traded ones

News source: CD Freaks - EMI sign agreement for software to monitor P2P networks

Net stumbling

Wireless, or Wifi, networks which link together computers and peripherals with radio instead of tangled, untidy cables are enjoying a boom, but for many their convenience has an unseen cost.

Surveys by security companies and curious computer enthusiasts have shown that few people are taking basic security precautions to ensure the network they have created and the data they are swapping is safe from attack.

Isolated wardriving expeditions have shown that the majority of networks do not turn on the data scrambling system built into the Wifi hardware.

Wardriving gets its name from the past practice of using a computer to dial through long lists of telephone numbers searching for data rather than dial tones. This is known as wardialing.

Now computer security experts and amateurs are conducting a series of large-scale surveys in several countries to map out the extent of the problem.

The first Worldwide Wardrive was carried out from 31 August to 7 September and the second one is taking place between 26 October and 2 November.

Wardrives are taking place in many American cities including Boston, San Diego and Des Moines as well as in Norway, Barcelona and Johannesburg.

The first survey found 9374 wireless access points, more than 30% of which did not have basic encryption turned on.

Almost the same percentage used the default names for the components forming the network.

Many of the networks are broadcasting these names making it very easy for malicious hackers and computer criminals to covertly join the network or try to use it to break in to other parts of the same network.

Wardrivers typically use a laptop running a program such as Netstumbler that logs signals from any Wifi networks it finds.


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