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Watch the RIAA site get hacked again and cheer...

In a victory for the record industry, an American internet provider has handed over the names of four customers accused of illegally copying music over the net.

The Verizon internet service provider (ISP) was ordered to surrender the names to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) by a court of Appeal in Washington.

On Wednesday the court rejected Verizon's request for a delay, pending a final decision in the case.

The ruling removes, at least for now, the anonymity of millions of people in the US who routinely download copyrighted music and films over the internet.

Verizon and the record industry have been involved in a protracted legal battle over the privacy of the ISP's subscribers.

Since last year, the RIAA has been trying to get Verizon to reveal the identity of customers who use peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa.

The record industry body argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allowed them to subpoena information about suspected pirates without first seeking a judge's blessing.

The RIAA has said it intends to sent out a significant number of subpeonas.

News source: BBC News

TCP breaks down large files into small packets of about 1500 bytes, each carrying the address of the sender and the recipient. The sending computer transmits a packet, waits for a signal from the recipient that acknowledges its safe arrival, and then sends the next packet.

If no receipt comes back, the sender transmits the same packet at half the speed of the previous one, and repeats the process, getting slower each time, until it succeeds.

This means that even minor glitches on the line can make a connection very sluggish. Because Fast TCP uses the same packet sizes as regular TCP, the hardware that carries messages around the net will still work. The difference is in software and hardware on the sending computer, which continually measures the time it takes for sent packets to arrive, and how long acknowledgements take to come back.

This reveals the delays on the line, giving early warnings of likely packet losses. The Fast TCP software uses this to predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data.

Since the packets are the same size as those used in TCP, none of the equipment along the internet itself will have to be modified, and no new hardware will be needed on computers receiving the data.

The first practical test of Fast TCP took place in November at a supercomputing conference. Researchers from Caltech, Stanford and CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits per second. Ordinary TCP managed just 266 megabits per second on the same routes.

By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, which is more than 6000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links.