RIAA offers deal to avoid lawsuit for file-sharing students

The US recording industry on Wednesday heightened its efforts to stop students from downloading pirated music online and offered students a way to settle the disputes out of court. The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, said it sent 400 letters to 13 U.S. ...more

Computer Associates accounts debacle forces more departures

The financial scandal which engulfed Computer Associates last year leads to nine more sackings yesterday. The scandal had already forced the resignation of the company's Chief Financial Officer last year. Yesterday's departures included four people from the company's legal department and five more from Finance. ...more

IEEE backtracks on 802.11g performance

Airport users wondering why they have never been able to achieve anything like the performance claimed by Apple and other wireless network vendors had their questions answered last month. Global standards body, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE approved a new draft for the 802.11g wireless networking standard (branded by Apple as Airport Extreme) which puts the actual data throughput rate at between 10 and 20Mbits/sec. ...more

eBay proves indispensable to UK shop owners

Had Napoleon been marching his armies around Europe now rather than 200 years ago he might have described of the British as 'a nation of online shopkeepers'. New figures from eBay show that there are now 68,000 cottage industries in the UK that depend on the website for at least a quarter of their income. Across Europe there are 170,000 businesses dependent on the site, many of which started out as a hobby before going full-time. ...more

BitTorrent swarms towards a CE future

File-swapping phenomenon BitTorrent has teamed up with US home networking kit builders to bake in its software into their devices. Asus, Planex and QNAP will include BitTorrent's download manager and client software in their various wireless routers, media servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices. BitTorrent is no longer the maverick it once was, and is cleaning up its act. ...more