These days, nothing worries an internet service provider more than peer-to-peer file trading. Depending on where you live, P2P can account for between 50 and 75% of broadband internet traffic. We mostly have the popularity of BitTorrent to thank for this crazy amount of data going to and fro.

This amount of traffic can raise the ISPs daily costs of delivering service, cause congestion either in your neighborhood or on the ISP’s network, and force the ISP to buy increased bandwidth capacity.

But if you’ve been paying close attention to your BitTorrent transfers lately (or if you’ve simply been reading the news) you’ll notice that ISPs have begun to take drastic measures to slow that flood of data currently clogging up their pipes.

Even though many of them deny it, most ISPs actively engage in traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling, connection denial or some such tactic to keep the amount of bandwidth consumed by high traffic applications on their networks to a minimum. While this does often ensure better performance for everyone in the neighborhood, it can mean painfully slow transfer speeds for those dabbling in P2P — legit or not.

While there are valid arguments for and against shaping, we’re not here to debate. We just want the fastest BitTorrent transfers possible.

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Sexual predators and online pedophiles are a growing concern among parents whose children use the internet. The FBI estimates that there are now over one million pedophiles active online. With many of them involved with child pornography. The majority are and chatting with children online daily.Here is a simple checklist that you can review in order to determine if your child’s habits online should cause you concern for the safety of your child and even your family.

Teaching your child not to reveal any personal information in chat rooms or over the internet which might lead a predator to the child can go a long way to ensuring their safety. Knowing what to look for is the first step.

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The International Herald Tribune reports ‘EU plans to require biometrics of all non-European visitors‘

The plans - arguably the biggest shake-up of border management in Europe since the creation of an internal travel zone - would apply to citizens of the United States and all other countries that now enjoy visa-free status.

We in Ireland know the debacle created by the electronic voting system. This current trend of consuming every last bit of private information about a person, whether it comes from governments or social networking websites, which extend so far as to their very biological nature, is a disturbing one to say the least. Just imagine if the database holding the biometrics of all europeans, and non-european visitors, was operated as successfully as the electronic voting system in Ireland.

[more at iht]

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