In the last months, I was extremely surprised to see MySpace loading in Spanish, although I am not living in Spain, and my IP doesn't belong to a country where Spanish is at least an officially recognized language. Today, I just had a revelation - I had to scroll down and choose an English-speaking country. So much for my accuracy when checking a Web page, but today news have emerged regarding a really disturbing MySpace-related issue, as well as one less disturbing, but pretty interesting, so let's take them one by one...


Anyway, before moving to the recent events, I should remind you a few nasty things that happened in the past.

First, it was back in May 2006, when two Long Island, New York teenagers, Shaun Harrison and Saverio Mondelli, were charged for unauthorized computer access and attempted extortion of MySpace, after they hacked into the site with the purpose of stealing the personal information of its users. After that, they threatened to share the secrets of their break in,unless MySpace paid them $150,000. Obviously, they both got arrested pretty soon, by undercover police officers posing as MySpace employees.

As a funny side note, multiple schools, and even public libraries, from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Malaysia restricted access to MySpace, considering it "a haven for student gossip and malicious comments."(!!)

The final piece of the past I want to tell you about now happened in April 2007, when police in County Durham, United Kingdom, arrested a girl aged 17 on charges of criminal damage. The reason? A party advertised on MySpace, held at her parents' house without their consent ended up with over 200 teenagers that arrived from across the country, and unleashed hell - £20,000 of damage, from cigarette butts to urine on clothing. They did so much damage, that the girl's parents, who were obviously not able to stop the party, being away at the time of the happening, had to move out of the house!

Now, let's get to the more recent facts, first of them being the conclusion of a very sad MySpace story, which I find pretty disturbing.

A boy and a girl met on MySpace, and they started living that kind of romance you only live once...although it was an online relationship, and they were 16 and 13 years old. After only a month, he said it's all over, and told her the world would be better without her, as closing words. Unfortunately, she hung herself and died, without knowing that the boy's mother has been using her boy's account in those final days...

Now, the 49 years old Lori Drew stands trial in Los Angeles, accused of providing false information to get a MySpace account, as well as violation of MySpace's terms. She could end up with no less than 20 years in prison for the above.

LA FBI Assistant Director Salvador Hernandez said "Whether we characterize this tragic case as 'cyber-bullying,' cyber abuse or illegal computer access, it should serve as a reminder that our children use the Internet for social interaction and that technology has altered the way they conduct their daily activities. As adults, we must be sensitive to the potential dangers posed by the use of the Internet by our children."

Unfortunately, time can't be turned back for one 13 years girl whose mistake was to trust a virtual account, and not trying to contact the person behind it. Well... words are useless now, so let's move to our next subject, the MySpace kings who lost their crowns.

The story is very simple - MySpace just won the largest CAN-SPAM judgment in the US history, after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, the two "spam kings," failed to show up in court. As soon as these two guys will be tracked down, they may be forced to pay $234 million, for the guild of using MySpace for commercial purposes, trying to make other members hand over usernames and passwords, using automated spamming scripts, and encouraging others to participate in this spamming whirlwind, too.

Although those $234 million may not be ever recovered, this judgement may be enough to scare others and help making MySpace a cleaner and safer place for all. Sounds good to me!

This is it for today, but I would like to challenge you to tell a story related to MySpace. I am sure you must know someone who has some interesting MySpace romance or another interesting story to tell, if you're not the one to have lived such a thing. For now, there are no prizes, but maybe in the future...

Are you really sure your ISP is not throttling your P2P traffic, even though you may be only downloading Linux distros? If you won a trial against the RIAA, did you have any idea they may start saying your attorney's fees are too high, although they were trying to make you pay for some MP3 files like you had to buy the artists themselves for the rest of their lives? I know, there are a lot of things completely unfair about RIAA, and it seems the "copyright wars" continue...


<-120x240 Vertical Banner - left->First stop, the ISPs that don't live up to the users' expectations. Obviously, it's about those in the US. To be more specific, we're going to talk about Cox and Comcast, but they are not the only ones on the planet playing dirty with their users, unfortunately.

Some researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems got deeper into this issue, and their results are pretty interesting, because out of 1,224 ISPs they have checked, only 13 were blocking BitTorrent traffic. Unfortunately for those in the US, 9 of those 13 were ISPs which operate there.

While some companies claim they are only blocking or limiting P2P traffic at peaks hours, both Comcast and Cox admitted(or others managed to prove beyond any doubt) that peak hours is not the only time of the day when P2P traffic is blocked. In fact, for them, it doesn't matter the time of the day!

Ben Scott from Free Press, one of the groups trying to make the FCC take action against these policies, said "Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. These Internet experts have also unequivocally demonstrated that blocking is not limited to times of supposed congestion. Their sophisticated testing shows that Comcast and Cox block BitTorrent applications at all times of the day—not just at times of peak traffic. This research proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that consumers, Congress and the FCC must urgently pursue the complaints against network providers."

These being said, it's obvious that Comcast and Cox are silent, despite the requests from press to choose their position and speak out. Well, the facts show everything, so why bother? Keep going this way, guys, and you may find yourselves without subscribers, one day!

Second topic today, Tanya Andersen. If you never heard of her, you should know that she is one of the few that saw the case against them dropped by the RIAA, but it took no less than 2 years for this to happen. Since she was the prevailing party, the judge ruled that RIAA must pay the attorneys' fees. So far, so good, but...

...Tanya Andersen's lawyer asked to receive $298,995 for the time worked during the trial, while RIAA reckoned only about 10 percent of that amount! In the end, the decision goes she must get $107,834 in court costs and attorney fees from the RIAA.

Well, what about RIAA's requirements from those pursued in court for downloading some songs being "excessive"? Anyway, both sides have until May 27 to file any objections to the award, and I hope RIAA gets what everyone expects - a decision to make them think twice before sending people into court!

In the end, it seems TorrentSpy didn't managed to die with dignity, if I have to believe some of the readers that took their time to drop their comments, for which I have to send all my thanks, and I have no proof against their claims. Good, so maybe TorrentSpy compromised some of its users while going down, breaking their own promises, but what about downloading some music, movies, and even games from sites that won't give away your identity to the cops, won't ask you to give any donation to increase your ratio and, most important of all, won't turn you into a thief?


<-180x150 Small Rectangle - left->No, I am not on drugs! I am not even drunk. I am as sane as possible, and I am not dreaming with my eyes open and my hands on the keyboard! Before moving on, I have to warn you - this may not be a golden mine, and things are rather limited, because you won't see any Electronic Arts games or Microsoft operating systems available for download on the legal torrent trackers we're going to talk about, but you'll get 100% legal content, and some of the stuff you can get is high quality, so...

...first stop, as you probably figured out, if you visited their site at least once since they got the new logo, is LegalTorrents!

Currently in the Beta stage, the site offers only a small number of torrents, most of them(if not all) allowing you to download Creative Commons-licensed content.


If you look closer, you can even find 3 older games for Windows (The White Chamber, Facade and The Adventures of Fatman), 6 audio books, about a dozen music downloads, including some 1-2GB collections, a single wallpaper pack...but it's a site worthy of your attention, although you may not find enough reasons to come back, after a while.


PublicDomainTorrents is a site whose name says it all, but it's swarming with ads, and I think that browsing it is a gruesome task. Well, at least for me, but if you like diggin' for gold, you may find some interesting things. Only movies, from what I can tell...


Next on the list, we have Legit Torrents, a site currently having 6703 users and 1569 torrents. The content you can get here is covering a wide range of topics, from Linux distributions to games, including some new freeware titles, and even free MMORPGs like Archlord. The problem is that some torrents(most of them) don't have any description, so illegal downloads may appear here, but they are removed as soon as they get reported by someone.

As a side note, let me add something - sites like the BitTorrent download store or Azureus' Vuze may provide some good free content, but they are swarming with DRM-protected material, as well as stuff you have to pay for, so...thanks, but I'll pass. Anyway, you may want to check it out, so feel free to do it, if you have the time and patience required to browse through their extensive media libraries.

Ooooh, yeah! Losless music, anyone? Etree is the place to go! As its front page clearly says, this site's only purpose is to help fans by "sharing the live concert recordings of trade friendly artists."


Now, you're probably thinking there are only anonymous artists to be found here, but hear these names and think again: Los Lobos, Radiohead, The Grateful Dead or Primus. Unfortunately, if you're not into live recordings, this site may not be your thing, but if you think the above sounds interesting, this site is heaven - updates are frequent, and there's an impressive collection of torrents to be browsed!

No, I can't give you any torrent sites where you can download the latest Madonna album, or the "Iron Man" movie, but that's life. Some things are worth paying for, while others come for free, and since I mentioned this fact once again, I can't conclude this article without showing you the path to the largest Linux torrents archive on the Web, available at Linuxtracker.

These being said, I hope you will drop me as many comments as possible, because I am sure there's more to have from the free torrent world, so if you know one legal torrents site worth checking out... you know what to do! I will be waiting...