EFF takes Windows Media Center to task for intentionally restricted functionality, in the name of compliance with a non-existent legal requirement. WMC will decline to record certain over-the-air digital TV broadcasts. Quoting the official response to CNET:

“As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed.”

The problem is, as the EFF Deeplinks blog points out, a DC circuit court has already struck down this requirement on hardware and software vendors, in one of the rare victories for sanity. This is one case where design decisions and conflicting priorities can not be blamed on the government.

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The Max Planck Institute for software systems has released the results of a study on BitTorrent blocking. The research was conducted by asking volunteers around the world to download and run some code on their computers that simulates BitTorrent traffic to test servers controlled by the institute. By  carefully monitoring what is happening on both sides of this connection, it’s possible to determine any unexpected traffic shaping attempts.

What emerges is a global map of non-intereference with US and Singapore having the dubious distinction of being the only countries to have sizable fraction of tampered connections. (The percentages are not reliable; it’s quite likely that self-selection lead to many users on Comcast and Cox to volunteer for the experiment.

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