Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Did Piracy Drop When Limewire Vanished?

Last October, the big music labels got the courts to shut down Limewire, one of the best-known file-sharing services on the Web. Normally, shutting down a piracy site is simply a whack-a-mole exercise, but research firm NPD says this time is different: It says peer-to-peer filesharing in the U.S. dropped from 12 percent of Web users to 9 percent between Q3 of 2010 and Q4. These numbers are from a self-reported survey, so use as much salt as you’d like.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik