When I download stuff I figure it’s no one’s business but mine, so I use a neat program called PeerGuardian — it essentially tracks certain organizations that like to spy on you and blocks them from doing so.

Today I peeked at the list of what it had blocked in the past few minutes:

(Click to enlarge.)

Why does the office of the president of Lithuania care what I’m downloading? I’m open to suggestions.

(Moviex, by the way, is a company that tries to prevent people from pirating movies. Evidently it’s also interested in more than just that. I happened to be getting a game demo.)

On the topic of private companies taking the law into their own hands — or at least their perception of the law — we find that Yahoo has removed The Pirate Bay from its search results.

Based in Sweden, The Pirate Bay is one of the largest sites listing files available via Bittorrent, legal and otherwise. It’s an index; it doesn’t store files, and (despite numerous attempts to show otherwise) what it does is legal.

Apparently, though, Yahoo decided to mess with its search results. If you search on the phrase "the pirate bay" on Yahoo and on Google, you’ll see that Google’s top link, naturally, is the site itself:

Yahoo, on the other hand, links first to the Wikipedia entry about TPB, then to a site for the Pirates Bay condos in Florida, then to a Vanity Fair article.

Try the search on other engines. Ask.com? The Pirate Bay site is the first entry. Live Search? Ditto. Only Yahoo doesn’t include it in the first page of results.

That means one of two things. Either Yahoo’s search engine is incredibly bad, or Yahoo is tweaking its results to please someone other than its customers. Which begs the question: What other sites does Yahoo block or degrade, and at whose behest?

Oh, and if Yahoo is going to make the argument about the legal issues, note this. You can search the site for "how to make a pipe bomb" and come up with some detailed advice:

Which do you think is more dangerous?

Follow-up: Since writing this, The Pirate Bay now appears at the top of a Yahoo search on the phrase, but the other links on the page don’t link to the site. My gut feeling is that Yahoo inserted the single link to TPB at the top because of criticism, but hasn’t changed the underlying changes to its search, whatever they are.

I wrote already that I was happy to be Comcast-free in large part because I don’t think Comcast should be telling me what I’m allowed to use the Internet for (any more than my phone company has the right to tell me what I can say to the people I call).

Comcast, for those who missed it, has a policy of restricting Bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent is a terrific way for sharing large files, because it spreads the pain of delivering those files among lots of people. If you want to download demos of new games, or a version of Linux, Bittorrent is the way to go.

But it’s also used for music and movie piracy, so Comcast decided to limit all Bittorrent traffic by essentially flooding Bittorrent users’ connections with bogus data.

When accused of this, first the company denied it. (I.e., it flat-out lied.) Then the Associated Press, the EFF, and some others proved it was being done. The the FCC started an investigation. Now Comcast is defending the practice it said it wasn’t engaged in.

Ergo, screw them.

To paraphrase John Gilmore, the Internet interprets this kind of bullshit as damage and routes around it. In this case, per TorrentFreak:

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs.

It amazes me on a regular basis that companies and organizations think they really can stop a large number of users from doing what they want to. There comes a point where companies have to realize where the river is going and then realize they have to work with that flow.

At times, Bittorrent accounts for something like 25 to 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Think about that. Comcast really thought it could throttle that kind of usage? Clearly users want Bittorrent, and interfering with it would only mean those users would come up with a way around Comcast’s roadblocks.

The future, to any reasonable person, was obvious; Comcast wouldn’t stop it for long, and it would generate a lot of bad press in the meantime.

Every now and again you read a story about, say, a teacher who suspends a student for leaving class to talk to his father in Iraq. We all know how that will end up — outcry, apology, embarrassment — and I wonder why the teacher couldn’t see the obvious. Ditto for Comcast. Did it really think it would get away with this for long?

Probably. The music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson. It continues to sue its customers while not providing them what they obviously want: unprotected music they can play wherever they want to. And then it’s shocked — shocked — that vastly more music is acquired by piracy than legally.

A few quotes from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching are appropriate:

If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

and

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

and finally

Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.
If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.