Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.

The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.

The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.

The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!

The following remark was made by Marie. L. van Uitert, MPAA attorney in the Jammie Thomas trial. She wrote in a brief:

It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement. Mandating that proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many cases.

The rest of the brief goes on to list the reasons why the MPAA feels it should not have to meet the full burden of proof in its case (i.e. proving actual distribution). For them, the existence of a location where the copyright material could be copied is sufficient grounds for prosecution. When you take this off the internet, this is equivalent to suing some for 12 * $150,00 for loaning someone a CD they later copied.

For more coverage, see Wired and TorrentFreak.

Don’t download the Hitman movie with Bittorrent when Apple will give it to you free on iTunes. Just hit “Browse” on the Quick Links on the right side of the main iTunes home page. Then, select “Movies” and “Thriller.” You’ll see the title “Hitman” for free, just 1.1GB away:

You might not want to watch it, Rottentomatoes gave it a 15%.