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Azureus and uTorrent (the two most popular bittorrent clients) had included in their latest beta new forms of encryption, which will provide a completely random-looking header and (optionally) payload to avoid passive protocol identification and traffic shaping. The technical details are a bit hairy, but if have the guts you can always take a peek here.

But Bram Cohen, the guy who invented the Bittorrent protocol, does not agree with this decision, since he believes that ISP's will be able to still detect Bittorrent traffic, and that this could harms the Internet performance as a whole, as stated in his blog.

What's next, an encrypted Skype?

After 2 weeks of design, coding and others, joaobordalo.com is now officially launched. This will be a evolving site, with new features and functionalities being added across the time. I intend to use it as my Ruby on Rails test bed, so put your fingers crossed.

All posts from alinobairro had been migrated here, but comments were not, and I'm still in the process of adding tags to the older posts.

This site will be more than a blog, but for now, it's just a blog and a couple of pages (see the upper left corner).

Please take a look at it, try it, and give me some feedback by commenting to this post. Thank you.

After a few days not digging, I've just found three pieces of news that worries me:

• How easy it is to stalk someone through his cellphone;
• AT&T CEO wants to extort money from Google;
• Could this be the end of the Internet as we know it?

Guys, if you own a cell phone (who doesn't), you have to point your browser to the bluepulse website, sign-up, and follow the instructions. These guys developed one amazing software, described as:

A free program for mobile phones that allows you to run tiny, useful widgets for a variety of uses, such as instant messaging and RSS.

And it's true, and works like a charm: in less than 5 minutes, I was talking with my buddies in MSN. I'm going to try now the RSS reader.

The platform allows any one to develop new widgets, and I surely hope the business model motivates people to develop new functionalities and services. I'm really impressed with this, and I reiterate: go to the website and try it.

Today's bloglines reading gave me a lot of interesting stories about possible technical, social and political trends. Here are a few, rescued from my last browser crash:

• Yahoo seems to be experimenting a new way of online ads: in Yahoo Movies, search for a movie (I used Vatel), go to the bottom of the page, and in the Sponsored Links box notice the links for different ad types. Click one and you will see ads only about the tag you just selected. Nice move, gives you less visibility, but targeted ads with higher levels of attention;
• Still in the advertising market, it looks like the marketing guys are getting there: The New York Times as a story about marketers getting really excited with three second messages in phone displays, all powered up by GPS positioning and location target adverstising;
• An interesting post on why Yahoo Music is better than iTunes for home entertainment. I admit I will think about this, really;
• A beautiful idea, sharing broadband to increase speed, is becoming a business case: two companies, Mushroom Networks and WiBoost Inc., are about to launch their new products. It looks like good sense is prevailing, take a peak at the article;
• Lawrence Lessig wrote an interesting post about the need for regulation on the "net neutrality" issue. If you want to know more on this subject, try the Wikipedia definition.