In a great blow for consumers everywhere, the prospect of 3-strikes for copyright infringers has returned with a vengeance, as both the EU Council and French Constitutional court pushed forward with their respective legislation. HADOPI is alive, and the EU has shredded requirements for judicial oversight.
An increasing death-knell is sounding for Lord Mandelson’s proposals for 3-strikes Internet disconnections. The latest blow comes from the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group. After a consultation earlier this year, they have now published their response, and it’s not one favorable to ‘Darth Mandy’ and his plans.
The UK has been consulting over proposals to deal with file-sharing, but it appears to have been an empty gesture. Speaking the day after the consultation closed, the MP in charge is already keen to move against P2P, noting the necessity of it during interview. If only his reasons for for doing so were based in truth.
An ISP in the UK is set to introduce a voluntary customer Internet censorship scheme. Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse/TalkTalk said the company would introduce parental controls for subscribers which would include a feature to ban BitTorrent sites.
In a late submission to the Canadian network management hearings of the CRTC, BitTorrent Inc. debunked some P2P myths and asked the committee to decide in favor of a neutral net. ISPs should look for other methods to deal with network congestion rather than discriminating against BitTorrent users, they say.
Furk is not your regular torrent site. Not only does it function as a meta-search engine, but you can also download ‘torrents’ via Furk’s servers using HTTP. And it doesn’t stop there. Furk holds these downloads in a searchable database that anyone can use, turning the site into a kind of mashup between BitTorrent and Rapidshare.
There can be little doubt that the provision of an effective and free service for BitTorrent anonymity would prove hugely popular. Today we bring you a detailed report on BitBlinder – a brand new open source project which promises to cloak your torrents, hide your browsing and get round many obstructive filters.
Traffic management company Ipoque has just released a whitepaper, detailing pros and cons of different methods of dealing with piracy on P2P networks. Surprisingly, the conclusions in the paper are not straight adverts for their own products and services. We will highlight some of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly conclusions.
Hundreds of ISPs all over the world limit and restrict BitTorrent traffic on their networks. Unfortunately, most companies are not very open about their network management solutions. With a newly launched website, Google is now helping out by supporting applications that distinguish the good ISPs from the bad.
Cox, the third largest ISP in the U.S, is none too fond of BitTorrent users. Previously we reported that they disconnect alleged copyright infringers without warning. Today, Cox announced a new ‘network management’ trial where P2P, Usenet and FTP users will be slowed down when the network is congested.
Net neutrality really is the hot topic at the moment. After the FCC slapped Comcast for slowing down BitTorrent users, Canada is now looking into the network management practices of its ISPs. And rightly so, as a CRTC investigation reveals that most of the ISPs in Canada actively slow down customers using P2P applications.
