It's not that the major porn studios were alright with you torrenting porn vids online, it's that they didn't yet organise themselves to form an entity to do something about it. No longer. Think of the new organisation PAK as the MPAA of the porn world, planning to target websites that host or track torrents of porn. It seems like they're first going after the "tube" sites, like porntube and youporn, but we'll see how successful they are going after torrent sites. After all, the MPAA and RIAA have been doing it for years and you're still downloading. [Daily Tech via T3]

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AT&T already caps its data plans at 5GB a month, but they told the FCC on Friday that if they catch you using their mobile broadband network for P2P, they'll nuke your account. Specifically, senior VP of dealing with the government Robert Quinn said that "AT&T's terms of service for mobile wireless broadband customers prohibit all uses that may cause extreme network capacity issues, and explicitly identify P2P file sharing applications as such a use."

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Confirming what's been hinted at by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin since like the dawn of time, the WSJ is reporting that the FCC is going to rule on Friday that Comcast violated federal policy by by stalling BitTorrent connections.... Read More »

It looks as though Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is ready to lay the hammer down on Comcast regarding their wanton BitTorrent blocking. As was evident in the recent net neutrality hearing, Martin is hellbent on protecting consumers by establishing rules for transparency within ISPs. In an interview with AP, Martin noted that "The commission has adopted a set of principles that protect consumers' access to the internet, and we found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles." He went on to say that they "arbitrarily" blocked internet access and failed to disclose this to customers.

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TiVo has been setting the bar for timeshifting television (what you want, when you want it) for the better part of a decade. Its latest models, the TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD, further refine and extend functionality to high definition TV and downloadable movies. But the future might not be so bright for TiVo, as other players such as Microsoft' Vista Media Centre, Apple's Apple TV, Netflix's Roku player, and upstarts like the Vudu aim to drink their milkshake. What's a company to do? Innovate. Use the internet. Connect users together. Go beyond broadcast TV. Here's what we think TiVo needs to prioritise in their next box in order to dominate the living room for the next decade.

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And I was starting to feel unfulfilled by the stuff coming out of Google's labs. Its senior policy director, Richard Whitt, says that they're cooking up software that'll tell you if your ISP is screwing with or slowing down your connection because you're hogging too much bandwidth, and what exactly they're doing to it. (There's already some available, BTW, since Whitt didn't mention a release date.) But it's not necessarily because they believe willy nilly in net neutrality.

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AT&T chief tech officer John Donovan has told Wired that they're going to test bandwidth caps in the fall, making them the third of the four major ISPs to do so. (Verizon stands alone, but for how long?) He... Read More »

One of Comcast's main defenses of their BitTorrent blocking is to make sure the network isn't congested for other users during peak hours. This study done by the Max Planck Institute in Germany calls BS on that excuse by... Read More »

Our ISP is currently Comcast, which is probably definitely throttling torrent traffic in this area, but how can we know for sure? Here's how. There's now a website that runs a little test, determining whether your ISP is throttling all traffic, all traffic on well-known BT ports, only BT traffic on well-known BT ports, or nothing at all. The full test takes seven minutes, but it's seven minutes well spent to find out whether you need another ISP. Or if you need to cut down on your PureTNA downloads. [Max Planck Institute via TorrentFreak via LifeHacker]

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QNAP has upgraded their line of NAS drives to include the one-bay TS-109 Pro II and two-bay TS-209 Pro II models. Both of these beefed up systems will include a Marvell 500MHz CPU and 256MB DDRII large memory, a faster BitTorrent download engine, built-in Joomla! CMS 1.5.1 and upgraded TwonkyMedia version 4.4.4. QNAP also claims that the P2P download speed is now the same as a PC-based BT download.

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