An office tower in downtown San Jose, California has long served as home to McColo--a hosting company whose servers in turn have quietly served as a conduit to a huge majority of the world's spam email, scam prescription drug markets and child porn sites. After investigations by the Washington Post's Security Fix blog identified McColo as supreme baddies and shut them down, web security firms saw spam volumes drop almost instantly by up to 75%.

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Here's something you don't expect to see: Comcast taking part in a test of new P4P file sharing protocol that offers up greatly increased speeds. And they actually want to make its use widespread. What's the catch here?

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France's Senate just passed a law proposed in mid-summer that would cut the families of illegal fileswappers off from broadband internet access for a year. This makes France the first country to pop anti-piracy legislation against users, and it's probably not going to be the last.

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Most of you download-hungry Gizmodians probably won't be able to make the most of these new entry-level Naked DSL pricings from Internode, but if you have a Nanna somewhere looking for some good value broadbandand VoIP bundles, you might want to point them in this general direction. Essentially, Internode has dropped the price of its entry-level Naked DSL plans to $50.

There are two plans: the Home-NakedExtreme-5 service, which runs of Internode's own equipment and includes 5GB of data, or the Home-Naked-1, which runs of Optus' wholesale equipment and includes 1GB of data. I'm assuming that which option you get depends on where you live and what exchanges Internode's set up on.

On top of these plans you can bundle Internode's Node2Phone VoIP service, with pre-paid bundles starting at $5 a month for $10 worth of calls. And if you exceed your monthly data quota, you'll be happy to know that Internode has doubled the amount of data in their data blocks. So where $5 would have bought you 1GB, it now gives you 2GB.

It's good to see ISPs pushing the naked bandwagon. Now all we need is for one of them to set up their equipment in my local exchange so I can move away from Telstra-run equipment...

[Internode]

New details have emerged on #3 cable provider Cox Communication's plan to enter into the wireless business. Apparently, subscribers will be able to control their DVRs, watch television, and automatically sync their address book with home PCs via their... Read More »

Comcast has announced that they have upgraded their DOCSIS 3.0 service to offer new high-speed 22Mbps/5Mbps and 50Mbps/10Mbps options. They have also increased the speed along standard tiers: 6Mbps/1Mbps will be upgraded to 12Mbps/2Mbps and 8Mbps/2Mbps will be increased... Read More »

A market research firm called MultiMedia Intelligence—who I admittedly had never heard of—offers up some astounding numbers on porn swapping P2P traffic: 33.6% of North American net activity is P2P, almost all of it illegal. Huge, right? But worldwide, the number is even higher, at 44%. So almost half of the world's net activity is the illegal swapping of movies and music? Mercifully for studios and record labels, the report holds some good-ish news about the future, but it's still a bag o' trouble for the ISPs.

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Australian hippies and eco-warriors can now enjoy using bittorrent as much as the rest of us. Internode have announced that they are now using 100 percent green power for their offices and data centres around the country, drastically reducing their impact on the environment.

The move to use only renewable energy sources like wind and solar has ensured that their status as a 100% carbon neutral company is maintained. And although there is a 20 percent increase in the cost of Internode's electricity, they currently have no plans to pass that cost onto consumers.

So now Internode customers can happily know that their hours of reading Giz are not only saving the environment, but doing it for the same price, while making you smarter and more attractive to the opposite sex (well, that's what we tell people, anyway).

[Internode]

What's wrong with this headline spotted on Ars Technica today?

"Australian ISPs offer US advice, smugness, on net neutrality"

Of course as always, headlines only tell half the story. Reading the Ars article, you quickly learn that it is in response to this article from ZDNet AU, where the heads of local ISPs BigPond, iiNet and Internode were interviewed on what Net neutrality means for Australians. The answer? Not too much, because our systems are very different, at least for the moment.

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Some of you P2P fans may want to know about a new coalition called Arts + Labs. It may sound like some kind of open-source hippie think tank, but it's actually a powerful alignment of film and music copyright owners (NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America) and tech firms and ISPs (Microsoft, Cisco Systems and AT&T). It's a group that could put together a pretty serious anti-piracy system without much trouble. Saul Hansell at the NY Times says the group claims that "network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers." Hansell interprets this as a call to filter packets, and put the kibosh on any dubious transfers.

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