Last week the news broke that Cogent, which operates one of the largest Internet backbone networks, blackholed IP-addresses that were linked to several notorious sites including The Pirate Bay.

It seems likely that the change of IP-addresses is an intentional response from Cloudflare to bypass the blocking. The company has a reputation of fighting overreach and keeping its subscribers online so that it would be fitting.

Their requests are being stopped in the Internet backbone network of Cogent Communications, which has blackholed the CloudFlare IP-address of The Pirate Bay and many other torrent and streaming sites.

A Cogent spokesperson informed us that they looked into the issue but that the company “does not discuss such decisions with third parties,” while adding that they do not control the DNS records of these sites.

The problems appear to be related to the site's recent ban of 'unofficial' proxy services. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is also down, but for now it's unclear what's causing the issues on their end.

ExtraTorrent is not the only site that has run into trouble lately. The Pirate Bay is also down at the time of writing. Users who try to access the site get a CloudFlare downtime warning, or a new Captcha error.

A few months ago a criminal investegation by the U.S. Government brought down KickassTorrents, the largest torrent site at the time.

“We have all our major uploaders on board and they continued to share tirelessly even before the torrent engines returned. The torrent community can continue to expect to see uploads from all the names they know and trust,” the KATcr crew says.

The rules, which are included in the Telecoms Single Market (TSM) regulation, would still allow targeted throttling of BitTorrent and other traffic, under the guise of network management.

ISPs are still allowed to throttle specific categories for “reasonable” network management purposes, as the second subparagraph of article 3 reads.

While it’s not expected that BitTorrent or VPN traffic will be targeted any more than it is right now, the option remains open. This will be a welcome decision by networking specialists and ISPs in general, which have argued that selectively targeting congestion is a more sensible approach.

In the most recent episode, pirates were saluted during a short scene. Without giving away any spoilers, the main character Elliot was shown playing a pirated movie via his PLEX media server.

It is safe to say that these were not included by accident but as a nod towards the pirates in the audience. The same can be said for the iconic FBI warning that’s shown when the movie starts playing.

Broadly, the companies that sell domains to users – called registrars – are now required to send a verification email to the domain name holders every time a new domain is registered or the domain details are modified.

In theory, the validation process is extremely easy: you receive an email from your registrar and simply have to click on a link to verify that the domain's registration information is true and accurate. Then you are done.

The suspension is under ICANN's control and there is little or nothing that your registrar can do about it. The problem of course is the system relies on people receiving and responding to an email.

The RIAA has asked uTorrent creator BitTorrent Inc. to come up with ways to stop infringement of its members' copyrighted content. In a letter sent to BitTorrent Inc's CEO, the RIAA's Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy points to BitTorrent's DHT system and asks the San Francisco-based company to live up to its claim of not endorsing piracy.

“We urge BitTorrent Inc. to live up to those words and take meaningful steps to deter this widespread infringement occurring using its own products and services,” Buckles says.

The City of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit and copyright and royalty group PRS for Music have teamed up for what appears to be a first-of-its-kind action. Arresting a 46-year-old man, this week police shutdown one of the Internet's few karaoke-focused BitTorrent trackers.

“The public needs to be aware that by accessing sites like this, they are putting money directly in the hands of criminals, which often then funds other serious organized crime, as well as putting their own financial and personal details at risk of being compromised and used for other fraudulent scams,” PIPCU chief Detective Chief Inspector Danny Medlycott said in a statement.

Newly released earnings numbers show that Rightscorp is contacting more people than ever before, fining more people for infringement than ever before, working with more ISPs than ever before—and yet is reporting record losses. Its stock is near all-time lows at about $0.11 per share.

"Rightscorp is recognized as a pioneer in the fight against piracy," said CEO Christopher Sabec. "We've established the company as one of the only viable solutions to the multi-billion dollar problem of peer-to-peer piracy."