This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA - Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order.

Nonetheless, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote 'yes' to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents. After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens, and street protests, the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources. The result will likely be huge street protests on Wednesday.

AVG rolled Linkscanner into its anti-virus engine, which has about 70 million active users worldwide. The company estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the tool's new incarnation, AVG version 8, and this has already cooked up enough ghost clicks to skew traffic not only on The Reg but any number of other sites as well.

Webmasters deal with robot traffic and other rogue visits all the time. But this is a little different. In an effort to fool even the sneakiest malware exploits, Linkscanner does its best to imitate real user clicks - which means most webmasters are completely unaware of the problem.

New York's Attorney General has just launched a blacklist-based initiative to quell undesirable Internet content. Child pornography is the target, although like all blacklists there will be a large number of blocked innocents and civilian casualties.

An undercover investigation by the Attorney General's office uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as "Newsgroups," an online service not associated with websites. The Newsgroups act as online public bulletin boards where users can upload and download files. Users access Newsgroups through their Internet Service Providers.

According to a report by Declan McCullagh, Sprint will be blocking the entire alt. hierarchy of Usenet, while good old Time Warner Cable has no time for such fussiness and will just stop offering all Usenet access.

The band seemed to have learned somewhat from the dark days of the Napster debacle by offering fans online access to pre-release material and in-studio video footage, but now it has apparently unleashed another potentially damaging fiasco upon itself by forcing bloggers to take down reviews of their upcoming album.

Metallica representatives played the album for The Quietus contributor "Bob Mulhouse" in London last Wednesday, after he did what one would expect: he posted a review on his blog.

Metallica held a listening party for music reviewers and was surprised when some of them wrote reviews? That has to be a public relations first.

It's still unclear why Metallica's management didn't require the reviewers to sign non-disclosure agreements if they didn't want them to write about it.

BT should face prosecution for its "illegal" trials of a controversial ad-serving technology, a leading computer security researcher has said.

But BT plans to push ahead with a further trial of the technology later this summer, the BBC has learnt.

During the trials adverts were stripped out of web pages served up to BT customers and replaced with more targeted ads, if available.

"This isn't how we expect ISPs to treat their customers' private communications and since, not surprisingly, it's against the law of the land, we must now expect to see a prosecution."

Comcast Corp. said Thursday that by early 2010 it plans to offer consumers in most of its markets Internet service so fast they will be able to download a high-definition movie in minutes.

Among cable operators, Comcast has been one of the most aggressive in deploying a wideband technology called Docsis 3.0 to fend off competitors as more users download videos over the Internet.

An internal BT report on the BT secret trials of Phorm (aka 121Media) Deep Packet Inspection has been revealed on Wikileaks today. The leaked document shows that during the covert trial a possible 18 million page requests were intercepted and injected with JavaScript and about 128 thousand charity ads were substituted with the Phorm Ad Network advertisements purchased by advertisers specifically for the covert trial period.

MediaDefender is paid by the recording and motion picture industries to seed fake files to illicit torrent tracking services. When Revision3 closed the tracker during the holiday weekend, the result was a denial of service attack by MediaDefender, which had been seeding the tracker with fake torrents.

"That's when MediaDefender went into overdrive and started pummeling us," Louderback said. "If a tracker was previously open and suddenly shut, their systems are automatically configured to put them out of business."

Saaf said MediaDefender had been seeding the tracker with fake torrents for some time. Fake files corrupt BitTorrent downloads.

The company has also been accused of a variety of different denial of service attacks against sites it believes are promoting file sharing. On the whole, pretty much everything the company seems to be associated with would be considered dirty tactics. What's amazing is that in pulling all these dirty tricks, MediaDefender never seems to get in much trouble for it.

MediaDefender, however, used a backdoor into Revision3's BitTorrent tracker to inject its own nefarious torrents -- basically piggybacking off of Revision3's tracker. Revision3 noticed the backdoor and closed it -- at which point, MediaDefender's system started flooding Revision3's servers with over 8,000 pings per second.

Charter Communications is planning to monitor its customers' Web surfing and then, anonymously, display relevant advertisements.

Schremp confirmed that Charter is using technology from Redwood City, Calif.-based NebuAd--which is reminiscent of how British broadband providers have been working with Phorm, which uses deep packet inspection with "anonymized ISP data to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time."

"The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That's another point of misinformation on the Net."