If the BPI's 'losses' figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.

"Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense," said Petter.

Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it's possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection.

In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages "disappear" after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.

"In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages "reappear" long after they should have "disappeared" nearly 100 percent of the time," the researchers wrote on a Web site that describes their experiment.

In my book, animated GIFs are one step above glitter graphics in terms of junk trends of the Internet, but I'm a big fan of any tool that makes creating them easy and fun.

To do this, it first downloads the clip to its servers, and then gives you simple controls to choose when you want it to begin and end. When you've picked out that perfect 10-second (or less) section of the video, you just hit a single button to finish the job.

Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a browser plug-in to help users keep their information private from prying eyes and from social-network providers as well.

Dubbed FaceCloak, the tool assures its users that sensitive data stays private, Hengartner says. "If you have a particular illness, you might want to allow only your friends to see that," he says. "This leaves it up to the user to decide what information to keep away from Facebook."

The biggest U.S. Internet service providers urged regulators to adopt a conservative definition of "broadband," arguing for minimum speeds that were substantially below many other nations.

Some of the submissions from service providers argued for a definition that even undercut an international ranking of U.S. Internet speed.

Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which, from noon to midnight, for certain services and providers, caps users' bandwidth at 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth.

All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3 speed, and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year.

Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

On August 17, Woodward put a fresh coat on the prior week's drama with a new gambit: He said he was giving the service to the community.

In the bitter post announcing this plan, he continued to claim that due to the fact that Twitter made Bit.ly the default URL shortener for the service, a product like Tr.im has no real chance for success.

Researchers are testing a scheme where users pay a cent to charity for each email they send - so clearing their inbox and conscience simultaneously.

Yahoo! Research's CentMail resurrects an old idea: that levying a charge on every email sent would instantly make spamming uneconomic.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser.

Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called 're-spawning' in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being "killed," the report found.