Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, the nation's second largest ISP, told a gathering of music industry executives that the company has issued 2 million notices on behalf of copyright owners, according to multiple people who were in attendance.

An AT&T spokeswoman said that the ISP has not threatened anyone with the disabling of service but acknowledged that warning letters sent to customers, the company says it reserves the right to terminate service.

To those who advocate for Internet users, however, any plan that threatens to shut off someone's Internet access without hard evidence is unfair.

It is removing all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS (Performing Rights Society).

Steve Porter, head of the PRS, said he was "outraged... shocked and disappointed" by YouTube's decision.

In a statement, Mr Porter said the move "punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent".

Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis appeared as an expert witness at the Pirate Bay trial yesterday. He was questioned on the link between the decline of album sales and filesharing. Wallis told the court that his research has shown that there is no relation between the two.

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

The Wallis' soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

First up is that the country's Prime Minister appears to be flat-out lying when he claims that New Zealand has to implement such a plan to remain in compliance with international obligations. That's simply not true. He claims that other countries, like Australia and the UK have already implemented similar plans, but that's also not true.

Then, apparently with a straight face, the RIANZ claims that the evidence it presents to ISPs is "highly reliable, well-tested and accepted worldwide."

So, the recording industry doesn't want to pay the costs, doesn't want to give users much time to respond and is lying about what other countries are doing and the quality of its evidence. And New Zealand politicians are buying it.

Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night.

"Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So - what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?"

Fast-growing micro-blogging service Twitter has reportedly raised an additional 35 million dollars in funding and said Friday that it is ready to "begin building revenue-generating products."

"Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate," he added. "Active users have increased 900 percent in a year."

Twitter, which allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less, has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 but has been unable so far to generate revenue.

Hacktivists pwned the website of Wolfgang Schaeuble on Tuesday in protest against new wiretapping and data retention laws They posted links inviting visitors to a protest website "Vorratsdatenspeicherung".

Later reports suggest that hackers were able to gain control over the site after breaking into it using a dictionary attack that revealed the password for the Typo3 CMS was "gewinner" (or winner in English).

A free service called OpenDNS is offering a new feature designed to alert administrators to the damage and help them contain it.

The service will also help network admins to quickly pinpoint any infected machines by checking their OpenDNS Dashboard. Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.

The culprit is ESPN's strategy of licensing ISPs rather than users. If your ISP doesn't want to pay for you to watch ESPN360, there's nothing you can do about it, short of switching to a provider that pays for it.

But Free Press' Ben Scott thinks the this new internet model will ultimately be bad for providers. "My gut reaction is that it's a terrible business model," says Scott. "The beauty of the internet is that you put a piece of content on your server, and it's available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world that's connected to the internet. If you begin walling off your content and selling network operators [the right to distribute content], that defeats the whole idea of maximizing the exposure of your content."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that while 60 Mbps may be enough to get us excited in the US, Korea is making plans to set the bar much higher. The entire country is gearing up to have 1 Gbps service by 2012, or at least that is what the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) is claiming. 'Currently, Koreans can get speeds up to 100 Mbps, which is still nearly double the speed of Charter's new 60 Mbps service.