Connection woes hit popular services across the Internet. So far, though, it's unclear if they are related.

A mysterious rash of outages struck the Internet today, crippling major services for hours at a time. It isn't clear whether they're related.

Having won cases against other torrent site hosters in the past, the anti-piracy group was quick to ask XS Networks to shut SumoTorrent down and hand over the personal details of its owner. XS Networks refused, however, and said it would only respond to a court order.

According to BREIN the Dutch hosting provider was to blame for this outcome, and in response went on to sue the company earlier this year in pursuit of damages. BREIN argued that XS Networks acted negligently when it refused to take the site down when asked to do so.

With this ruling in hand BREIN can ask for the shutdown of any site they deem to be infringing, as well asking for the personal details of the site owner. Providers who refuse to cooperate will make themselves liable for damages caused by the website in question.

Andy Smith, an internet security chief at the Cabinet Office, said people should only give accurate details to trusted sites such as government ones.

"When you put information on the internet do not use your real name, your real date of birth," he told a Parliament and the Internet Conference in Portcullis House, Westminster.

Sony faced a setback in its campaign to control what software can run on its PlayStation 3 after hackers published one of the cryptographic keys that forms the core of the security scheme locking down the game console

Nate Lawson, a cryptographer and the principal of the Root Labs security consultancy, said the disclosure represents a setback for Sony in its attempt to control what end users can and can't do with the console.

The BPI, which represents major UK record companies, has asked the ISPs to stop people accessing Fenopy, Kickass Torrents and H33T.

“Like The Pirate Bay, these websites are profiting illegally from distributing music that isn’t theirs, without permission and without paying a penny to the musicians, writers and producers who created it," a BPI spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "It is plain wrong."

AWS confirmed on its status page at 2:11 p.m. ET that it is experiencing "degraded performance for a small number of EBS volumes." It says the issue is restricted to a single Availability Zone within the US-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia. It warns that instances using EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.

AWS has periodic performance issues this year, including its last major outage in late June, which it blamed on powerful storms that ripped through the mid-Atlantic region causing power outages. Last year, AWS was down for as many as four days for some customers, including Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and HootSuite.

Shortly after confirming the EBS outages, AWS reported that its Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Elastic Beanstalk, which is an application deployment service and ElastiCache were also impacted by the outage.

Instead of displaying official Finnish subtitles, Netflix was caught using DivX Finland’s fansubs on the Canadian-American science fiction series Andromeda. It’s possible that Netflix made this same ‘error’ for other TV-shows and movies as well.

“It’s nice to see that the texts are used, but they did not ask permission,” they wrote, adding a link a clip from the Netflix video where DivX Finland’s credits are clearly visible.

Last year footage from the dubbing room of the American anime distributor Funimation revealed how the company was also using ‘pirated’ subtitles.

"It's sort of a social-networking version of Moore's Law," said Zuckerberg, who was interviewed by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. "We expect this rate [of sharing] will double every 10 years. So in 10 years from now, people will be sharing about 1,000 times as many things as they do today."

As for Facebook, he argued that the social network is fundamentally changing human behavior by expanding the number of people we can keep in our social circles -- offline and on.

Just as plants need sunlight to pull off the trick, Air Fuel Synthesis, the firm profiled in the UK's Independent newspaper, need to use good old-fashioned electric energy to pull off theirs.

In Iceland, Carbon Recycling International opened a plant at the end of 2011 drawing waste CO2 from a power station, with capacity to produce five million litres of methanol per year.

Lesser said that over the next two months, the five major ISPs funding the CAS—AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—would ”begin rolling out" their versions of the alert system. Under the CAS, ISPs would pass infringement notices from copyright holders on to their subscribers.

Finally, Lesser explained to Ars that consumers will have to pay $35 to the CAS to initiate a review procedure, which will be refunded if the consumer wins the review.

"This is the first time that there is a multi-stakeholder effort that tries to address these issues in a consumer-friendly way. If we are successful and we see a reduction in piracy and an increase in legal services, there may be a phase two. We need to take this first step and evaluate it."