Three class-action lawsuits were filed against Comcast this week in California, Illinois, and New Jersey, alleging that the company deceived and misled consumers by advertising that it offered "unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer."

In November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report detailing its own investigation, confirming that BitTorrent performance was being selectively degraded by unexpected TCP reset packets.

Comcast did not tell customers that it would engage in this type of traffic shaping when the company promised "unfettered access," and was not authorized to do so by its customers.

The city of Los Angeles has also announced that it is suing Time Warner Cable for deceptive business practices and false advertising.

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.

Flexplay DVDs have been around for about five years, though on a more limited scale. The premise remains unchanged: Flexplay's patented disc adhesive reacts to oxygen when the DVD's package is opened, beginning a slow chemical reaction that renders the disc unreadable in 48 hours.

Staples will start carrying Flexplay DVDs this month, for $4.99 each.

There is so little security in fax signatures that it's mind-boggling that anyone accepts them.

I've signed book contracts, credit card authorizations, nondisclosure agreements and all sorts of financial documents -- all by fax. I even have a scanned file of my signature on my computer, so I can virtually cut and paste it into documents and fax them directly from my computer without ever having to print them out.

A homeless woman has been arrested in Japan after living undetected for almost a year in a man's cupboard.

The man contacted police and, after an exhaustive search of the property, officers found the woman hiding in the top of a built-in cupboard designed to store bedding and mattresses.

Horikawa told police that she had nowhere to live and had first taken up residence in the cupboard, in a room that the man rarely used, when the owner of the house had gone out and not locked the door.

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.

After word spread that Prince covered Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella, the tens of thousands who couldn't be there ran to YouTube for a peek. Everyone was quickly denied -- even Radiohead.

Yorke laughed when his bandmate, guitarist Ed O'Brien, said the blocking had prevented him from seeing Prince's version of their song.

When Prince performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, on April 26, he prohibited the standard arrangement of allowing photographers to shoot near the stage during the first three songs of his set.

An anonymous tipster who alerted the Australian competition watchdog about Ebay's proposal to force its users onto the Paypal payments system was none other than Google.

The watchdog had received a 38-page anonymous report from a whistleblower in which the move was dubbed 'anti-competitive'.

When Bromage started to tell world + dog about Google's involvement, the document was pulled and has since been replaced by one less revealing.