ISPs, the entertainment industry, and BitTorrent once again dominated the file-sharing headlines this week. As ISPs such as Comcast become growingly hostile to BitTorrent, BitTorrent is pushing back with a new proposed circumvention feature. The next year will prove very interesting indeed.

February 9th, 20008

The Pirate Bay’s solution to a court ordered block on Tele2’s network appears to have been successful. The Jesper Bay.com, a guide to circumvent Tele2’s block, has not only allowed The Pirate Bay to maintain its presence in Denmark, but actually drive in additional traffic. Traffic from Tele2’s network remained unchanged.

"...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI," the blog post reads. "Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk."

"We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There’s no noticable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after."

February 10th, 2008

The pressure is on for several other ISPs such as Road Runner, Charter and Cox, as NewTeeVee.com reports that the ISP giants have reworded their terms of service. The rewritten terms of service are worded to avoid the current pressure Comcast is currently facing, specifically the charge that the ISP was not transparent in its bandwidth management policy. Here is Comcast’s new policy as it applies to P2P:

“Comcast manages its network with one goal: to deliver the best possible broadband Internet experience to all of its customers. High-speed bandwidth and network resources are not unlimited. Managing the network is essential as Comcast works to promote the use and enjoyment of the Internet by all of its customers. The company uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards. Comcast tries to use tools and technologies that are minimally intrusive and, in its independent judgment guided by industry experience, among the best in class. Of course, the company's network management practices will change and evolve along with the uses of the Internet and the challenges and threats on the Internet.”

Date: 2008-02-16 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1663