Tag Archives: isp

Chances are, if you are hooked up to the service of one of the UK's largest ISPs, then the answer to the above question is, yes. Data from a new survey conducted by Which? magazine, suggests that some of the most highly appreciated ISPs are often the smallest ones, with …

Even though it barely seems to be operational these days, The Pirate Bay is the most iconic torrent search site in the world and is frequently cited by media lobby groups as a URL that ISPs should block – often with the courts backing that decision. While some ISPs might …

TalkTalk is currently warning its customers that its servers were breached recently and user data may have been compromised. According to the UK ISP, cyber thieves may have been able to get their hands on account numbers and personal information, such as names and date of birth. Now with these …

For media groups, the war on piratcy is one that will never be won, but there are battles that can be fought and contested and one of the ones they like fight the most, is send letters out to allegedly infringing internet users demanding money. However, they can't do that …

Valve has added many useful features to Steam over the years but one that you may have overlooked is the Steam Stats page, which was updated to let you check the data rates and average speeds for different Internet Service Providers in each country and region. Valve is calling this feature …

TalkTalk has gone ahead and acquired Tesco's Blinkbox video streaming service, alongside the company's broadband and voice services. This means 75,000 broadband customers along with an additional 20,000 voice customers are going to be transferred over to TalkTalk's service soon. TalkTalk also has plans for Blinkbox, which it will be …

Chairman Tom Wheeler of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has confirmed during a CES speech, that the voting on the open Internet order will go ahead on the 26th of February. He also all but confirmed that internet service providers (ISPs) will be reclassified as common carriers under Title II provisions in the Communications Act. This would …

Over the past decade, the tactics used to tackle piracy by copyright lobby groups and copyright holders have changed dramatically. What once saw them taking individual sharers to court and ruining their lives through bankruptcy and more, now has them getting sites blocked by Internet Service Providers, making it a …

Last year Italy dropped the ban hammer on a bunch of different sites, claiming they were heavily involved in media piracy. Some of these were file lockers like Mega, while others were webmail clients like Mail.ru. Since then however, the site owners have been appealing the decision and now after nearly a …

As file sharing has evolved over the past decade, the efforts of lobby groups and studios to stop it have done so too. Back in the day the technique of choice was to sue individual downloaders and uploaders, but that's time consuming and ultimately has little effect on the number …

It seems like I'm not the only one that doesn't want David Cameron censoring the web with his China sponsored pornography filters, as when it comes to new users opting out of them, almost everyone is doing so. In fact, the numbers of people agreeing to the filters are in …

UK based Internet service providers have teamed up with representatives from the entertainment industry to send out alerts to those suspected of piracy. The scheme operates on the assumption that you don't actually know that file sharing copyrighted works is illegal. ISP's will be allowed to send up to four …

Do you know what the government hopes the most about its recently rushed through DRIP legislation? That you'll forget about it. For those that don't know, DRIP, or the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers law, is a bill that was pushed through last week that forces ISPs and in-fact any …

One of the main reasons that rates of piracy are so high in Australia, is because the legal ways of getting access to media are either non-existent, or monopolised and criminally expensive and yet News Corp, one of the company's that ‘suffers' the most from people pirating its shows, is …

At least it looks like the public and open rights groups aren't the only ones that find GCHQ's snooping antics leave a bad taste in their mouth. The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has had its annual award ceremony where it gives props to some of the best and brightest …

The business of blocking websites relating to The Pirate Bay has become old hat in the past year or so. We've seen the original blocked in countries all over Europe and proxies getting the same treatment every few weeks since, but that hasn't made it much harder to get on …

When most internet service providers were faced with an order from their country's respective high court to block torrent search site The Pirate Bay, they gave in and made that site slightly more difficult for their customers to access. Not so in the Netherlands though, where two high profile ISPs, …

The Pirate Bay is one of those dogs that not matter how many times you kick it, it just won't stay down. Despite its owners being in jail, its servers raided at times and massive studio funded lobby groups the world over gunning to take it down, it's still alive …

Net Neutrality is quite a hot topic around the internet based world at the moment, as it seems America and other countries may see the future as a gated community of permissions and access hierarchy and a lot of people aren't happy with it. Similarly, not many people are happy …

The last few years have seen copyright lobbyists turn from targeting individual downloaders in the court room, to going after the sites themselves, by attempting to have them blocked in every country and by every ISP the world over, despite these DNS blocks being exeedingly easy to circumvent. However, the …

Remember those David Cameron porn filters we talked about potentially causing problems for gaming? Well that could already be happening with certain games, most notably League of Legends and its patcher, which contains files that due to their nomenclature contain the word sex and could therefore be blocked by these …

In another classic example of site blocking not achieving its original goals and simultaneously overstepping the mark into the realms of censoring completely legitimate content, Sky's recent blocking of several torrent websites as per UK court orders, ended up also blocking popular image hosting site Imgur over the weekend. penis …

One of the more popular, but overlooked (especially in terms of government sanctioned DNS blocks) ISPs in the UK, Plus.net, has unveiled some new pricing plans for its broadband packages, with pricing that could really take the fight to some of the bigger firms out there. The new deal sees …

‘Quick, look like you're busy,' continues to be the unspoken rule over at media lobbyists like Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) which has continued alongside the BPI to have websites blocked in the UK, because of their links with pirated content – despite the fact that all evidence suggests that …

British telecoms regulator OfCom has announced its intention to push for a law change on current mobile contracts. It wants it to be possible for consumers to leave their mobile, landline or broadband provider mid-contract, if said provider raises prices at all. As it stands, consumers are only allowed to …

In order to prevent the organisation and the individuals behind it from facing financial crisis, Loz Kaye and the other members of the Pirate Party (PPUK) have taken the difficult step to take down the Pirate Bay Proxy, in the face of BPI legal threats. Back at the end of …

An Australian Internet Service Provider (ISP), iiNet, has walked out of talks with copyright lobbyist groups, claiming that it shouldn't have to “perform work on their [copyright holder's] behalf,” and that instead, the real problem behind piracy in the country was down to the limited legal availability of much of the protected …

Talk Talk has been crowned the king of horrible ISPs, after it was announced that it had received the most complaints about its services between Apil and June this year. For every 100,000 customers, it received 42 complaints for its broadband – comparative service Sky, received only 10. It wasn't …

The European Commission has announced it is undergoing a public consultation that aims to look into the “aspects of transparency, traffic management,” with a view to keeping the internet free, and open. Net neutrality is a big issue for campaigners of internet freedom, since it prevents ISPs and other organisations …

This is going to be a tough article for people in the United Kingdom to read because let's be honest, our ISP's generally suck. Even the fastest quoted ISP's such as Virgin Media incorporate hideous packet shaping during the evenings, which can reduce glorious 50mbit lines down to 3-5mbit in …