1Mbit home broadband trial underway

BT's trial of its 1Mbit/sec home broadband service is underway and users who signed up should be getting activated this week. Although the length of the trial is flexible, it is not expected to last much longer than three months, after which, unless there are unforeseen problems, the trail will be converted to a full service. Users who have subscribed to the trial should not notice any difference when this happens. ...more

Hollywood wins DVD cracking lawsuit

The movie industry has won its legal battle to prevent a journalist from publishing links to software that cracks the copy protection on DVDs. New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan yesterday ruled in favour of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which had sought to prevent Eric Corley, publisher of the online hacker magazine 2600.com, from distributing the DVD-cracking program DeCSS. ...more

New Mitchell and Webb Get a Mac ads

Apple has posted six new adverts in its UK 'Get a Mac' campaign. The new ads, which feature award-winning comedians Mitchell and Webb as a PC and a Mac, cover file transfers, networking and ease of set-up. This new run of ads, currently showing on Apple's site (direct link below), plugs many gaps in the initial line-up, which was skewed very much towards the home user. ...more

Music industry threatens legal action to force ISPs to dump p2p traffic

A UK music industry body has called on leading ISPs to take action against p2p file sharing. The Music Business Forum (MBF) has written to BT, Tiscali and NTL, telling them that they have a 'corporate responsibility' to discourage 'illegal downloading'. 'Internet Service Providers have to take their share of responsibility for keeping the traffic on their networks legitimate. ...more

Sun launches two new servers

Sun Microsystems has announced the launch of two new servers. The new machines are based around the UltraSparc T1 processors formerly codenamed 'Niagara' that the company announced last month. The new servers, known as T1000 and T2000 are aimed at filling the racks of ISPs and are claimed to offer both better performance as well as lower power consumption. ...more