Virgin Media looks set to become the first British internet company to crack down on customers who download music illegally.

Record labels are lobbying for a "three strikes" regime that would see those who collect pirated material disconnected from the internet, and the government is expected next month to consult on how such curbs could be legally enforced.
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Music trade body the BPI is working with Virgin on a pilot which could see dozens of customers sent warning letters.

The trial by the UK's largest residential broadband supplier will go live within months and disconnecting customers who ignore warnings, a sanction favoured by the record BPI, remains an option. The trial will also be open to film and television studios.

needinfo writes "A registry hive is a group of keys, subkeys, and values in the registry that has a set of supporting files that contain backups of its data. The registry has gone through very little changes, so if you’re interested in learning more about it, check out “What’s all the buzz about registry hives?”

If you’re not too familiar with the registry and how it works, there are a slew of different companies that would like to sell you a registry cleaner. Do you need to clean your registry? Let’s look at the facts."

The RIAA has now set its sights on Usenet, that decentralized network of discussion groups, some of which happen to host copyrighted material. The cartel filed suit against www.usenet.com, a Usenet access provider, for offering—get this—”essentially the same functionality” as the Groksters of the world. (When was the last time anyone used Grokster? Why don’t we mention BearShare while we’re at it…) Usenet, if you’re not familiar, can be thought of as a giant decentralized message board of sorts, only you can attach files to your posts. That’s the Reader’s Digest version, at least. Since Usenet is sorta hard to figure out and not everyone has access to it (some ISPs give you access as part of your regular Internet subscription), it hasn’t been on the RIAA’s radar. But believe me when I tell you, having used it to “get things” for six years now, it’s the best resource for things out there for the average guy. Not everyone has access to topsites and the like.

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.
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Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.

A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.