iiNet has been given a huge victory against a long-running lawsuit by the film and TV studios represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT); which included Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warber Bros, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.

The court finding that iiNet's role in giving access to copyright infringers to BitTorrent does not mean that it is authorising the infringement, and is protected by a section of the Copyright Act - known as the "safe harbour" section.

"The mere provision of access to the internet is not an authorisation of infringement," Justice Cowdroy, who served as the judge in the trial, said in his judgement.

""iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement."

"The law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another," he added.

Justice Cowdroy also said that BitTorrent could be used for legal purposes - like Revision3 and BitTorrent itself.

Unlike the Kazza trial, iiNet was not promoting and encouraging infringement - unlike Kazza with its P2P network. Kazza was forced to shut its operations within Australia or face criminal proceedings.

He also said that the proposition of a notification system to notify users of copyright breaches by suspending or terminating their internet service was not reasonable. If that judgement was in favour of AFACT, that would let AFACT be the judge and would force ISPs to suspend or terminate service as they would fear a lawsuit against AFACT.

Justice Cowdroy however said that the Telecommunications Act would not have prevented iiNet from acting on the notices of infringement given to them by AFACT, but this wasn't relevant to the case.

The application was dismissed and AFACT has been ordered to pay the legal costs.

Straight from CES, Intel have announced the WiDi HD. Working over wireless, you can stream your HD media to your television set via a HDMI connection. Your PC will need a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor together with the receiver box which will set you back $100. Intel demonstrated netflix from a laptop with Windows 7 streaming over to a TV.

Netgear will be the first to provide the receiver box for the TV called "Netgear Push2TV PVT1000". The Toshiba Satellite E205 will also be the first laptop to have native Intel  WiDi support.

Google has today written a scathing blog post on the Australian Government’s plan on bringing mandatory ISP level filtering to millions of internet users in Australia, citing a report by three professors that found a wide scope of content that could be blocked under “Refused Classification”.

The report claims that because the RC classification is so broad, content that are socially and politically controversial – like education content on safe drug use – and instructions of crimes, including euthanasia, could be blocked alongside child sexual abuse material.

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Today Google has introduced Google DNS.
Similar to that of OpenDNS, Google DNS is designed to speed up web browsing.
How ever, It is for Public use and not for ISPs to use as they do not have a service-level agreement (SLA) in place. The project is characterized as "experimental".

View Google Code DNS Page

More Information to Follow.

Since the start of 2003, the notorious torrent site The Pirate Bay was launched by a group of friends from Sweden, and became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers out there on the web as it handled more than 25 million peers downloading files from their tracker.

Jump to today, and some news that would likely shock the entire torrent community – The Pirate Bay is saying bye bye to its tracker, since the protocol has now evolved in such a way that makes trackers redundant. It isn’t getting out of the torrent business just yet, however, as it will be adopting trackerless solutions like DHT and PEX as replacements.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay administrators wrote on their blog.

In short, DHT (Distrubuted Hash Table) is just a P2P network that does not need a centralised server in a location allowing them to find peers – in other terms, a computer – to download a file, and most modern BitTorrent clients have this a default option. Using PEX (Peer Exchange), this allows DHT to find more peers on the same network, and therefore makes a centralised server as a tracker pointless.

It will also put up “magnet links”, which are links that allow users to directly download the torrent in your BitTorrent client and not jumping through your browser to open it. And yes, it’s changed its tagline from being the “The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to “The world’s most magnetic BitTorrent site.”

Bioware have posted another video in their timeline series on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website,. It depicts a battle between the Sith and the Jedi which resulted in a draw. The battle was the first major defeat of the Empire’s ships which led to boosted morale in the Galaxy against the Empire, that they could be matched in strength. Several weeks later though, the Empire ordered several hundred ships to destroy what was left of Bothawui. Check it out on the official website.

The Battle of Bothawui

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has threatened the telecommunications industry with a plan to add additional reforms to the Telecommunications Act after an report by the industry’s ombudsman said that there was a massive spike in complaints from customers.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) has said that it received 230,065 complaints from consumers and small businesses during the 2008-2009 financial year, representing a 54 percent increase from the previous year. However, while complaints about billing and payment still topped the list, complaints from mobile phone users rose 79 percent from last year.

“This report is an absolute shocker,” Senator Conroy told Network Ten’s Meet the Press program. “What we have now is a proper reporting framework demonstrating how bad consumers are being treated by their telcos. This goes to the heart of the competition problems in this sector.”

Other areas also saw massive jumps in the number of complaints, including internet (57 percent) and landline (40 percent).

“What we have announced is a bill before Parliament now to try to improve the powers of the ACCC so that they can deal with the lack of competition in this sector; we have announced we want to structurally change the sector by separating out Telstra's wholesale and retail arm, and we want to give more fines and more standards to the consumer service obligations and universal service obligations that exist in the law today," he said.

Conroy has also said that he will sit down with the TIO to work out what it needs to do to crack down and punish companies that continue to mistreat their customers.

There it is folks - a new Wi-Fi type that will be officially support by the Wi-Fi Alliance and is aimed to do one thing - create a devices-to-deivces network without a base station or ad-hoc nonsense.
From the Wi-Fi Alliance website press release:

The specification, previously code-named "Wi-Fi peer-to-peer," can be implemented in any Wi-Fi device, from mobile phones, cameras, printers, and notebook computers, to human interface devices such as keyboards and headphones. Significantly, devices that have been certified to the new specification will also be able to create connections with hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED legacy devices already in use. Devices will be able to make a one-to-one connection, or a group of several devices can connect simultaneously.

"Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available," said Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa

Wi-Fi Direct will provide more speed and security then Bluetooth but will be a drainer on power supplies. It will allow for Wifi communication between multiple device without the need for a wireless base station. The Alliance hopes to make it industry standard by mid-late 2010.