provider

Is your Internet provider as fast as its rivals? A new Netflix page could provide the answer.

Launched today, the site's ISP Speed Index page displays the performance of certain ISPs in the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. As such, it doesn't cover the entire world but simply those countries where Netflix is available.

In the U.S., Google Fiber took the top spot with an average speed of 3.35 megabits per second. Cablevision's Optimum service was No. 2 with a speed of 2.35Mbps, followed by Suddenlink, Cox, … Read more

The Swedish police seem to be going straight to the source in their battle against copyright infringement. According to Forbes, the country's authorities raided the Stolckholm-based Web host PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet, including the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, and the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central.

It's unclear why police raided PRQ, but its owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24 that he believes the investigation had to do with intellectual property violations, according to TorrentFreak. Viborg also … Read more

Today, technology giant Microsoft and Chinese Internet service provider PPTV signed a partnership deal that will bring a new Web TV service to Microsoft's Windows Azure platform.

The deal, Microsoft's first cloud-based collaboration with a local Chinese new media company, will see PPTV's Asia TV Networks (ATN) launched using Azure as its core infrastructure, while the two companies have also agreed to explore further opportunities to work together in online TV and other areas.

ATN is intended as a "local showcase" for subscription online television, according to PPTV. Content can be uploaded by global content … Read more

Last month it was blog users, this month it's blog owners. The Chinese government announced today that it will tighten restrictions on all Internet service providers for blogs, microblogs, and online forums -- forcing them to act as Web police, according to the Associated Press.

This is just the latest in a long list of restrictions that the government is enforcing on its citizens. According to the Associated Press, China began requiring real-name registration on all microblogs in December. However, people still seem to be sneaking under the radar.

The new restrictions entail making the Internet providers act as … Read more

Twitter has had enough of TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, Troption, and Justinlover. So much so, that the microblogging site filed a suit against these five tool providers and spammers in San Francisco's federal court this morning.

"Our engineers continue to combat spammers' efforts to circumvent our safeguards, and today we're adding another weapon to our arsenal: the law," Twitter announced on its blog today. "With this suit, we're going straight to the source."

By working to shut down these tool providers, Twitter hopes to stop other spammers from using those tools. The tools function … Read more

WASHINGTON, DC--A Federal Communications Commission official defended his agency's controversial proposal to require broadband providers to report glitches, arguing that it would help with cybersecurity and network reliability.

"We don't get any data at all on some of the most pressing problems," Jeffery Goldthorp, the FCC's associate bureau chief for cybersecurity and homeland security, said yesterday at the Online Trust Alliance's conference here yesterday.

In May, the FCC announced that it wanted more data from broadband providers, saying it "would enable the FCC to track and analyze information on outages affecting 911 service … Read more

Yahoo would pay up to $2 billion to acquire Hulu if the deal came with four or five years of exclusive access to current TV shows and older movies, according a story in yesterday's Business Insider.

Citing a "source familiar with Yahoo's M&A plans," Business Insider said that Hulu's owners would have to guarantee the exclusive access before Yahoo's corporate development people would present such a deal to their board of directors.

However, that type of deal may be tough to swing.

Hulu's owners have reportedly been willing to offer the … Read more

As part of a plan to discourage customers from pirating films and music, some of the country's largest bandwidth providers announced last week that they will take punitive action against customers repeatedly caught in the act.

So far, most of the attention has been on the potential impacts to Internet users, but now some are asking how the major Hollywood film studios and four top record companies were able to convince the Internet service providers to take part. For years, executives from AT&T and Verizon have argued that enforcing copyright was up to the content creators and … Read more

A partnership announced today between big entertainment companies and some of the nation's largest Internet service providers will not mean the end of online piracy. To be sure, the parties involved know this.

The most savvy tech users and dedicated file sharers will continue to pirate content and perhaps there isn't any way to stop them. But the hope of Hollywood film studios and the four largest record companies is that the participating ISPs, which include Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, can help discourage mainstream Internet users from sharing content illegally over the Web.

The participating … Read more