Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.

The Diamond Plan, which includes 20 connections (plus SSL, which is sorta unnecessary, but whatever) and unlimited monthly bandwidth. That’s usually $30 per month.

Giganews is sorta the Ric Flair of Usenet access, which is sorta weird since it’s only 11 years old. (Usenet itself predates the Bronze Age.)

For the record, I use Newdemon. I pretty much live in alt.binaries.hdtv.x264. True story!

Don’t expect every country in Europe to follow France in implementing a “three strikes” anti-piracy laws. A report called Digital Britain, which assess the UK’s preparedness to enter the digital era, will be published next week, and inside are methods that the UK could use to combat Internet piracy. One such method: slowing down the Internet connection of file-sharers so as to prevent them from effectively downloading illegal content. (Though, if my UK acquaintances are telling the truth, broadband in the UK is garbage to begin with. It’d be like telling a slug to slow down.)

Slowing people down is one option, rather than just cutting people off from the Internet altogether, which is something the EU doesn’t support. The Government there, now less a few Blairites, sees Internet access as being as important as something like running water.

Also in the report: a demand that ISPs cooperate when copyright infringement is found. You know, sending letters to customers saying, “Yeah, we found out that you were downloading Premier League games, and now the FA and Sky Sports are breathing down our necks. Knock it off.”

Of course, that’ll open up ISPs to all sorts of nastiness. “If they can catch people downloading episodes of “Lost,” why can’t they spot people who are looking at terrorism sites, teasing Gordon Brown, etc.?”

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