A web chat involving the band Bloc Party on August 18 led to the shock announcement that the band’s new album would be “rush-released” within three days as a legal music download on the band’s official website. After freaking out their fans, Bloc Party came good on their promise and, sure enough, on August 21, the album Intimacy was available for music download for the princely sum of a fiver.

The band made the decision to offer the quickly released music download because the boys are apparently bored and “dispirited” by the way most albums are released today. The album was finished about six months ago and Kele Okereke and co saw no reason to wait any longer before fans could legally get themselves a copy of the nw material.

Critics have been all over the album, mostly praising Bloc Party’s solid offering of 10 brand-new tracks. Bloc Party follow in the footsteps of bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who have all played with the model of releasing albums as legal music downloads.

The filesharing community in the UK is rocked. It was recently announced that entertainment companies are going after thousands of people suspected of using filesharing services to share music, games and videos. One London-based law firm is set to seek permission for ISPs to release the details of 7,000 filesharing offenders.

These users could then be taken to court and face hefty fines if convicted. Davenport Lyons, the firm in question, is the same firm behind the landmark ruling that a UK woman must pay the equivalent of $32,000 for uploading the game Dream Pinball 3D to filesharing networks. This is a major step up in the battle against illegal filesharing and it should have a lot of Internet users in the UK extremely worried.

Britain is getting tough on filesharing and there is very little anybody can do to stop it. The ISPs have already given in and the government supports the new measures, so all that is left is for the entertainment industry to wield its axe and wreak havoc.

Sending SMS messages is so early 2000s. Sending messages via social networking applications as become much more fashionable. Which is a shame really, because SMS is fairly instant. What if you could combine the two: wouldn’t that be really great!? Well wonder no more because the latest of the of the iPhone apps to really blow my mind is here: iPling.

To the uninitiated iPling is ‘another’ social networking application. To those in the know it is a new way of getting your social networking fix. Naturally, being involved with Apple and iPhone apps, iPling is sexy and innovative.

Once you’ve made your profile you have the change to go around and tag it with keywords and ‘colors’. Once you’ve done this the iPling engine analysis you and your information and puts you in a iPling ‘circle’. You can send SMS messages to people within this circle.

Fortunately iPling is among the many iPhone apps that take your security really rather seriously and all SMS messaging is done completely anonymously.

You will not find iPling with the other iPhone apps in the iPhone apps store, so don’t go looking for it there. This is only sold on the iPling website. Go and get it! Maybe we’ll be chatting soon!

There’s an interesting article on Guardian website at the moment that looks into how filesharing really does know no boundaries. As soon as a program is first aired, be it in the UK, the US or elsewhere, the filesharing networks can get hold of it and make it available for people to download. This infuriates the TV industry as when the show eventually airs around the world, people have already seen it, leading to lower audience figures and lower DVD sales.

Why is it, then, that major movies can be simultaneously released all over the world, but TV bosses can’t do the same for their shows? Would it be so hard to have the BBC linking up with ABC and linking up with a US network? The TV industry seems even further behind the times than the music industry. You can’t blame the people because they just want to watch the shows, but when they’re made to wait several months, why wouldn’t they download and use filesharing networks? There’s no other way to watch the show.

Comcast has revealed that it is going to slow down the Internet speeds of certain users in a bid to free up some of the bandwidth that some subscribers are hogging. Comcast has come under fire a lot recently over allegations that the ISP has been tampering with traffic to filesharing protocol BitTorrent. Comcast has now been ordered to release information about all its practises, especially related to filesharing traffic.

By targeting certain Internet users, who could see their connections slow for between 10 and 20 minutes at a time, Comcast is trying to avoid legal trouble. Comcast did vow to leave all BitTorrent traffic alone, but it was never made clear if the same would be true of regular filesharing traffic. Vague statements have done nothing to clear up the mess.

There is also no news on exactly when Comcast is going to start slowing down people’s connections, but if your download speed suddenly drops off for 20 minutes, now you’ll know why.

A woman in the UK has been ordered to pay 16,000 pounds for sharing a videogame over filesharing networks. While most of the stories with regards to filesharing in the UK are related to illegal music downloads, this is a case of videogame downloads being thrust into the spotlight.

The danger for filesharing advocates is that this could open up the posibiilty of thuosands more lawsuit for people accused of using filesharing services to share videogames, movies and other copyrighted material.

The woman has to pay 6,000 pounds to the owner of the game Dream Pinball 3D. The other six grand is for court costs. There is something of a filesharing crackdown going on in the UK at the moment as the UK’s top-six ISPs have pledged to restrict the Internet speeds of people who persitently violate copyright laws by using filesharing programs such as Limewire and Ares.

We like to be ahead of the times now and then. This week, it’s emerged that Nintendo is feeling the pinch because of a little device known as the R4 Revolution. In Thailand, we’ve had the R4 available in malls and shops for a long time. It’s old news, but apparently people in the US are just picking up on it.

Basically, it’s a device that means you never have to buy another Nintendo DS game again. It works – with every game. You use filesharing services to get your games and then you download them. Slap them on a tiny memory stick and you can have as many games on a cart as your memory device can handle. Not that we do this, of course, but this is what we’ve heard.

Filesharing sites have been full of Nintendo DS roms for ages. We’re surprised it’s taken this long for the global media to pick up on this little filesharing snippet. Nintendo hasn’t gone after the filesharing services, but rather, the people marketing and exporting the R4. Good luck with that one.

It seems as if everyone is cashing in – or not – on the whole free music download thing. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay have all experimented with the idea, but it took Keane to come along and just do the exact same thing without really giving any reason for doing so. Much in the same way as band’s music is just plain dull, so came the announcement that the band’s new single, “Spiralling”, would be released as a free music download.

About 500,000 happy Keane fans got their digital hands on the track, leading to high expectations for the band’s new album, Perfect Symmetery. Who knows, perhaps Keane will come with such innovative ideas as using holographic images of the lads on the album’s artwork.

We’re not really keen on Keane, but it is a positive thing to see more bands giving away free music. We can’t wait for some more good bands to take up the initiative, though.

Yes! She’s back again. Jammie Thomas is one name that we just will never be able to forget. The world’s most famous filesharing user, who last year was ordered to pay $222,000 for sharing a handful of songs, may see her case thrown out of court. This is the kind of light at the end of the tunnel that has seemed so far off for Jammie Thomas, a single mum from Brainerd.

The case may be thrown out of court because the judge was not aware of a precedent in a prior case. The prior case stated that making a track available for filesharing is not a violation of copyright laws. In Jammie’s case, the judge told the jury that it is.

The argument from Jammie’s side is that there is nothing to prove that the songs were shared with anyone other than the record companies who were snooping on her. This would be a major blow for the music industry after using this landmark case to make an example of the filesharing community.

There are heaps of Russian websites out there offering cheap music downloads, but now there is one a Chinese service trying to get a piece of the pie, supposedly offering legal music downloads for knockdown prices. The Chinese websites has teamed up with an American partner. The price of each track? 3 cents. That’s a heck of a lot less than most music websites.

www.wa3.cn offers more than one million songs from international artists in genres such as pop, hip hop, dance, rock, blues and country. There are popular and underground artists included on the roster.

You basically pay the equivalent of about $3 and then get 88 music downloads. How this works, we have no idea. At the moment, you have to live in China to take advantage of the service. It’s anybody’s guess whether this is totally legit. And with music downloads so cheap, it kind of begs the question as to why anyone would even bother. No word on if this will be thrown open to other countries.