AUSTRALIA'S largest privately owned broadband services provider, Internode, has been snapped up by ISP iiNet for $105 million.

The acquisition of South Australia-based Internode will add approximately 190,000 broadband subscribers to iiNet's customer base to cement the Perth-based provider as the nation's second largest DSL provider and the third-largest supplier of fixed-line broadband services in Australia.
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UPDATE (TechDirt):

Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.
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Cyber activists supporting Anonymous have passionately sought to punish the corruption they see in authority – from digital security firms to big corporations to, now, banks themselves. A hacker splinter group called TeaMp0isoN says it has partnered with supporters of the extremely loose-knit network of hacktivists and pranksters, to steal credit cards from several banks including Chase, Bank of America and CitiBank and give the money to charities and “the 99%.” ...

The student newspaper of the University of Cambridge has published a new interview with Valve founder Gabe Newell, in which the mastermind behind Half-Life and Steam shares his thoughts on digital distribution, region-locking, and piracy.
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Some developers choose to prevent piracy outright, often frustrating legitimate buyers in the process. In the case of ArmA developer Bohemia Interactive, they instead chose to toy with the pirates, creating an experience that would degrade overtime into an unplayable mess. Is piracy really still so widespread though? According to CEO Marek Španěl, they are recording a staggering 100 pirates for every three legitimate purchasers.
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Skyrim is currently the most popular game on Steam by a huge margin.

The stat tracker on Valve's digital download service now shows that the new Elder Scrolls game reached a peak of 274,410 simultaneous users in the past 24 hours, or more than double the number of users playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
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