• Ofcom reports surge in UK mobile broadband take-up [mobileeurope.co.uk]
• Residents "own" last-mile in Canadian broadband trial [computerworld.com.au]
• Mobile Operators Must Get Mobile Broadband Strategy Right, Says AdaptiveMobile [techwhack.com]
• World’s First Solution for Targeted Advertising over Mobile TV on display at IBC 2008 [itbsoftware.com]
• 'Immature' Infineon chip blamed for iPhone woes [pcadvisor.co.uk]
• India to Account for Nearly 20 Percent of Global WiMAX Subscribers by 2012 [techwhack.com]
• The International Olympic Committee Joins the DMCA Censorship Club [techdirt.com]
• "Tested Virus Free" seals mean nothing as AVG, Avast ring alarms [theinquirer.net]

Say the phrase “Swedish BitTorrent” and people will automatically assume that you’re talking about The Pirate Bay. However, a new company in the country (called Headweb) is aiming to take business away from the big giant by providing legal, DRM-free movie downloads.

Given that bands make the majority of their money from touring and merchandising, it's not too surprising to see many of them interested in using broadband to deliver their music directly to fans. British rockers Radiohead tomorrow will release their new album In Rainbows, and have e-mailed customers to note that the tracks will be in MP3 format and DRM free.

Users in our security forum discuss how Sony's latest attempt at DRM prevents some DVDs from being played -- even on some Sony DVD players. Several new Sony DVDs come with the protection, which Wired News suggests is a rehash of an old (and already compromised) DRM system named ARccOS. This blogger was told by Sony that it's up to the end-user to upgrade the firmware on their DVD players.

Techdirt chimes in on the DRM Panel at this week's Tech Policy Summit. The panel was apparently stacked against consumers (and common sense), much like the FTC's recent broadband workshop (Gigi Sohn representing consumers at both events). Though scattered reports keep insisting that there's an anti-DRM sea change occurring, the same stale rhetoric seems to indicate otherwise (ex: DRM "opens up new business models"). "Pretty much the entire industry has simply decided that DRM is the only way to make money -- even with repeated examples of why that's simply not true," notes Techdirt's Masnick.

Long before Sony's rootkit DRM there was Starforce, a stealth driver installing copy-protection scheme we discussed at length after our users began to complain about it. Since then, some users have decided to Boycott any games that use the controversial protection scheme. While writing about the boycott yesterday, Boing Boing called the software "Anti-copying malware."

That apparently didn't sit well with the software's makers, who wrote Boing Boing to inform them they planned to sue the blog for harassment, and had filed a complaint with the FBI. A Dennis Zhidkov, PR-manager for the company, writes the following:

"Dear Sir, calling StarForce "Anti-copying malware" is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now.

An interesting guide to DRM in online music has been posted by the folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. " In this brave new world of "authorized music services," law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing."

P2P site Slyck interviews Jon Johansen (aka DVD Jon), who first developed De_CSS at 16 years of age (receiving an award from the EFF) , and has perpetually been a thorn in the side of DRM developers (particularly Apple). Johansen says he's preserving the "copyright balance", and says those who believe that the iTunes DRM is a "good compromise" have "naively bought into the impending doom propaganda."