74 Democrats signed a joint letter to the FCC supporting internet throttling by Verizon, ATT and Comcast. Throttling lets carriers slow or block internet traffic. This is a clear attack on net neutrality.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just endorsed net neutrality.

"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced its orders on Comcast, a major high-speed internet provider, to halt their practice of throttling selected peer-to-peer file sharing traffic.

"The fight for net neutrality is intensifying with the recent confirmation that Comcast and other internet providers are restricting BitTorrent traffic. ‘Net neutrality’ is the basic principal that all traffic on the internet should be transmitted equally. Unfortunately, corporations like Comcast believe that they should be able to slow down or block certain types of traffic while accelerating other types (including their own)..."

"A California man filed suit in state court Tuesday against internet service provider Comcast, arguing that the company's secret use of technology to limit peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent violates federal computer fraud laws, their user contracts and anti-fraudulent advertising statutes..."

Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.

"WASHINGTON -- Today, the Federal Communications Commission published an enforcement order punishing Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, for blocking Internet users' access to legal online content and services. The order, approved by a bipartisan majority on Aug.

For those savvy enough to have switched over to Linux, this step-by-step guide will prove once again that Linux really does offer users almost complete control over their OS.

"The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission yesterday sharply questioned Internet service providers who control consumers' Web access over their networks, and suggested the agency could intervene against the practice. Kevin J. Martin made his remarks at an unusual off-site hearing to address complaints that cable provider Comcast restricts the flow of content -- such as video and music clips -- through file-sharing service BitTorrent..."

The world of free software is full of amazing and even heroic stories (the gcc toolkit for its quality and flexibility, Linux and free desktops for their size and sheer ambition, Samba and Mono for their tenacity at keeping up with confusing quasi-standards) but one of my favorite recent stories is the opening of the iPhone.