Another week in Tech has flown by as we head into December and the inevitable Christmas rush. This week we’ve had the good, the bad and the down-right ugly rear their heads in the world of consumer technology.

In a break from tradition we’ll start with the bad. Virgin Media announced this week that it would be  snooping into 40% of it’s customers traffic using a technology called CView, which conducts Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in an effort to determine the rate of music piracy across it’s network. Yes that’s right, Virgin is going to examine everything that goes to and from your computer if you happen to be in the lucky 40%. What does this really mean? Well if you’re pirating music across an unencrypted network like BitTorrent, VM will know and what they’ll do about it is unknown. Virgin are set to launch a music service in conjunction with Universal and their official line is that they want to gauge piracy levels. I don’t know about you, but piracy or not, I don’t want people snooping at everything I do or send across the Internet including email, IM, Waves and surfing. Maybe it’s time to protect yourself by changing providers or using a SSL tunnel to a proxy you trust. (more…)

It’s that time again, time to review some of my cherry picked smaller stories of the week for those that might have missed them. This time round we’ve got an Adobe Flash update that doesn’t suck. OK, sucks a little less. Flash 10.1 beta was unleashed to the willing public with GPU video acceleration for certain Nvidia cards on Windows, but perhaps more importantly reduced CPU usage across all platforms. What does this mean? YouTube that doesn’t make your Mac or PC red-line that’s what. A step in the right direction Adobe, maybe Flash isn’t a lost cause after all. I’ve certainly seen some improvements on my netbook and Mac. (more…)

Pirate Bay has been sold to Global Gaming Factory X for $7.8m, who will take charge in August. Having also purchased ‘p2p 2.0′ software company Peerialism, many are saying that Pirate Bay is going the way of Napster V2.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Global Gaming Factory CEO Hans Pandeya.

TPB blog had this to say:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

It’ll be interesting whether this new approach works and whether it will be business as usual for TPB.

[Via Engadget]