Local police in Cambodia have announced that one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has been arrested as a result of an international warrant issued against him last April by his homecountry Sweden.

The country reacted after Warg failed to turn up for the beginning of his 1 year jail sentence for multiple copyright violations.

“His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology,” Cambodia’s police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency.

“We don’t have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we’ll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case,” the spokesman added.

Warg, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and their financier Carl Lundstroem were convicted by a Swedish court for encouraging copyright violations in 2009. Lundstroem, Sunde and Neij each had their 1 year jail sentences reduced following an appeal in 2010. The appeal allowed their sentences to be reduced to between four and ten months. In addition, they were also ordered to pay the music and movie companies almost £4m ($7m) in damages for their copyright violations.

Warg did not attend the appeal with his defence lawyer citing being too ill as his reason. The Swedish court decided to uphold his sentence.

Incidentally, no copyrighted material is actually hosted on the Pirate Bay’s website, it simply acts as a linking site to its users torrent servers where the users themselves store the data.

As of yesterday morning BE Broadband and O2 Broadband were experiencing massive routing issues with a significant portion of traffic. Some websites and services were loading fine, others completely dead. User @bestatus on Twitter was regularly posting updates to the problem until around 4pm yesterday and we’ve had no more updates from them since.

It looks like a major fibre connection has gone down, with BE Broadband’s twitter feed saying:

Services such as Amazon’s AWS (cloud computing) and Sony’s Playstation Network are currently unable to be used if you’re on one of the affected ISPs. We’re monitoring BeThere’s status pages and twitter feed for updates.

Are you or someone you know affected by this? Let us know in the comments below!

Update from BeThere at 10:53 on Tuesday 28th August 2012:

Virgin Media Broadband Outage

Lots of users have been commenting that this evening Virgin Medias broadband and TV on demand service have been unavailable. Twitter is full of people in the Edinburgh area with problems at present.

Phoning 150 from a Virgin landline and then confirming puts the user in a queue that then cuts them off with a “the other person has cleared” message.

Latest updates

20:08: one user reports their Virgin Media Super Hub restarted and now has a completely new firmware and web interface loaded onto it. He reports Internet being back up and online again.

More Updates as they happen.

EFM: Mind blowingly fast connectivity

UPDATE: CONSIDER IT NO LONGER OFFERS EFM AS A STANDARD PRODUCT. EFM IS ONLY UTILISED AS A STOP-GAP WHERE ETHERNET FIBRE CIRCUITS ARE DELAYED. 

Consider IT are pleased to announce their new offering of Ethernet in the First Mile internet connectivity to businesses in and around Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and beyond. Bridges the gap between cheap connections and much more expensive high end Optical Fibre connections. Perfect for businesses with more than 5 concurrent users, or businesses who make heavy use of their internet connection an EFM connection is perfect for your needs.

With prices starting from just £180 per month, Consider IT are one of the most competitive providers of EFM to hit Scotland. Contracts ranging from just 1 year to 3 year mean you’re able to make flexible decisions on your connectivity that are right for your business.

We also guarantee throughput when you receive your quote, meaning that you’ll get at least that speed or you can cancel with no obligation!

For less than £6 a day, your business can get a super fast, symmetrical (meaning both the upload and download speeds are the same),  connection.

Virgin Media along with various other ISPs are now actively blocking the Pirate Bay website. Last week the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, and so the censorship by our country of what websites we are and aren’t allowed to visit begins.

In the order, the judge Mr Justice Arnold told Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2 and Everything Everywhere to begin blocking access to The Pirate Bay.

A sixth ISP, BT, requested “a few more weeks” to consider their position on blocking the site.

Virgin Media said in a statement: “Virgin Media has received an order from the courts requiring it to prevent access to The Pirate Bay in order to help protect against copyright infringement.

“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”

Mr Justice Arnold said in a written judgment in February: “In my judgment, the operators of [The Pirate Bay] do authorise its users’ infringing acts of copying and communication to the public. They go far beyond merely enabling or assisting.

“I conclude that both users and the operators of [The Pirate Bay] infringe the copyrights of the claimants … in the UK.”

Some Edinburgh customers told us they had been affected.

Virgin Media has said that services around the UK are now fully restored following a nationwide failure.

Virgin Media apologised to their customers for Tuesday’s blip and said that the issue had now been fully resolved.

The problems arise just as Virgin Media plans to increase speeds to most of its customers. Over the next 18 months, Virgin Media plans to double most of its customers internet speeds.

If you have still not been able to connect, please try powering down your Cable modem for five minutes and then start it back up and wait a few minutes for the connection to re-establish.

BT has confirmed that a power outage has led to thousands of its customers being offline nationwide. The broadband network went offline this morning, with BT announcing the issue via Twitter.

BT’s customer services team, BT Care, confirmed that there was an ongoing problem with BT Broadband connections. “We’re aware that a number of you are unable to get online … We’re sorry about this & will keep you updated.”

Customers have reported problems from as far afield as Belfast, Edinburgh, Swansea and London