Yesterday at 11:30am, the Queen made her way to Parliament in a coach, entered the robing room to receive her crown, then followed someone known as the "Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod" to the door of the House of Commons. The Gentlemen Usher banged thrice upon the door with his black rod, was allowed to enter, and headed to the Table of the House to "announce the Queen's summons." The Queen, seated on her throne, then opened Parliament with her customary speech.

Though it sounds like something straight out of the 1570s, this is pomp and circumstance, 21st century style. The ritual opening of the Parliament was tweeted on the official "ukparliament" account, transcripts went up immediately on the Web, an official Flickr photo set captured the magic—and the Queen's speech made clear that legislative action against Internet file-swappers would be coming, and soon.

Nearly half of the report simply reviews what the smart grid entails, specifically from the consumer perspective. In general terms, a smart meter, combined with smart appliances and other hardware, will allow consumers to obtain fine-grained information about their energy use patterns, and exercise a greater degree of control over them. As the report notes, this can have a wide variety of positive consequences, from more efficient use of energy resources to lowered electric bills. So the general message is that concerns about privacy shouldn't derail plans to deploy smart grids.

We now have the full legal theory behind BlueBeat.com's attempt to sell remastered Beatles tracks online for a quarter each. It's so odd that the federal judge overseeing a music industry lawsuit against the site decided he didn't even need to hold the hearing scheduled for tomorrow. Instead, he blasted BlueBeat's "psycho-acoustic modeling" defense and extended his temporary injunction into something more permanent.

In an strange deposition that covers all sorts of ground completely unrelated to the lawsuit (and is littered with typos), BlueBeat founder Hank Risan told the court last week that the songs for sale on his site are totally new recordings that he created and that he in fact owns the copyrights on. This is possible thanks to the wonder of psycho-acoustic simulation, which Risan describes this way:

The Federal Trade Commission has charged those behind the shady online check service Qchex with contempt, and wants daily fines imposed on them until they give up the ghost. The group has launched a new site—a Qchex clone—with the same questionable policies that made Qchex a "dinner bell for fraudsters." This has left the FTC fuming, and it wants the site's operators to quit helping criminals rip people off—now.

You may remember Qchex from a court order earlier this year—in February, a US District Court ordered the company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up its ill-gotten gains. It turns out that the check creation and delivery service failed to implement safeguards to prevent fraud, a point that the FTC had brought up back in 2006. Qchex apparently created and sent checks drawn from any old bank account without verifying that the person requesting the check was the owner of said accounts. Unsurprisingly, this made Qchex a shining beacon for scammers from around the globe who used the service to steal money from people's accounts, using those same checks to pay for various goods and services.

At the Internet Governance Forum meeting here in Egypt, a session on critical Internet resources started with yet another discussion of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. This time, talk turned to paying for the upgrade to IPv6—a real issue in poorer countries.

Rod Beckstrom, the head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number (ICANN), offered his own novel approach to the problem: a worldwide "cash for clunkers" program targeted at old networks.

While the US talks, other countries are acting. Both Finland and Spain have now decided to add "broadband" to their universal service requirements. By 2011, any Finn or Spaniard, no matter where they live, should be able to get a reliable 1Mbps connection at a reasonable price.

"Universal service": it's a common concept in developed countries, and it provides money to telephone operators and other utilities to ensure that service is extended even to places where it would not otherwise be profitable, and that prices remain reasonable. As broadband increasingly becomes an essential utility, members of Congress and US regulators at the FCC have pondered how some form of basic connectivity might be extended to every American address through the Universal Service Fund.

Peer-to-peer filesharing applications have been wildly popular, especially among those interested in accessing pirated software, music, and media. But not everyone who operates a P2P client knows how to properly configure the software, and some clients may share entire directories unless explicitly directed not to. Apparently, some government employees have exhibited this sort of carelessness, as private and secret government documents have shown up on P2P networks. Now, at least one Congressman has had enough, and has introduced a bill that would ban the use of P2P software by government employees.

The Congressman in question is Edolphus Towns of New York, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a statement announcing the bill's introduction, Towns highlights a number of embarrassing incidents in which sensitive government files showed up on P2P networks. These include schematics for the Presidential helicopter and the location of a first-family safe house, as well as the financial records of a Supreme Court Justice.

Back in October, the US Commerce Department changed its agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Out went the "Joint Project Agreement" and in came the "Affirmation of Commitments." That may not sound like much of change, but the new document removed even more US control from ICANN.

It was welcomed by the international community, but some continue to argue that it didn't go far enough, and this opposition to continued US influence over the domain name system and IP addressing surfaced again at the United Nations-backed Internet Governance Forum going on this week in Egypt.

Internet commenters aren't generally known for their eloquence and impeccable manners. Still, people's tasteless little one-offs are relatively harmless most of the time—until the comment police happen across your note and contact your employer. That's what happened to one unlucky commenter posting to the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (of all places), where a poorly chosen vulgarity eventually led to the loss of his job.

The Post-Dispatch had posted a story last Friday on its blog about the "craziest thing you've ever eaten." You're all geeks, so we're guessing that your minds are going all sorts of places. So were the commenters on that post. Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media for the Post-Dispatch who had made the post, noticed that one commenter had posted a "single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy" (let your imagination run wild). The comment was deleted, but this particular user must have been enthused about his cunning lingual abilities, as he went back minutes later to post it a second time.

Imagine that you visit Restaurants.com and purchase a gift card for a friend. During the checkout process, a screen asks if you want to save ten dollars on the purchase you just made, and it shows a single "Continue" button, as though this is just one more step in the process. On the next page, you are offered information about some kind of discount club that will give you cash back on the purchase you just made, and there's a box for entering your e-mail address. You do so, thinking to yourself, "What can they do with my e-mail address, right? I'll at least get some more information on what this is all about, or maybe I'll sign up for this free trial. Can't hurt, since they don't have my payment info."

You think nothing of it for months until, on one rainy Saturday, you look more closely at your credit card statement and wonder why you're being charged $12 a month? Digging through your previous statement, it's clear that the mysterious charge recurs monthly, and has been going on since you purchased that gift certificate.

As the wireless industry makes its case for more spectrum licenses, it's facing stiff opposition from television broadcasters who warn that any reallocation of the band would be "terrible public policy." TV brings "vast efficiencies to our national communications infrastructure," eight broadcast groups led by Sinclair Media told the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, "through their ability to serve 'one to many' in small bandwidth segments, and those efficiencies cannot be achieved in any other way."

Ditto, add a slew of state broadcasting associations. "It would be a sad irony if, in response to false warnings of a looming broadband spectrum crisis," dozens of them wrote to the FCC, "the Commission were to abort free, over the air, digital television service, which provides the most obvious savings of disposable income that consumers might use to adopt broadband."

The Pirate Bay's BitTorrent tracker is down for good—but that's by design.

The Pirate Bay has been intermittently unavailable for last few months as copyright holders have pressured its various ISPs to cut off service to the site in the wake of Swedish court decisions against the site's operators. Even though BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer network, it relies on .torrent files that are typically hosted on trackers—and The Pirate Bay's tracker was one of the largest. When the site was down, the tracker was compromised, and the crew behind the Bay decided that the system relied too much on a single point of failure.

Verizon and AT&T are playing out their 3G coverage spat in court, with Verizon asserting that "the truth hurts" when it comes to AT&T's 3G coverage. Verizon's statement is just the latest in the legal battle that started earlier this month when AT&T filed a lawsuit over Verizon's "There's a Map for That" ad campaign—the gloves are off, and it's clear that both companies are willing to go to great lengths to push their own marketing agendas.

If these two companies were five-year-olds, AT&T would be screaming "VERIZON STARTED IT!" The network began running ads in October—meant to directly target Apple's and AT&T's "There's an App for That" ads—that showed a Verizon coverage map next to AT&T's. Verizon's map showed significantly more 3G coverage, and the ad stated "There's a Map for That" with the implication that AT&T's devices are no good if you can't get any coverage out in the middle of Podunk City, Iowa. The ads even stated flat out that AT&T's customers were "out of touch" where 3G coverage wasn't available. Oh snap, Verizon!

In our coverage of debates over the Federal Communications Commission's authority to enforce its proposed Internet nondiscrimination rules, we've taken a look at pro and con arguments over whether Congress gave the agency net neutrality powers. But the question of statutory authority isn't the only challenge facing the FCC's suggested regulations—rules that would sanction ISPs for discriminating against applications and require transparency in their network management practices.

Critics also argue that US incidents where ISPs engaged in questionable network behavior have been so few that setting up tougher standards amounts to "regulation by anecdote."