AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market -- something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL's employees, or about 2,300 workers.

The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site's visitors into little P2P cash cows. So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they're officially shutting down the site's tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they're not shutting the site down however -- they'll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution: story continues..

Last week we noted how Verizon had started working with the RIAA to send letters to Verizon users who traded copyrighted files, though the company still doesn't plan to divulge user identities to the entertainment industry. Verizon also doesn't appear willing to engage in the industry's dream scenario of booting repeat offenders off of their network. In a follow up piece, CNET notes that Verizon has also struck a new letter notification agreement with the major film studios and the MPAA. Contrary to what CNET seems to believe, Verizon has sent DMCA infringement notifications to their users on behalf of Fox and other companies in the past, so it's not clear just how expanded this new effort will be (Verizon isn't commenting).

GigaOM directs our attention to an interesting video interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who dissects Netflix's role as the premier application for broadband. Hastings discusses how the future for Netflix is bright, given the tendency to embed every consumer device with a $10 Wi-Fi chipset, and the fact that bandwidth prices continue to drop. He doesn't get into specific bandwidth costs for the Netflix streaming service, but he cites the fact that "Moore's law is an amazing thing" in a world where Amazon now charges 5 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth and you can transfer a movie for about a nickel. "What's fueling the whole system is the end users, who are paying $40-$60 to their ISP, and that's funding the whole system," says Hastings.

Over the years we've seen no limit of specialized hardware, software or other gadgetry promising to defeat the laws of physics and speed up your Internet connection above and beyond its basic capabilities. From the "Juice Boosted" scam to Earthlink's latest absurd acceleration ploy, by and large these are all snake oil. Even well-intentioned ideas to deploy new, faster protocols 99.4% of the time wind up being little more than blistering hype. With that in mind, Google today issued a post over at the Chrome blog claiming they were working on a new protocol they insist could double the speed of everyday browsing: story continues..