Bittorrent

Sunday's  Game of Thrones  third season premiere on HBO generated about 1 million downloads from BitTorrent users within 24 hours of its premiere. And with a record 160,000 users sharing pirated copies, the series is poised to become the most downloaded program of 2013, according to  TorrentFreak .

Fueled by Netflix, which accounted for a 33 percent bandwidth share, North American Internet data usage spiked 120 percent in the last year, according to the latest research from Sandvine. Data culled from a selection of 200-plus Sandvine customers throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and Asia-Pacific, revealed "mean monthly data usage has increased by 120 percent."

Comcast succeeded in quashing four subpoenas that had been filed by adult film companies that wanted the cable MSO to identify 88 of its high-speed Internet subscribers who are accused of downloading copyrighted porn videos through BitTorrent's file-sharing servers.

Comcast is fighting subpoenas demanding that it identify 88 of its high-speed Internet subscribers who have been accused of downloading porn through file-sharing service BitTorrent.