In a bizarre turn of events Virgin Media has joined forces with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to harass customers that the BPI claims have illegally downloaded music tracks using Virgin’s Broadband service.

Up to 800 warning letters have been sent out to customers by Virgin with the warning “if you don’t read this your broadband could be disconnected”. The letter is part of a wider ‘three strikes and your out’ campaign by the BPI and has left some Virgin customers scratching their heads wondering whether they are paying Virgin Media for an internet service or a ‘re-education’ programme.

The move has been widely criticised, with some talking about ‘a PR disaster’ and ‘biting the hand that feeds it’. Whilst other ISP’s, including the Carphone Warehouse, have sent the BPI away with a flea in it’s ear, Virgin appears to have readily ‘offered-up’ it’s customers, sparking more privacy fears and concerns over loyalty.

This latest debacle comes as yet another blow to Virgin Media’s reputation following the Phorm fiasco, in which it was revealed that Virgin planned to sell its customers browsing history to the advertising company Phorm, Inc.

Whatever Virgin Media’s intentions, this appears to be advertising gold for the UK’s other ISP’s.

A user on the digitalspy forums has successful upgraded the hard disk in his V+ box. The Poster known as jamjam has extended the recording time from 80 hours to an astonishing 400 hours.

The stock 160gb hard drive was replaced with a new Seagate 750GB Ultra IDE Drive (Model No. ST3750640A). From the forum discussion it appears that the upgrade was relatively straightforward, and simply involved physical removal the old drive and replacement with the new drive. Jamjam reported that on first boot the V+ box automatically reformatted the new drive without any user input - which has been working perfectly since. The only minor niggle is that the V+ menu only displays 80 hours of available space after upgrade, although this number only decreases to 79 hours after 5 hours have been recorded. It would seem that V+ calculates the number of free hours based on the percentage of free disk space.

Check out the details here.

Please note that V+ users do not own their V+ boxes. V+ boxes remain property of Virgin Media, therefore this is one of those ‘do not try this at home’ upgrades.

This coming week sees the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, and the most eagerly anticipated announcement has to be the new iPhone (the iPhone 2.0).

According to MacRumors the second generation iPhone is expected to adopt 3G for faster internet access, along with a number of ground breaking features. These could include a forward facing camera for video calls and a GPS receiver for satellite navigation. As always there has been much speculation as to the design of the new iPhone, with a number of ‘leaked’ photos circulating the Internet.
With the actual launch expected to be sometime in late June or July in the US, UK users are left wondering about possible launch dates in the UK and whether it will be long after the US launch. Many have speculated that it’s likely to be soon after the US because of its predecessors popularity.

On a personal level the first iPhone has been such an amazing buy (despite the critics views) that I can’t wait to get my hands on the iPhone 2.0. I may even consider switching to O2 and signing up on a contract (I currently use an unlocked iPhone on Vodafone). My only gripe is the duration of the existing O2 contracts, which appear to be around 18 months (far too long). Either way it seems extremely unlikely that second iPhone will be made available on any other network, at least to being with.