Update below. Cable-TV and Internet provider Comcast is fighting back against customers who are rampant file sharers, TorrentFreak says. Reportedly the broadband Internet service provider has slowly ramped up monitoring of peer-to-peer network traffic, and now, using traffic-management services, it's preventing BitTorrent users from connecting to anyone outside the Comcast network. This would almost be commendable if its motivation was to crack down on piracy, but TorrentFreak suggests that Comcast is just being cheap. One anonymous Internet engineer says that just because you pay for a connection, doesn't mean you actually get to abuse it. Or, some might say, actually get to use it. What's next? Policing online-video sites, or bandwidth-intensive real-time videogames? You get what you pay for — except when you don't.

Since CNBC interviewed me about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the famous series, leaking onto the internets, there have been further developments. Scholastic, Potter's U.S. publisher, is threatening legal action against DeepDiscount.com, an e-commerce website which only started selling books five months ago. While it appears DeepDiscount.com did break Scholastic's embargo, it's not clear that the copies — photographs of pages, really — leaked onto file-sharing networks actually came from the online retailer. Not that any of this will hurt sales, as I told CNBC, of course. Most people don't dress their kids up in wizard costumes and stay up until midnight to download torrents. And the few dorky enough to do that placed their "Potter" pre-orders on Amazon.com months ago. (Video from CNBC)

Glossy music magazine Blender has named Apple CEO Steve Jobs to the top of the Powergeek 25, its list of the top 25 people who influence online music. We don't object to the content of the list, but we do object to the title. His Steveness is no geek! And neither are flashy MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson nor suave Youtubers Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The only recognizable geek on there is Bram Cohen of BitTorrent, at number 19. The rest are either techies, hipsters, or businesspeople. Someone at Blender should read up on their definitions.

TorrentFreak reports that scanned copies of the new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the new book about everyone's favorite teenage wizard, have hit BitTorrent file-sharing networks. If you don't want to find out the ending, log off now. Or download the copies anyway: Apparently the quality is so bad that you can only read some pages by using Photoshop to enhance the images.

TapeItOffTheInternet.com (TIOTI) is a still-closed beta project looking to create 'Napster Moment with television', the site combines torrent-tracking, RSS feeds, tags and more Web2.0 wankery. In an interview on Torrent Freaks, TIOTI founder, Paul Pud (real name?), tries to get you to recall the thrill of being a p2p bandit for the first time.

Sometimes you can see a story coming a financial quarter away. Last week, a tipster dropped some gossip about VC firm Doll Capital Management, headed by veteran investor Dixon Doll.

Craig (you know, Craigslist Craig) just posted the first known photo of Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen together. As Craig says on his blog, the Napster founder and BitTorrent founder had never met until last night's Wired Rave Awards. Craig captured the historic meeting on his Treo.

Om Malik scoops a rift between the Cohen brothers (not the cool Big Lebowski ones. That's the Coen brothers. The Cohens are the ones who let you steal The Big Lebowski).

Tonight
Fireworks and robotic power are on display at a special screening of a Survival Research Labs documentary. Twenty bucks to watch SRL crush a Trojan Horse and get a visit from the LAPD. [Laughing Squid]
BitTorrent holds a reception during CodeCon, where the curtain came off the p2p program years ago. Head to Loft 11 at 6 pm. [CodeCon]