Virgin Media was hit by a DDoS attack this week, which was apparent payback for blocking The Pirate Bay.

According to Anonymous' UK Twitter feed, its members were responsible for taking Virgin Media's website offline, explaining that censorship was the reason for its involvement.

Virgin Media is one of five ISPs in the UK to block The Pirate Bay. It is following a High Court ruling that it must stop allowing access to the site, alongside O2, Talk Talk, Sky Broadband and Everything Everywhere.

Virgin Media put on a brave face throughout the hack and stood by its reasons for blocking the site.

"As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders but we strongly believe that tackling the issue of copyright infringement needs compelling legal alternatives, giving consumers access to great content at the right price, to help change consumer behaviour," a spokesperson explained in a statement.

Honour among thieves

In an interesting twist, though, the Pirate Bay has distanced itself from the hack with a statement on its Facebook page.

"We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us," said the post.

"So don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDoS and blocks are both forms of censorship.

"If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol, print some pro piracy posters and decorate your town with, support our promo bay artists or just be a nice person and give your mom a call to tell her you love her."

The Pirate Bay has been on something of a moral crusade of late. Earlier this week it revealed that it doesn't condone the proxy versions of The Pirate Bay that are popping up, allowing users to access TPB's content even if the site is blocked for them.

Apparently it's not the proxies it has a problem with, however, but the fact that some sites are asking for payment in exchange for the proxy, explaining: "We do not condone this behaviour, The Pirate Bay is a free service!"

We wonder if there's a car park somewhere in the world being readied for an Anonymous / Pirate Bay face-off. Ron Burgundy would surely approve.

Twitter is refusing to hand over a users' tweet history to the courts because it claims that they belong to the user, not to it.

The New York District Attorney has issued Twitter with a subpoena demanding that it hand over three months' worth of tweets sent by Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street activist who was arrested as part of the protest earlier this year.

Twitter is resisting the action and has filed a 10-page document against the order in which it says, "Terms of service expressly state: 'You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the services'."

Challenging

Harris had himself challenged the subpoena, but the judge in the case ruled that he couldn't do so because Twitter owned his tweets.

The social network also says that the order goes against federal law by asking Twitter to hand over the tweets without a search warrant.

It's not the first time that Twitter has become embroiled in legal proceedings – in May last year the network was forced to hand over users' contact details over the whole superinjunction debacle, although it resisted for as long as possible.