Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Music Industry's New Extortion Scheme — Musicians themselves may just be crazy, but the music labels are dangerously stupid, and need to be stopped before they can do any further damage to the music industry. Case in point: Warner Music, fully aware that the days of charging …
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Portfolio:
Fee for All — Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s Warner Music Group has tapped industry veteran Jim Griffin to spearhead a controversial plan to bundle a monthly fee into consumers' internet-service bills for unlimited access to music. — The plan—the boldest move yet to keep the wounded entertainment …
Discussion:
Mark Evans, WebProNews, Mashable!, Download Squad, Public Knowledge, A Copyfighter's Musings, Slashdot, paidContent.org and Michael Geist Blog
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:Is a music “tax” paid to ISPs the answer?
Discussion:
Smalltalk Tidbits …
InfoWorld:
Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest — It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned. — He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.
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Tom Krazit / One More Thing:
MacBook Air hacked in security contest — A team of security researchers has won $10,000 for hacking a MacBook Air in two minutes using an undisclosed Safari vulnerability. — IDG News Service is camped out at CanSecWest in lovely Vancouver, Canada, and has chronicled the exploits …
Brad Stone / New York Times:
Comcast Adjusts Way It Manages Internet Traffic — SAN FRANCISCO — Comcast, the country's largest residential Internet provider, said on Thursday that it would take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic on its network.
Discussion:
Los Angeles Times, eWeek, VoIP Watch, Life On the Wicked Stage, DygiScape, VentureBeat, Ars Technica and TGDaily.com
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Ryan Kim / San Francisco Chronicle:Comcast changes tune, won't block large files
Discussion:
p2pnet
Peter Lauria / New York Post:
M'SOFT NOT YET ON BOARD — NO NAMES LINED UP YET FOR YAHOO! — Microsoft has been so cagey about the candidates it plans to nominate to Yahoo!'s board that speculation is mounting that the software giant actually doesn't have anyone lined up. — The word on Wall Street and in technology circles …
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Charles Cooper / Coop's Corner:
Here's a throwback idea that might offer a way out for Microsoft — Ray Ozzie is one of the most well-respected computer scientists around. He pioneered innovations in groupware software during previous stints at Lotus and Groove and now is working to bring Microsoft's technology strategy …
Discussion:
Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check
Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:
Adobe's New Flash Codec is “Everyman's HD Platform”....has Improved Beet Stream on YouTube and Blip — I have come to think of H.264 as a kind of everyman's HD video production and distribution platform. The encoding software, referred in the industry as a codec, was released by Adobe into the Flash ecosystem in December.
Craig Newmark / cnewmark:
Multiple language support on craigslist — We tend to do stuff without much announcement, but I figured you might want to know that we implemented multiple language support for craigslist in November. Just Spanish then, but last week we added more languages. Check for yourself:
Rafat Ali / paidContent.org:
The Next Phase Of Our Company: Scaling From The Inside Out — Some time around late summer last year, about six months after we moved into our (first-ever) office in Santa Monica, I realized we needed to start asking the “BIG S” question for our growing B2B media company: How Do You Scale?
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Zoho Business Machine Rolls Forward: Invoices Next — Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.).
Paul McDougall / TechWeb:
Xbox Live Cheaters Hit With Penalties — Microsoft is cracking down on players on its Xbox Live gaming service who use hacks to artificially inflate their scores. — “Today, we took action,” said Larry Hryb, Microsoft's Xbox Live programming director, in a blog post Wednesday.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Off Topic: What the Past Three Months Have Taught Me — It's exactly three months to the day since I had my heart attack. What has followed has been a life-altering experience, forcing me to learn some hard lessons about life, myself and of course being a first-time entrepreneur.
Discussion:
BoomTown
Betsy Schiffman / Epicenter:
Can Google Stop the Brain Drain? — It takes more than an army of trained chefs and free lunch to keep Googlers happy. As a new wave of web darlings (such as Facebook) beef up recruiting efforts, high-level Googlers are blowing the joint. Sheryl Sandberg, Ethan Beard (right) …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Danger Room / Wired:
High-Tech Soldier Suit, Crawling Back From the Dead — The Army's soldier suit of the future, once left for dead, appears to be crawling back to life. — After 15 years and a half-billion dollars in development, the Army officially cancelled the Land Warrior program …
