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 …
Discussion:
Don Dodge on The Next …, Los Angeles Times, Mark Evans, p2pnet, hypebot, broadstuff and MediaFuturist
RELATED:
Andrew Orlowski / The Register:
US students, alumni to get legal P2P — The beginning of the end of the file-sharing wars? — Exclusive US colleges and their alumni may be offered the right to P2P file-sharing under one of the most radical copyright reforms in a hundred years, The Register has learned.
Discussion:
WinBeta
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 …
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.
RELATED:
Zero Day Initiative / DVLabs:PWN to OWN Day Two: First Winner Emerges! (updated)
Discussion:
Digital Trends, Engadget, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Business Technology, Slashdot, Errata Security, SecurityFocus, Salon and Digg
Jemima Kiss / PDA:
The quiet boom of paidContent, and its new chief executive — Rafat Ali's digital media empire has grown, again. I'll disclaim right away - I used to work for him and am in awe of what he has created since ditching the life of a staff journalist all those years ago.
RELATED:
Linux-Watch.com:
Red Hat posts great 2008 fiscal year earnings — Anyone under the delusion that you can't make money from open source and Linux should have been on Red Hat's 2008 fiscal year earnings call on March 27. — If they had been, they would have heard Red Hat executives report …
RELATED:
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
What's Yahoo worth to Microsoft without Alibaba? — One of Yahoo's best arguments for getting Microsoft to raise its offer to acquire the company-the portal's stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba-is in jeopardy courtesy of antitrust regulations in China.
RELATED:
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
Jonathan Skillings / CNET News.com:
Dell offers sub-$1,000 Blu-ray laptop — The end of the next-generation DVD format battle may not mean a long victory lap for inflated Blu-ray prices after all. — Dell, which has more than a little clout in the PC market, on Friday announced that consumers can now spend less than $1,000 to get a Blu-ray-equipped laptop.
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.
Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
MPAA to broadband providers: Pull the plug on pirates — HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—The Motion Picture Association of America is calling on broadband providers to pull the plug on copyright-infringing users. — Jim Williams, the MPAA's chief technology officer and senior vice president …
Discussion:
DSLreports
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, p2pnet, eWeek, VoIP Watch, Life On the Wicked Stage, DygiScape, TGDaily.com and VentureBeat
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007 — That huge bundle of damning emails and documents Microsoft produced as part of the Vista-capable lawsuit is full of fascinating information about how the company developed, planned, and launched Vista …
BBC:
Oldest recorded voices sing again — An “ethereal” 10 second clip of a woman singing a French folk song has been played for the first time in 150 years. — The recording of “Au Clair de la Lune”, recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.
