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3:15 PM ET, April 17, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict - Guilty  —  While only a few weeks ago, it seems like an eternity since the trial of The Pirate Bay Four ended and the court retired to consider its verdict.  The prosecution claimed that the four defendants were 'assisting in making copyright content available …
RELATED:
Threat Level:
The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome  —  Oscar Swartz reports.  —  Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Pirate Bay Loses A Lawsuit; Entertainment Industry Loses An Opportunity  —  Well, the verdict has come down in the trial against The Pirate Bay in Sweden, and it appears The Pirate Bay has been found guilty and each of the defendants has been sentenced to a year in jail and told to pay $3.6 million in damages …
Erik Palm / CNET News:
Copyright holders cheer Pirate Bay verdict
Discussion: NewTeeVee and Softpedia News
CNN:
Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter ‘turning point’  —  (CNN) — As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service?  Or the beginning of its demise?
Discussion: Laughing Squid
RELATED:
Rafe Needleman / CNET News:
How to unfollow Ashton Kutcher  —  Twitter is getting fishy.  In the race between Ashton Kutcher (aplusk on Twitter) and the CNN Breaking News feed (CNNbrk) to get to 1 million followers first, Kutcher won.  But was the race goosed by Twitter itself?  —  Last night, various reports surfaced …
Discussion: TechCrunch, PC World and ITworld.com
Andrew Hampp / AdAge:
Secret to Ashton Kutcher's Twitter Success? Billboards
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Kutcher Plays His Pied Piper Flute And Gets A Million Twitter Followers
Dan Nystedt / PC World:
Google's CEO Predicts Strong Year for Android  —  Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Thursday predicted good times ahead for Android, the company's mobile phone OS and software.  —  “Overall, it looks like Android is going to have a very strong year,” he said during the company's first quarter investors' conference.
Ki Mae Heussner / ABCNEWS:
Hacking Their Way to a Job?  —  17-Year-Old Behind Recent Twitter Worm Offered Job After Claiming Responsibility  —  For the social networking darling Twitter, it was a headache and potential threat.  But for the young man behind the computer worm that attacked the micro-blogging site this week, it was a fast track to a job.
Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:
New discoveries turn up in betas of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software [u]  —  Developer sources familiarizing themselves with betas of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software have uncovered a handful of additional tweaks and improvements to the system in recent weeks, including changes to Safari's window handling …
Discussion: MacRumors, Gizmodo and The iPhone Blog
Kevin Poulsen / Threat Level:
Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years  —  A sophisticated FBI-produced spyware program has played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in federal investigations into extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back at least seven years, newly declassified documents show.
Discussion: Threatpost Blog
Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:
Review: YouTube's New Premium Shows Design  —  We'd worried that YouTube's redesign to promote premium content would crowd out the site's homegrown stars.  But now that YouTube has launched its site refresh, we see we might have been overly concerned.  The new shows and movies section is well-contained within a little header tab.
Discussion: Gawker and Lifehacker
RELATED:
YouTube Blog:
Watch Shows and Movies on YouTube
Joseph Galante / Bloomberg:
Twitter Posts on Paint Projects, Ear Infections Start to Irk Some Users  —  Rachel Gard, who started using Twitter two months ago to keep in touch with friends, says she may stop using the site if companies keep contacting her.  —  Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room …
Brad Stone / Bits:
Apple Tops PC Customer Service Rankings  —  When it comes to customer service, PC manufacturers aren't held with quite the same contempt as cable companies, health insurers and Internet service providers — but they don't have much to brag about, either.  —  Forrester Research's 2008 customer …
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows Mobile 6.5 launch: Pencil in May 11  —  The first Windows Mobile 6.5 phones aren't expected to be available until this fall, but it looks like that isn't stopping Microsoft from “launching” the next version of its mobile operating system on May 11.  —  May 11 is the opening …
Reuters:
Sony Ericsson says Android phone to take time  —  HELSINKI (Reuters) - Sony Ericsson will take some time developing a phone using Google's Android operating system, its chief executive said on Friday, but declined to say when such a handset would be available.
RELATED:
Agence France Presse:
Sony Ericsson to cut 2,000 jobs after losses
Adrian Covert / Gizmodo:
Sidekick LX 2009 is a Lean, Mean Twittering Machine (With a Better Screen)  —  T-Mobile's new Sidekick LX 2009 isn't a radical new departure from past models, but it brings a beautiful, 3.2-inch, 854x480 screen to the table along with Twitter integration.  It's also the slimmest Sidekick to date.
Renai LeMay / CNET News:
Ubuntu 9.04's final test version released  —  The Ubuntu project has published a release candidate, or final testing version, for the upcoming 9.04 version of its popular Linux distribution.  —  “We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user …
Discussion: Ars Technica and Download Squad
Brian Krebs / Security Fix:
World's First Mac Botnet?  Not Quite.  —  This morning, as I scrolled down the list of security Web sites I normally check via my RSS reader, I noticed several items referencing news about the “world's first Mac botnet.”  As I read on, it became clear this was neither news nor a first.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
A Look Back At Some Prescient Predictions On Copyright  —  Via Michael Scott, we are alerted to a blog post by Thomas O'Toole, where he looks at two separate papers from the pre-DMCA era, both presenting incredibly accurate predictions of what was about to happen in the world of copyright and content.
Discussion: Beyond Search
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Why Apple's shares rose as its market share shrank  —  On Wednesday, Gartner Research reported that Apple's (AAPL) share of the U.S. computer market, which topped 9% in calendar Q3 last year, dropped to 7.4% in Q1 2009 — putting it in fourth place behind HP (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer.
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
This iPhone App Helps You Make iPhone Apps  —  Do you have a great idea for an iPhone app but not the coding skills to actually build it?  Well, there's an app for that.  The AppIncubator iPhone App from MEDL Mobile lets you submit your ideas which the company's development team will then build into apps for you.
Discussion: textually.org
Gabriel Madway / Reuters:
U.S. video games sales fall 17 pct in March: NPD  —  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Overall U.S. video game sales fell 17 percent in March to $1.43 billion, research group NPD said on Thursday, a revealing figure for an industry that had so far shown resilience in the economic downturn.
Discussion: MediaPost
RELATED:
Hiroshi Suzuki / Bloomberg:
Nintendo Shares Fall After U.S. Wii Sales Drop for First Time in 14 Months
Discussion: paidContent.org and Engadget
 
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 More Items: 
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Hacking internet backbones - it's easier than you think
Camille Ricketts / VentureBeat:
As execs defect, is this the end of an era for Google?
Discussion: Google Watch
Josephine Lien / DigiTimes:
DRAM spot prices up significantly
Discussion: The Tech Report and Maximum PC all
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Watch Out, TwitPic: PhotoBucket Is Coming At You With TwitGoo
Kevin Bullis / Technology Review:
Netbook Chips Create a Low-Power Cloud
Thanks:atul
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Kindle owners find out about DRM's ever-present threat
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
NBC Universal Earnings Sliced In Half, but There's a Bright Side
 Earlier Items: 
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google CEO Schmidt Wants A Twitter Search Deal
Discussion: eWeek, Dealscape and paidContent.org
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Interview With Automattic's Matt Mullenweg: “Blogging Is Not Slowing Down”
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Snow Day, Employee Arrest At Fox/MySpace
Discussion: The Equity Kicker and AppScout, Thanks:atul
Philip Lam / Your Source for Palm Pre News:
Palm Pre available from Chinese Accessories wholesaler?
Discussion: Boy Genius Report, Engadget and Gizmodo
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Substack, very deliberately, tries to have it both ways by saying publications on their platform are independent while presenting them all as parts of Substack

 
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