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 …
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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 …
Discussion:
TorrentFreak, BetaNews, PaulStamatiou.com, Gawker, Telegraph, Threat Level, TeleRead, Kotaku, paidContent and hypebot
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 …
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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?
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Kutcher Plays His Pied Piper Flute And Gets A Million Twitter Followers
Kutcher Plays His Pied Piper Flute And Gets A Million Twitter Followers
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CNET News, MediaPost, IntoMobile, bub.blicio.us, ITworld.com, Technology Review, AppScout, Screenwerk, GPS Obsessed, TECH.BLORGE.com, Twittercism, Mashable!, TheNextWeb.com, broadstuff, The Web Services Report, Don Dodge on The Next …, Laughing Squid, BoomTown, Silicon Alley Insider and Hi Tech
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
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.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Technologizer, mocoNews, InformationWeek, FierceWireless and Phone Scoop
Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:
New discoveries turn up in betas of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software — 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:
The iPhone 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.
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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 …
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.
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.
Discussion:
The Technology Chronicles, BetaNews, eWeek, IntoMobile, Electronista, Gearlog, Obsessable, Engadget Mobile, SlashPhone, Boy Genius Report, Crave, Tech Beat, MobileCrunch and Brier Dudley's blog
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 …
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.
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
NBC Universal Earnings Sliced In Half, but There's a Bright Side — The bad news for NBC Universal: The TV and movie powerhouse saw earnings drop 45 percent in the last quarter. The good news: The GE unit says that if you stripped out one-time costs, charges, etc., it would have only been down something like 15 to 25 percent.
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.
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MediaPost
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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 …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Snow Day, Employee Arrest At Fox/MySpace — Los Angeles tech companies may not be able to stand up to their northern California neighbors when it comes to technology clout, but they sure do seem to have a more interesting and varied work life. While Silicon Valley based Facebook …
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google CEO Schmidt Wants A Twitter Search Deal — During yesterday's earnings call, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt talked up the benefits of a search deal with Twitter: — “Without commenting specifically about Twitter ... you could imagine that ... it could be a channel for product information …
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 …
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.
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textually.org
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.