Top Items:
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.
RELATED:
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict - Guilty
Discussion:
L.A. Times Tech Blog, BBC, ReadWriteWeb, Guardian, CNET News, TechCrunch, The Local, Slyck, The Register, Kotaku, New York Times, Homotron.net, paidContent, TechSpot, MediaMemo, Music Ally, CNN, Electronista, 9 to 5 Mac, Mashable!, the Econsultancy blog, Gamasutra, Download Squad, GMSV and Boy Genius Report
Andrew Hampp / AdAge:
Secret to Ashton Kutcher's Twitter Success? Billboards — Should He Be Disqualified for Such Old-School Advertising? — OAAA gets Twitterpated — Here's how Ashton Kutcher really won the Twitter war with CNN: digital billboards. — Lamar Advertising, the third-largest billboard company …
RELATED:
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?
Rafe Needleman / CNET News:How to unfollow Ashton Kutcher
Discussion:
VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, bub.blicio.us, Technology Review, Digits, AppScout, ITworld.com and TechCrunch
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’ — Hulu is in the process of developing an app for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, we have learned from a plugged-in industry executive. The app is coming soon (within a few months) and is “badass” — as excellent as Hulu's Web site.
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
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 …
Discussion:
Electronista, Engadget Mobile, CNET News, Download Squad, BetaNews, Gizmodo and ithinkdifferrent
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.
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:
Seeking Alpha, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, AndroidGuys, FierceWireless, InformationWeek, mocoNews and Technologizer
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.
Gmail Blog:
New in Labs: Suggest more recipients — Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients.”
Karen Gullo / Bloomberg:
Polaroid sells its assets for US$88-million — Polaroid Corp., the twice-bankrupt pioneer of instant photography, won bankruptcy court approval to sell itself for US$88-million to a joint venture led by two liquidation firms. — The partnership, led by Gordon Brothers Brands LLC …
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 …
Josh Lowensohn / CNET News:
TC50/DEMO revisited: What's alive, what's dead? — Last year, 124 products were unveiled during the TechCrunch50 and DemoFall conferences. A week later, we went through and sorted out which ones you could actually use. As anticipated, most were closed off from public use. Was this a surprise?
Discussion:
Gadgetwise
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.
Discussion:
eWeek
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.
RELATED:
YouTube Blog:Watch Shows and Movies on YouTube
Discussion:
Search Engine Watch, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Download Squad, paidContent.org, Internet Evolution, Network World, Contentinople, The Utube Blog, AppScout, Associated Press, Electricpig.co.uk, E-Media Tidbits, Bizzia, Agence France Presse, MarketingVOX, HotHardware.com News and Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim
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 …
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.
Discussion:
PC World, Newlaunches.com, Ars Technica, Softpedia News, Security Watch, Technologizer and The Register
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Kindle owners find out about DRM's ever-present threat — Some Kindle users are angry because Amazon blocked them from their Kindle accounts, thereby blocking them from accessing their already-purchased media. Even if these stories are exaggerated, they once again highlight the caveats that come with DRMed media.
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 …
Reuters:
Taiwan's Asustek to use Linux in new smartphone — Netbook PC pioneer Asustek (2357.TW) will use a Linux-based operating system in one of its first two smartphones, a senior company official said on Friday, in a boost for the system's developer. — Both Microsoft's (MSFT.O) …
David Carnoy / CNET News:
Blu-ray sales nearly double from a year ago — Blu-ray detractors and backers, here's the latest status report on the format: — According to Adams Media Research, about 9 million Blu-ray discs sold in the U.S. from January through March—up from 4.8 million units sold in the first quarter of last year.
