The Great Geek Manual News

As we mentioned earlier in the week, EU commissioner McCreevy has been pushing for a longer copyright period for recorded performances. This proposal has now passed the commission and is on the way to the parliament. The upside however, is that the commission also aims to break music royalty monopolies.

The proposal, as we explained on Monday, is simple. Extend copyright by 45 years in order to help ’struggling session players’ earn money when they’re old. It seems a noble principle, and seems to be one that has convinced commissioners, in any case.

Perhaps the biggest incongruity that came from the announcements about it, is the feeling that session musicians, after being paid for the last 50 years for a single days work, need, all of a sudden to get another 45 years of payment.

You can bet the guy that put paper in the printer, that spat out the plans for McCreevy’s house hasn’t gotten paid for the last 50 years. I’ll bet the architect hasn’t either. However there is some reason that musicians, particularly jobbing musicians without the talent or ambition to head off on their own, should be paid for work of decades past. The press materials put out by the commission tries to spin a brave face on this, with the likes of frequently asked questions, and number 7 asks the question we all have…

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Source: Torrent Freak

A federal court on Tuesday sentenced a New York man to a 30-month prison term for sending unsolicited marketing e-mail to 1.2 million AOL subscribers, according to a Reuters report.

The court ordered Adam Vitale, 27, to also pay restitution of $180,000 to the Time Warner unit for violating federal antispam laws.

In 2005, Brooklyn resident Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller of New Jersey, cut a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a security computer program to nearly 1.3 million AOL subscriber addresses. Under that deal, the two men were to receive 50 percent of the product’s proceeds.

The two men avoided detection of AOL’s spam filter system through the use of several servers to relay and change the e-mail header information.

Moeller was sentenced to 27 months in jail last November.

Source: CNet

As if the three-way between Yahoo, Microsoft, and Carl Icahn weren’t complicated enough, news is breaking that everyone but Icahn is now engaged in serious negotiations with Time Warner, which is interested in dumping its AOL subsidiary. AOL had been mentioned as part of some earlier formulations of a Microsoft-Yahoo deal, but the new talks come as these two companies have developed a far more adversarial relationship. As a result, Redmond and Yahoo would be looking for AOL for very different reasons.

The initial vision behind the purchase that brought AOL into the Time Warner fold was that it would bring the resulting company something similar to the vertical integration that Apple enjoys. It wouldn’t have any hardware, but the combined company would be an Internet service provider, act as a portal to its customers, and use the portal to feed them Time Warner content. These visions never panned out, and the current Time Warner management is apparently looking to separate the ISP portion of the business and then sell both it and the AOL portal property in order to refocus on its content.

AOL’s status as a portal, and the advertising revenues that go along with it, remain significant, and helped drag the company into the Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations in the first place. Once it became clear that Microsoft was primarily after Yahoo’s search business, a key aspect of the negotiations was finding a way to ensure that Yahoo remained a viable entity if search were sold off. AOL made sense in this regard; it was already on the market, and combining its portal property with Yahoo’s would clearly expand Yahoo’s scope.

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Source: Ars Technica

Apple has sued a Florida company which was selling Macintosh clones. Since May, Psystar has offered the computers online. In a lawsuit filed July 3, Apple asks a court to shut Psystar down and retrieve all computers already sold.

The lawsuit charges Psystar violated Apple trademark by selling altered versions of the Mac OS X operating system able to run on PCs. Apple and Psystar meet next in court Oct. 22 for a conference.

The Psystar Web site was offline Wednesday, according to the New York Times.

Source: All Headline News

Virtual worlds are attracting heavy investment, and online teen hangout Gaia Online says it has received $11 million. Fast-growing Gaia pulls in five million visitors a month, but competition is growing from sites like Google’s Lively virtual world. By 2011, such virtual worlds are expected to be home to 53 percent of child and teen Internet users.

Gaia Online, one of the world’s fastest-growing online hangouts for teens, says it has attracted $11 million in a new round of venture funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

“Social networks and virtual worlds are constantly evolving as users become more involved and embedded, and at Gaia Online we are focused on bringing ‘Gaians’ experiences they will not get anywhere else,” said Gaia Online Chief Executive Craig Sherman. “With this capital, we are excited to continue to deliver on this mission, while growing and developing new site elements to support the rapidly increasing interest in Gaia Online.”

Gaia’s announcement is the latest evidence that investors are betting big on virtual worlds. Venture-capital and media firms shelled out more than $345 million to 39 virtual worlds-related companies through the first six months of 2008, according to Virtual Worlds Management.

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Source: News Factor

Apple said Monday it sold one million new iPhones in the initial weekend, on par with estimates set by analysts.

The original iPhone, introduced in late June 2007 in the United States only, sold about 270,000 units in its first two days. Sales topped one million by early September. The new device is sold in 21 countries.

“IPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, said in a statement.

Steven Hodges, president for the Northeast region for AT&T, Apple’s only carrier in the United States, would not disclose how many iPhones it had sold, but he said the iPhone would be AT&T’s key device for the holiday shopping season this year.

Activation problems marred the phone’s introduction Friday in the United States, with many buyers leaving stores frustrated that they could not use it after waiting in line for hours.

AT&T blamed problems in synchronizing the phone with Apple’s iTunes online music and software store, saying they were probably caused by too many people trying to gain access to iTunes at the same time.

“We don’t yet know the breakdown of how many phones were sold to new customers and how many existing iPhone customers upgraded, but regardless, sales during the first weekend were very impressive,” said Jeffrey Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst.

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Source: The New York Times

Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers.

Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.

Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs’ attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

“We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group [led by the English Football Assocation],” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes claims. “They have agreed to let us anonymise YouTube user data.”

Yesterday, it was claimed that Viacom wanted details of what videos had been watched and uploaded by Google staff in a bid to prove the company’s staff were aware of illegal material being uploaded on to the site.

In a legal stipulation agreed to by attorneys for all major parties in the case, the sides agreed that the new data privacy agreement did not cover employees and that they would work out how to share this data separately in coming weeks.

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Source: PC Pro

A Southern California man who already served federal time for hacking into Lexis-Nexis has begun a state prison term for allegedly using his skills to try and extort phone sex from an internet celebrity.

Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, 23, pleaded no contest to a single count of computer intrusion in May, and was sentenced to two years in prison. He was transferred to California’s Tehachapi state prison on Thursday.
Amor

Weinberg was arrested by LAPD detectives in Southern California in January, following a weeks-long police investigation aided by victim Amor Hilton — a teenage MySpace user who had a popular video streaming show on Stickam.com.

According a blog post by Hilton prior to Weinberg’s arrest, she found herself locked out of her MySpace account on December 28, the same day she began receiving harassing phone calls from a hacker calling himself “V.I.P.” — a handle used by Weinberg in the past. The calls continued over the course of several days, and often took a threatening tone, she says.

During that time, the hacker allegedly disconnected Hilton’s cellphone account, and took over her account on Stickam. He allegedly demanded phone sex and nude photos from Hilton.

Hilton reported the harassment to the police, and recorded one of the phone calls. Weinberg was arrested after Hilton matched his mug shot to a photo the hacker had sent her.

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Source: The Wired Blog

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives. The judge also turned Google’s own defense of its data retention policies — that IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason. Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema. Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

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Source: Wired Blog

Today is the deadline for any business that accepts credit cards over the Internet to meet new security standards for their Web sites.

But not all businesses are expected to make the deadline, and for those that do, it’s not clear how much more secure their sites will be.

The new rule comes from the big credit card brands - Visa, MasterCard Worldwide, American Express, Discover Financial Services and JCB International - and is intended to protect credit card data from Web attacks, which are increasing. It is known as Payment Card Industry standard 6.6.

By today, businesses with publicly accessible Web sites that accept credit cards are supposed to have had their code inspected for software flaws by an outside assessor or have a firewall installed that inspects code automatically.

If businesses are found to be out of compliance, the banks that accept their credit card payments could be fined.

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Source: SF Gate

Another ex-administrator of former BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents is facing prison time for his part in the site’s peer-to-peer sharing of copyright material.

Daniel Dove, 26, was convicted by a jury on separate counts of “conspiracy and felony copyright infringement,” the US Department of Justice announced today.

Dove helped supply pirated material to the website and recruited members who had high speed internet connections to join in uploading content.

Fellow admins, Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen, and Scott Harvanek, all pleaded guilty to similar charges rather than take their cases to a jury. The DOJ says its the first criminal conviction after a jury trial for P2P copyright infringement.

EliteTorrents was one of the largest “private” trackers in operation between 2003 and 2005. In May, 2005, Operation D-Elite, a combined force of the FBI CyberCrime Fraud Unit and Homeland Security, shut down the site. The Motion Picture Association of America also provided “substantial assistance” to the D-Elite investigation.

Working on 10 search warrants, The Feds seized control of the EliteTorrents’ central server to obtain information about the site’s administrators. According to the DOJ, they found more than 17,800 movie titles being seeded by about 133,000 EliteTorrents members. They contend many of the movies distributed on the site, such as Star Wars Episode III, appeared there before the movies were yet released in theaters. (Star Wars II: Revenge of the Sith appears again and again on DOJ press release for Operation D-Elite as an example. Somebody is a George Lucas fan.)

Dove’s sentencing is scheduled for September 9, 2008. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Source: The Register

Sensing the start of a personal computer revolution, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to start Microsoft Corp and pursue a vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.

Three decades later, Gates is set to step down on Friday from what is now the world’s largest software company to work full-time at the charitable organization — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — built by his vast fortune.

No longer the world’s richest man — he has been topped by investor Warren Buffett and Mexico’s telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim — Gates says great wealth brings with it great responsibility.

The 52-year-old, whose boyish looks seem at odds with his graying hair, will leave behind a life’s work developing software to devote energy to finding new vaccines or to micro-finance projects in the developing world.

As Microsoft’s biggest shareholder, Gates will remain chairman and work on special technology projects. His 8.7 percent stake in Microsoft is worth about $23 billion.

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Source: Reuters

Facebook agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of cash and stock to settle a long- running legal battle over whether founder Mark Zuckerberg stole ideas for the site from fellow Harvard students, according to court documents released late on Wednesday.

The parties in the case — which pitted Zuckerberg, a shy 24-year-old entrepreneur now worth billions of dollars, against former Harvard classmates and one-time U.S. Olympic team rowing hopefuls Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — agreed to a tentative settlement deal in February, according to the court papers.

The settlement agreement was delayed by a subsequent challenge by the Winklevosses, who argued the deal was incomplete and that Facebook had committed fraud by failing to disclose crucial documents related to Zuckerberg’s actions.

On Wednesday, Judge James Ware of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected those claims and ruled the settlement is enforceable and ordered the parties to a July 2 hearing to determine how to carry out the deal.

Facebook, begun as an online version of the introductory picture book first-year students at Harvard received to get acquainted with fellow students, has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon over the past four years for allowing Web users to share private details with a select group of their friends.

The dispute centered on accusations Zuckerberg copied ideas for Facebook after being hired as a Harvard University sophomore by the Winklevoss brothers and a third partner to write code for a site called Harvard Connection.

Through the settlement, Facebook effectively agreed to buy ConnectU, the successor company to Harvard Connection founded by the Winklevoss brothers, partner Divya Narendra, for cash and common stock.

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Source: iT News

Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned. The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month. Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.

By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo.

Google has generally dismissed Powerset’s semantic, or “natural language” approach as being only marginally interesting, even though Google has hired some semantic specialists to work on that approach in limited fashion. Google’s search results are still based primarily on the individual words you type into its search bar, and its approach does very little to understand the possible meaning created by joining two or more words together.

That’s where Powerset sees an opportunity for growth, and perhaps where Microsoft finally sees a chance to get a quality edge. However, Powerset’s technology has remained controversial to people within the industry because, while sexy in theory, the natural language approach is difficult to pull off in practice. Skeptics wonder if the technology can ever be developed enough to be useful within a major search engine. That skepticism abounded during a long secretive stage in Powerset’s development, but the company did launch its service last month to the public, so it’s there for full view. You can use it to search for items within Wikipedia, and we’ve previously outlined various instances where it can be useful.

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