The Great Geek Manual News

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

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’ and demanded millions of dollars in damages. The defense did not agree, and all pleaded not guilty - backed up by the inimitable King Kong defense.

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Source: Torrent Freak

After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.

In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.”

Organizations which stood in opposition to the trials, such as Free Press, claim this as a major victory for consumers. Campaign director for Free Press Tim Karr said, “We’re glad to see Time Warner Cable’s price-gouging scheme collapse in the face of consumer opposition. Let this be a lesson to other Internet service providers looking to head down a similar path. Consumers are not going to stand idly by as companies try to squeeze their use of the Internet. This is a major victory, but the fight for a fast, open and affordable Internet is far from over.”

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Source: Beta News

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey has taken control of her own Twitter name, @oprah, she announced on her Facebook page today. And tomorrow, she’ll start using it, on her show.

Apparently, her guest tomorrow will be the man she calls “the King of Twitter,” Ashton Kutcher. I’m sure he’ll be talking about his race for a million followers on the service (he should be there by then), and presumably about his pledge to help fight malaria in Africa if he crosses the million mark before CNN.

Knowing this, Twitter CEO Evan Williams tweet from earlier today makes a lot more sense. “Tomorrow just became a very big day. (Sorry for the teaser — more later.),” he wrote. And it should be a very big day indeed. Oprah is known for her loyal (some may say “rabid”) following, as she can turn any book or product she talks about on her show into pure gold. And Twitter will likely be no different. I suspect Twitter may see its biggest one day jump in new sign ups tomorrow — certainly, it will be the largest influx of women of a certain age group into the service in one day.

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Source: Tech Crunch

ACTOR Ashton Kutcher has become the first “Twitterer” to have one million followers on the popular micro-blogging website after a hotly-contested race against news network CNN.

Click to see Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter page

Kutcher cracked open a bottle of champagne as he announced his victory live on Twitter and UStreamTV moments after he passed the one million mark.

”Victory is ours”, Kutcher tweeted, describing the moment as a “changing of the guard”.

“We have shown the world that the new wave is here, it is present and it is ready to explode.

“You guys are all of it because I can’t follow me, so I don’t even count.

“We can and will create our media. We can will and edit our media. We can and will broadcast our media. We will censor our own media ourselves.”

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Source: New.com.au

Google has announced that it will partner with major movie studios to stream a number of full-length films and TV shows for free on YouTube. The studios involved in the launch of this premium content section will include Sony, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, and the BBC. The movies will be ad-supported, and ad revenue will be shared with the content owners. Those who love YouTube’s user-generated video offerings should not fret, however, as those will remain on the site separate from the premium offerings.

Google has been growing its collection of full-length movies as of late, with MGM announcing in November of 2008 that it would begin adding some of its films to YouTube, starting with films like The Magnificent Seven and Bulletproof Monk. Then, earlier this month, rumors spread that Sony was working on a similar deal to add films to YouTube. Now, with MGM, Sony, and a handful of others on board, YouTube has taken a giant step in the right direction to figuring out how to monetize the site.

The premium-content section comes as some analysts predict that YouTube will lose almost $500 million this year due to bandwidth consumption, licensing fees, the difficulty in monetizing content, and other expenses. “In our view, the issue for YouTube going forward is to increase the percentage of its videos that can be monetized (likely through more deals with content companies) and to drive more advertiser demand through standardization of ad formats and improved ad effectiveness,” Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena said earlier this month.

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Source: Ars Technica

Time Warner Cable is reportedly having trouble finding submissive test subjects for its proposed scheme of charging US customers by the gigabyte for their internet service.

Additional trials for the company’s new “consumption based billing” regime were slated to begin in several markets this summer, but public outcry has made the cable giant retreat from some of its attempts to stuff the all-you-can-eat internet genie back in the bottle - for now.

The company originally intended to expand tests of metered billing on April 13 to Rochester, New York, Greensboro, South Carolina, and San Antonio and Austin, Texas. But all has not gone according to plan.

After facing a surge of complaints from customers, Time Warner has decided to delay the rollout in both Texas cities until October. Presumably, a few months will make bandwidth caps easier to swallow.

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Source: The Register

On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student’s property.

Should Boston College Linux users be looking over their shoulders?

In his application, the investigating officer asked that he be permitted to seize the student’s computers and other personal effects because they might yield evidence of the crimes of “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” and “Unauthorized access to a computer system.” Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses. There are no assertions that a commercial (i.e. for pay) commercial service was defrauded, a necessary element of any “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” allegation. Similarly, the investigating officer doesn’t explain how sending an e-mail to a campus mailing list might constitute “unauthorized access to a computer system.”

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Source: EFF.org

More than half of U.S. adults used the Internet to participate in the 2008 election — the first time that threshold has been crossed, according to a study released Wednesday.

Some 55 percent searched for political news online, researched candidate positions, debated issues or otherwise participated in the election over the Internet, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

New forms of Internet communication such as blogs, social-networking sites like Facebook and video-sharing sites played a prominent role, the nonprofit group said. Among its findings:

* 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election;

* 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others;

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Source: Reuters

Internet data caps generated controversy in the US last week as Time Warner Cable expanded its low caps to more cities and one Congressman pledged to introduce a bill limiting the practice. But capped Internet (or, as it’s known in countries like Canada and Australia, “Internet”) access is a worldwide issue, even in the UK’s competitive DSL market. One UK website now suggests that 25 percent of Internet users there have received warnings about “excessive use.”

ISPreview.co.uk offers ISP rankings and reviews, and it conducts reader surveys on issues like excessive use notices. According to the latest survey of 557 users, 25.1 percent have received warnings about using too much data, and nearly half of those surveyed said they would switch ISPs should they receive such notices.

It’s hard to put much faith in these numbers, which were gleaned from an utterly unscientific Web poll on the site’s front page. However, they do tell us that the sort of Internet users who are savvy about their ISPs and read sites like ISPreview run into service limits far more often than one might expect—and that users aren’t happy about hitting the caps.

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Source: Ars Technica

Amazon has been taking a beating online for the removal of sales ranking on a number of gay- and lesbian-themed books. The company initially called it a glitch that was being fixed. Now Amazon is calling it a “ham-fisted” error that goes far beyond gay titles.

Here’s a statement from Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener: This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

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Source: Tech Flash

The expanding underground economy is fuelling an identity price war, with unskilled crooks now able to buy full personal identities for pennies, according to the latest edition of Symantec’s Internet Threat Report.

The study, published on Tuesday, reports that credit card details, names, addresses and date of births of targeted individuals can be bought for as little as 50 pence. However, the range of prices varies widely, with more prized identities fetching up to £40.

The sale price of credit card details on the underground economy also varies a great deal, from 40 pence to £20. Bank account credentials, meanwhile, sell for as much as £675.

Symantec’s study takes a wide-ranging overview of malicious activity, threat activity and cybercrime. Its findings come from data collected by millions of sensors across the world, research and active monitoring of hacker communications.

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Source: The Register

The Chinese government is denying any involvement in the reported infiltration of US electric grid systems.

Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu as saying that any sort of involvement from China in the incident “doesn’t exist at all.”

The denial follows a report in the Wall Street Journal which claimed that agents from China and Russia along with several other countries had infiltrated the computer systems charged with managing electricity in the US and left behind software payloads which could be used to control or disable electric grids in the US.

Security experts warned that while the incident showed glaring holes in the US security infrastructure and that in a time of conflict such an attack could have catastrophic effects for the country.

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Source: iT News

Even if it’s inevitable that Facebook’s growth will slow down at some point as the site runs out of prospects to convert, Facebook continues to change what it has to offer, meaning today’s holdouts might decide later to join after all. Facebook’s expansion has been peppered by growing pains, including concerns about how it handles privacy.

In less than eight months, Facebook has doubled its user base by signing up 100 million people from around the world, officially hitting 200 million on Wednesday.

Its population is now higher than Brazil’s and Japan’s.

The ubiquitous online hangout, available only to college students when it opened in 2004, has been growing rapidly since opening up to anyone who wants to sign up.

But how long can that continue?

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Source: News Factor

Google’s YouTube and Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, said on Thursday they will launch a premium music video website as they bid to increase revenue from YouTube’s huge usage.

The new advertiser-supported site, featuring professional videos, will be called Vevo and is expected to launch in coming months, the companies said.

The deal is a boost for YouTube, which has been under increasing pressure from music labels and publishers who are frustrated that the popular site has been unable to pay higher fees for rights to use their music and videos.

Talks broke down late last year between YouTube and the No.3 music company Warner Music Group. Last month YouTube was forced to block all music videos in the UK and last week it had to do the same in Germany in a similar dispute with song publishers over money.

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Source: Reuter