The Great Geek Manual News

Consumers may be tightening their belts, but that reduction apparently hasn’t affected DVD sales just yet. In fact, spending on DVDs and Blu-ray discs during the first half of 2008 showed a slight increase over the same period a year ago, according to data collected by Home Media Magazine. Spending on rentals rose even more, indicating that perhaps part of consumers’ money-saving efforts involve cozying up to a movie at home for entertainment instead of heading out for a night on the town—or downloading from the Internet.

Home Media found that sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs rose from $6.8 billion in early 2007 to $6.87 billion in the first half of this year—a modest increase of 1.1 percent. This number appears to coincide with “studio reports” saying that unit sales were also up 1.1 percent to 412.3 million discs in the first half of 2008, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Rentals increased by 2.6 percent, from $3.7 billion to $3.9 billion.

Analysts seem to think that these numbers also serve as proof that downloading—legal or illegal—is not hurting DVD sales as much as Doomsdayers would like to think. “The fact is, despite what many on Wall Street seem to think, there is very little digital downloading going on,” Adams Media Research president Adams Media Research said. “We’re talking about $118 million in 2007 spending, and about $254 million this year—so against a $24 billion packaged media market, it’s really not making much of a dent at this point.”

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Source: Ars Technica

Time Warner Inc’s AOL will launch a personal finance site on Tuesday, adding to a roster of new properties that do not bear its name.

The new site, called WalletPop.com, is a spin-off of AOL’s Money & Finance channel and will focus on consumer and personal finance. AOL Money & Finance will continue to business and investing news and tools.

The launch of another site not bearing the AOL brand is part of a plan to create new online businesses courting younger audiences unfamiliar with a company whose heyday ended with the popularity of high speed Internet access.

TMZ.com, a celebrity entertainment site created by AOL and a unit of Warner Bros, added 35 percent more users in May, now attracting about 9.2 million visitors monthly, according to comScore. Asylum, which the company said is now the top men’s site, attracted 2.7 million unique visitors in May.

Walletpop offers “a comprehensive, accessible, and interactive web site focused exclusively on the money matters of real people, such as debt management, finding the best deals, saving, retirement, insurance, real estate, banking, taxes and more,” Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance said in a statement.

Walletpop’s launch follows on the heels of the July launch of BigDownload.com, a site targeting PC gamers.

Visit Wallet Pop
Source: Reuters

An Australian woman renowned as the world’s oldest blogger has died at the age of 108, with her last posting talking about her ailing health but also how she still sings a happy song every day.

Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.

The physically frail but mentally alert Riley won an international audience with her blog, The Life of Riley (www.allaboutolive.com.au), and series of videos posted on YouTube with her talking and singing.

Riley was said to be the world’s oldest blogger as she was 12 years older than the previous titleholder, Spain’s Maria Amelia. She was born in 1899 and would have turned 109 in October.

“She enjoyed the notoriety — it kept her mind fresh,” her great-grandson Darren Stone of Brisbane told local newspapers.

“She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while.”

Visit her blog, The Life of Riley
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Source: Reuters

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years now, but only recently has this turned into a political issue. In a huge victory for BitTorrent users, the FCC has now announced that it will order Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic.

Almost a year ago we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Now, after numerous debates and false promises from Comcast, the FCC has ruled that Comcast’s BitTorrent interference is unacceptable, and orders the company to stop doing so.

Kevin Martin, FCC chairman told AP that Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling is “arbitrary”, and that the company had violated the principles of the Federal Communications Commission. Martin said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

Indeed, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute showed that the company had misinformed the FCC and their users. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie, as the study showed that they blocked BitTorrent upstream traffic 24/7.

The FCC has announced that it will take appropriate action against Comcast, and the ISP will be ordered to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has said before that it will invest in its network capacity and stop slowing down the traffic of their users, but these were all false promises.

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Source: Torrent Freak

Each dollar lost to software piracy equals $5.50 in lost opportunities, claims Microsoft. A new white paper released by IDC and funded by the software giant looks at how copyright infringement affects the software ecosystem as a whole, not just how it affects a single corporation. IDC claims that, if Microsoft were to make back each of those lost dollars, partner companies would gain $4.37 in increased revenues and $1.13 in lower operational costs. That’s assuming, however, that the Business Software Alliance’s estimated losses due to piracy are correct—an assumption that IDC makes in this report, despite having admitted in the past that the numbers are misleading.

Stolen software can slow down the velocity of sales or even halt an entire project when illegal software is discovered. “Worse, in many emerging markets where legally licensed software is difficult even to obtain, it can be next to impossible for a legitimate partner to operate,” comments Microsoft.

IDC says that companies can be forced to compete with others that use unlicensed software (therefore reducing their own operating costs unfairly) and that these companies can waste time and effort in dealing with clients who are running illicit software. They could also be limited in creating a better customer experience through more advanced product features not available on illegal versions of the software.

“Even in a healthy ecosystem, illegal software causes hidden costs and friction in the sales and deployment processes,” said Microsoft’s director of License Compliance, Michael Beare, in a statement. “At its worst, rampant piracy in some economies is tearing down the opportunity for legitimate businesses to exist and thrive.”

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Source: Ars Technica

The Net —- all of it — should be encrypted, says The Pirate Bay.

So it’s working on a way to, “potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes,” says Janko Roettgers on NewTeeVee, going on:

Still in its early stages, the project is called, ‘Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,’ or IPETEE and tackles encryption, “not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature,” TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij (right, aka Tiamo) says in the story.

“Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible’,” he told Roettgers.

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Source: P2P Net

Users get caught in the crossfire as service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies. To wit: Verizon barred an abortion-rights group from obtaining a “short code” for conducting text-messaging campaigns, while LiveJournal suspended legitimate blogs on fiction and crime victims in a crackdown on pedophilia.

Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won’t eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.

Say it on the Internet, and you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content Relevant Products/Services that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services — from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video — become more central to public discourse around the world. It’s a fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

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Source: News Factor

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.

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Source: AFP via Yahoo! News

While the Pirate Party might be well known in Sweden, and heard of elsewhere around Europe, it’s not really taken off in the country that prides itself as being ‘the land of the free’. Unperturbed, the US Pirate Party has soldiered on and with the preliminary release of data from it’s first study, it’s hitting back at the media lobbyists.

Claims by the music or film industries that ‘piracy is costing billions’ are commonplace. In 2005, for instance, the MPAA funded the LEK study, which claimed that over $6 billion was lost to MPAA members due to piracy. However, the figures and data behind those claims have never been publicly released, a fact underscored this past January when the MPAA had to release a statement saying ‘they made a mistake’ in one of the figures. It’s a figure that’s been quoted a lot, to this day, and was something that rankled US Pirate Party Administrator, Andrew Norton.

“I was tired of seeing those claims on every press release,” he tells TorrentFreak, “knowing there was no evidence to back them up. They could have said that the loss was $20 billion, if they think they could bluff it out. The sad fact is that we have news outlets, and politicians quoting this figure as fact, and yet not one verified any claim. If I said I could turn lead into gold, I would be bombarded with requests to prove it. They have turned air into $6billion, and supposedly smart people accept it without question.”

Frustrated, Norton decided he should study the MPAA’s own figures. When he couldn’t find any data to support their claims, he decided that there needed to be a study of the data the MPAA did put out. “I was thinking about where I could look, when the MPAA announced a new record year, and I thought ‘of course’. The MPAA can hardly question the accuracy of the data published by its members, and itself.”

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Source: Torrent Freak

One-third of consumers in the US and UK have made a copy of a DVD within the last six months, according to a report from Futuresource Consulting. The firm surveyed 3,613 people in the US and 1,718 in the UK to discover their “home piracy” habits, and attempts to paint a somewhat ugly picture of casual copyright infringement even though a majority of users who make copies are doing so “legitimately” (for personal use).

36 percent of UK respondents and 32 percent of US respondents have made a copy of a DVD within the last six months, which Futuresource says is an increase from only a quarter of survey respondents in 2007. Respondents in the UK who copied DVDs primarily made copies of movies and TV shows, although movie copying dropped between 2007 and 2008 while TV copying went up.

Unsurprisingly, the preferred method of copying DVDs were some of the simplest. Roughly a quarter of both UK and US consumers who made copies of DVDs connected a DVD player to a DVD recorder using a composite/S-Video cable, while roughly another quarter of the two groups preferred using a single PC application for burning DVD copies.

Futuresource notes, however, that some 62 percent of US users and 49 percent of those in the UK are making “legitimate” copies of their own new release DVDs that they purchased. 58 percent and 54 percent of those who made copies of older movies made copies of their own DVDs too. Although the numbers for burned DVDs from those that were rented or borrowed are nothing to sneeze at, the large majority of those surveyed appear to be doing what they believe they have a legal right to do.

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Source:

Hackers have “compromised” pages on the US Sony PlayStation website, a security firm claimed today..

Sophos said that cyber-criminals used an SQL injection vulnerability to add unauthorised code to pages promoting PlayStation games SingStar Pop and God of War.

The malware claims to undertake an antivirus scan and displays a fake message stating that the visitor’s computer has been infected.

The visitor is then urged to purchase a bogus security product to clean up the ‘infection’.

Sophos warned that it would be “trivial” for the hackers who have compromised the web pages to alter the payload so that it became more malicious.

They could install code designed to harvest confidential information from users, or turn innocent victims’ PCs into botnet zombies.

“There are millions of video game lovers around the world, many of whom will visit Sony’s PlayStation website regularly to find out more about the latest console games,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

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Source: iT News

A study from researchers at Google, IBM and the Communications Systems Group in Switzerland found only 60 percent of Web users have safe browsers. The most secure is Mozilla’s Firefox, and the least secure is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The findings are similar to those by Sophos, which found 81 percent of corporate endpoints vulnerable.

Researchers from Google, IBM and the Communications Systems Group in Switzerland released a study Monday that shows only 60 percent of Web users are surfing with patched, updated browsers.

They estimated that only 576 million of 1.4 billion Internet users worldwide used the most secure browsers. The data Relevant Products/Services came from Google’s server logs between January 2007 and last month.

Mozilla users are most likely to be using the latest versions of their browsers, with 83 percent of Firefox users patched. By contrast, only 63.3 percent of Safari users and 56.1 percent of Opera users have the latest versions. Microsoft Relevant Products/Services Internet Explorer users ranked at the bottom with only 47.6 percent using the most secure version of IE7.

“We believe the auto-update mechanism as implemented within Firefox to be the most efficient patching mechanism of the Web browsers studied,” the researchers wrote.

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Source: News Factor

Virgin Media has sent about 800 letters to customers warning them that they should not be downloading illegal music files via file-sharing sites.

It is part of a 10-week campaign it is running in conjunction with the BPI to “educate” users about downloads.

The BPI, the body which represents the UK record industry, told the BBC that “thousands more letters” would be sent.

Its stricter stance on illegal downloaders might result in some ISPs being taken to court, it told BBC News.

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Source: The BBC

Internet search company Google signed an agreement with Brazilian public prosecutors on Wednesday to help combat child pornography on its social networking site Orkut, an accord that the company believes is the first of its kind internationally.

Under the agreement, Google will use filters to remove and prevent illegal content on Orkut, which has about half its users in Brazil. The company will also facilitate evidence gathering under judicial order in suspected crimes against children and teen-agers on Orkut without the need for international legal accords.

Google will also preserve for six months access logs of users being investigated for illegal conduct.

Google said it was the first such agreement that the company had signed and the firm believes it is the first internationally. Alexandre Hohagen, president of Google in Brazil, told a congressional committee, “It’s an historic day not only for Brazil but for the Internet in the entire world.”

Initially, Google had refused to work with prosecutors, saying it was subject only to U.S. laws, said Prosecutor Sergio Suiama. The company denied this, saying it had always been willing to cooperate with Brazilian authorities.

Brazilian prosecutors say 90 percent of illegal Internet content being investigated in Brazil involves Orkut. The site has 60 million users, half of them in Brazil.

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Source: Reuters