Much of the released music was previously only available through the games’ collector’s editions, or at special events such as the BlizzCon gaming convention. The soundtracks released today are: StarCraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade and Taverns of Azeroth.

The albums are available through a new Blizzard Entertainment hub page within the iTunes store. It also hosts BlizzCast podcast and various media from the studio’s upcoming games.

Additionally, the “Diablo 3 Overture” track has been released as a single and has been highlighted as a “Discovery Download”, making it free to download till this Tuesday.

Source: Digital Battle

Even as the economy slows and businesses move to slash spending on computers and network gear, sales of storage will continue to spiral — at least until someone invents a way for companies to stop collecting so much data, analysts say.

Proliferating data storage requirements brought on both by customer demands to keep information instantly available and by mounting record-keeping mandated by regulators are forcing companies to retool their corporate data centers.

IBM said its new line-up of storage products and services are designed to help customers manage the transition from static data archives to dynamic storehouses ready to manage two-way data flows over the Internet.

“IBM is trying to illustrate how many facets of their storage offerings can be viewed as something strategic and cohesive as opposed to just another series of ‘cool products,’” said analyst Clay Ryder, the president of Sageza Group.

International Business Machines Corp said it aims to help customers — big banks, retailers, government agencies and other organizations — contend with the growing digitization of entertainment, health care, security and retail information.

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Source: Reuters

Kane Kramer, 52, came up with the technology that drives the digital music player nearly 30 years ago but has still not seen a penny from his invention. And the father of three is so hard up he had to sell his home last year and move his family to rented accommodation. Now documents filed by Apple in a court case show the US firm acknowledges him as the father of the iPod.

The computer giant even flew Mr Kramer to its Californian headquarters to give evidence in its defence during a legal wrangle with another firm, Burst.com, which claimed it held patents to technology in the iPod and deserved a cut of Apple’s £89billion profits.

Two years ago, Mr Kramer told this newspaper how he had invented the device in 1979 – when he was just 23.

His invention, called the IXI, stored only 3.5 minutes of music on to a chip – but Mr Kramer rightly believed its capacity would improve. His sketches at the time showed a credit-card-sized player with a rectangular screen and a central menu button to scroll through a selection of music tracks – very similar to the iPod.

He took out a worldwide patent and set up a company to develop the idea. But in 1988, after a boardroom split, he was unable to raise the £60,000 needed to renew patents across 120 countries and the technology became public property.

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Source: Daily Mail

On Monday, RealNetworks, the digital media company in Seattle, will introduce RealDVD, a $30 software program for Windows computers that allows users to easily make a digital copy of an entire DVD — down to the extras and artwork from the box.

Robert Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, called it “a compelling and very responsible product that gives consumers a way to do something they have always wanted to do,” like make backup copies of favorite discs and take movies with them on their laptops when they travel.

But RealDVD is also sure to be a controversial product — one that will easily earn its maker the ire of Hollywood’s powerful and litigious movie studios. Since the DVD format was introduced more than a decade ago, Hollywood has unremittingly sought to protect the DVD from the fate that befell the CD, which has no mechanism to prevent copying.

Pirate music services like Napster sparked the digital music revolution. The ability of regular consumers to make digital copies of CDs easily with their computers fed such services and, in Hollywood’s view, led to the weakening of the major music labels.

A vibrant movie rental market makes the threat of widespread DVD copying even more ominous. If people who lack technical knowledge can easily copy DVDs, Hollywood worries, they will stop buying DVDs and instead simply visit the local Blockbuster to “rent, rip and return.”

To stave off this outcome and protect what is now $16 billion in annual DVD sales, studios and consumer electronics companies have enveloped their discs with encryption that is intended to prevent copying.

They also regularly go to court to fight any company that offers software to break the encryption. More than five years ago, several studios and the Motion Picture Association of America sued 321 Studios, a company in St. Louis, that had sold the popular program DVD X Copy. A judge ruled that the software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the company closed in 2004.

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Source: The New York Times

“Social Network Web sites have the ideal properties to become attack platforms,” according to a paper entitled “Antisocial Networks:Turning a Social Network into a Botnet,” that was authored by five researchers from the Institute of Computer Science in Greece and one from the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore. The demo application, called “Photo of the Day,” displays a new photo from National Geographic every day. However, every time someone views the photo, the host computer is forced “to serve a request of 600 Kbytes,” according to the paper.

Such a botnet could be used for other types of attacks, such as spreading malware, scanning computers for open ports, and overriding authentication mechanisms that are based on cookies, the paper warned. The researchers suggested that Facebook and other social networks be careful in designing their platform and application programming interfaces (APIs) so that there are few interactions between the “social utilities they operate and the rest of the Internet.”

“More precisely, social network providers should be careful with the use of client side technologies, like JavaScript, etc,” the paper says. “A social network operator should provide developers with a strict API, which is capable of giving access to resources only related to the system. Also, every application should run in an isolated environment imposing constraints to prevent the application from interacting with other Internet hosts, which are not participants of the social network. Finally, operators of social networks should invest resources in verifying the applications they host.”

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Source: CNet via Yahoo! News

“It’s every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it’s much, much more,” said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

The program is called A-Space, and it’s a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.

The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation’s entire intelligence community September 22.

“It’s a place where not only spies can meet but share data they’ve never been able to share before,” Wertheimer said. “This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella.”

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Source: CNN

Google Chrome. It’s a browser that was admittedly still in the development oven when Google released it, so are Internet Explorer 8-killer comments premature? Some analysts think so.

On Tuesday, Google launched its latest innovation: a new open-source browser intended to create a better Web experience. Chrome is now available in more than 40 languages for the Windows operating system.

Flanked by promises on one side and hype on the other, Chrome took one percent of the global browser market within a day of launch, according to Web traffic-analysis company StatCounter.

“This is a phenomenal performance,” said Aodhan Cullen of StatCounter. “This is war on Microsoft Relevant Products/Services, but the big loser could be Firefox.” StatCounter’s analysis also revealed that Internet Explorer holds 70 percent of the global browser market, followed by Firefox with 22 percent.

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Source: News Factor

“This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans,” Moore said in a statement Thursday. “The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire (millions) to get off the couch and give voting a chance.”

Moore’s camp said no consideration was ever given to a theatrical release for the film, which cost about $2 million to make, perhaps forfeiting a nice profit at the box office. His last two documentaries, Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11, are two of the three highest-grossing documentaries ever released.

The download will be available on BlipTV. The planned release takes a page out of Radiohead’s book, which released its album In Rainbows on the Internet in October 2007. The band invited fans to pay what they wanted for the download, but the music was essentially free for the taking. Radiohead has never revealed the promotion’s sales figures, but there was speculation that the money wasn’t very good.

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Source: CNet

Since going public, the company has used its Googlebucks to acquire a slew of innovative startups–ranging from photo-sharing service Picasa, video site YouTube and even the core of its Google Earth mapping service. It also has raised a bunch of homegrown consumer favorites, including e-mail service Gmail and social networking site, Orkut.

The number of searches it handles has grown astronomically. In 1998, Google reported that it handled 10,000 searches a day. That number leaped to 500,000 a day in 1999. Google doesn’t share those numbers widely now, but research group comScore estimates that Google hosted 235 million searches a day in July of this year.

There’s another way to gauge Google’s growth. The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million Web pages. In July, a Google search engineer tallied up how many unique URLs the company searches to find content: the number was 1 trillion. At this rate, a “googol” worth of pages (or 1 followed by 100 zeros) can only be a few years away.

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Source: Forbes

This year we’ve reported on several book authors who embraced the Internet, and BitTorrent in particular. Having pirated copies of their books listed on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay is considered to be an honor to some. They use it as a promotional tool, and actually sell more books because of it.

One of the prime examples is best-selling author Paulo Coelho, who said he sold thousands of extra books because of he pirated his own books. “Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho told TorrentFreak in a follow up interview, explaining why he decided to share his books for free.

Responses to unauthorized filesharing vary. Those that have embraced it have seen dividends. Others fight it and throw tantrums, or use it as an excuse. A prime example of the last category has emerged, in the form of author Stephanie Meyer. Meyer, best known for her recent hits based around vampires, caters to the ‘young adult’ market re-popularized by the Harry Potter books.

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Source: Torrent Freak

“Our concern is that in order to obtain the co-operation of the ISPs, there seems to be a quid pro quo,” said Pakman. “This is qualitatively different from licensing another half a dozen digital music businesses.”

He claimed that the agreement inked in July between six UK ISPs, the BPI, and the Motion Pictures Ass. of America, to crack down on illegal downloading would “penalise the good guys, not the bad guys”.

Unsurprisingly, ISPs rebutted Pakman’s comments that they could encourage traffic to their own sites over the likes of eMusic, iTunes, Amazon and others.

“We have no plans to inhibit in any way the traffic of other legitimate music or content services, irrespective of whether we eventually offer our own,” BT told the FT. BSkyB said: “It seems premature in the extreme to be warning of the consequences of something that doesn’t even exist.”

ISPs have in recent months been busily firing off threatening letters to customers they suspect of sharing copyright music over peer-to-peer networks with internet cut-off.

Source: The Register

“Slacker Uprising” documents Moore’s 62-city tour of key swing states during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, when he tried to convince young non-voters to give voting a shot.

“This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans,” Moore said in a statement. “The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November.”

“Slacker Uprising,” budgeted modestly at over $2 million, was funded by Moore along with movie executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who hold international rights, said a spokesman for Moore.

It marks his follow-up to the healthcare expose “Sicko,” which earned just $24.5 million at the North American box office last year, far short of the $119 million haul for his 2004 political blockbuster “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Moore’s spokesman said no consideration was ever given to a theatrical release. A low-cost DVD will be released on October 7.

The download will be available on by BlipTV (http://www.blip.tv).

Source: Reuters

The downturn left Yahoo’s market value about $12-billion below what shareholders would received if the Sunnyvale-based company had accepted Microsoft’s takeover offer of $33 a share in May. Microsoft sweetened the offer after Yahoo repeatedly rejected an initial bid of $31 a share made in January.

Yahoo’s demands for more money eventually drove Microsoft away, angering many shareholders now worried that the company won’t be able to push the stock price back above $30 any time soon. If Yahoo shares remain in a funk, some analysts believe the company’s board will be under increasing pressure to replace co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive.

Mr. Yang, who also sits on the board, has already pledged to increase Yahoo’s net revenue by at least 25 per cent in each of the next two years – a goal that has been greeted with widespread skepticism. Yahoo’s net revenue rose 11 per cent to $2.7-billion during the first half of this year.

Two former CEOs, Frank Biondi Jr. and John Chapple, joined Yahoo’s board last month as part of a settlement with disgruntled shareholder Carl Icahn, who wanted the company to be sold to Microsoft. Mr. Icahn also recently joined Yahoo’s 11-member board.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

In a precedent-setting move, a divided Federal Communications Commission last month determined that the company is violating a federal policy that guarantees unfettered access to the Internet. Comcast challenged the FCC decision Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington.

Comcast executive vice-president David L. Cohen said in a statement that the company is seeking “review and reversal” of the FCC order and that the commission’s action was “legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record.”

The Comcast case arose from complaints by users of a type of “file-sharing” software often used to download large data files, usually video. Tests by The Associated Press and others found that file-sharing transmissions were aborting prematurely. It was later discovered that the company was cutting off transfers without informing customers.

The FCC noted Comcast’s network management practices were “discriminatory and arbitrary” and that the company’s practices “contravene industry standards and have significantly impeded Internet users’ ability to use applications and access content of their choice.”

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Source: The Globe and Mail