Apple uses it to sell iPods. Vodafone uses it to sell broadband airtime. Starbucks uses it to encourage customers to linger longer, and consider a second Frappuccino.   Digital music finally took off in 2005, according to data published ahead of this week’s Midem music trade show in Cannes, while lawsuits kept illegal file-sharing in [...]

MessageLabs, the e-mail-filtering provider for the U.K. government, told ZDNet UK that targeted e-mails were sent to various individuals within government departments in an attempt to take control of their computers. The e-mails harbored an exploit for the Windows Meta File vulnerability.   The attack occurred over the Christmas period and came from China, said [...]

Three other executives were arrested alongside Livedoor boss Takafumi Horie, 33, who has denied the allegations.   Livedoor’s problems have shaken Japan’s business world and stock market amid fears that more problems may emerge.   The allegations were central to last week’s share sell-off that forced the Tokyo stock market to close early.

"The new operations of al-Qaida has not happened not because we could not penetrate the security measures. It is being prepared and you’ll see it in your homeland very soon," the voice attributed to bin Laden said, apparently addressing Americans.   But the voice on the tape, which appeared to be aimed at the American [...]

TAR, stands for tape archive, from when archives were initially backed up on magnetic tape. The .TAR format can archive files (combine many files into one file) but not compress, unlike .ZIP, or .RAR.   A .ZIP or .RAR file compresses each file as it is included in a zip file. A .TAR file just [...]

Napster today said it has doubled the number of people subscribing to its music rental services in the past 12 months.   The digital music provider’s subscriber base now stands at more than 550,000 users, Napster claimed, with nine per cent of that total – 50,000 – coming through the company’s subscription programme for university [...]

Several students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who got sued by the RIAA for sharing music over Internet2 are now demanding that the founder and operator of the file-sharing network they used pay the RIAA to settle the cases.   In its standard fashion, the RIAA has told the kids it will settle for payments [...]

Alex Tew, 21, hit the headlines at the start of the year when he revealed his Million Dollar Homepage had made him a million dollars in four months.   But the publicity brought the unwanted attention of extortionists who knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.   Following a week of downtime, the [...]

In a 6-3 vote, justices rejected a Bush administration effort to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.   The court said the 1997 Oregon doctor-assisted suicide law trumps federal power to regulate doctors. The Oregon law has been used to end the lives of more than 200 seriously ill people.   The court [...]

A digital music "vending machine" of sorts, music kiosks let users browse, buy and download tracks from an Internet-connected unit that they can then either burn to a CD or transfer to an MP3 player.   New versions support Bluetooth technology, which would enable buyers to transfer content wirelessly from the kiosk to certain mobile [...]

NAB wants to work with the record labels to figure out a compromise over content protection issues associated with HD Radio, rather than relying on Congress to mandate a solution. It opposes mandatory encryption of the digital signal at the source, however, and tells the RIAA that such a proposal could obsolete both IBOC receivers [...]

The AFP report said the government’s culture ministry issued a statement saying the bill was being amended on the orders of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to notably enshrine the right of consumers to make private copies of music and film disks.   It would also make a distinction between people illegally downloading for profit [...]

At issue are new devices that can record and save high-quality digital copies of tunes as they’re being broadcast by these new networks. Recording executives are worried that consumers might increasingly opt to make such copies instead of purchasing the music on a commercial CD or from a download store like Apple Computer’s iTunes.   [...]

The government on this flyspeck of an island nation, home to an American Navy base, recently renewed its effort to block dozens of opposition Web sites. So Abdulemam, 28, a computer engineer, had to spend about 10 minutes whipping through various computer servers around the world before finally pulling up his Web site, BahrainOnline.org.   [...]

A UK consumer watchdog has called for new laws to protect users’ rights to use digital music and movies.   The National Consumer Council (NCC) said anti-piracy efforts were eroding established rights to digital media.   The NCC had little faith that industry self-regulation would adequately protect consumers’ rights. It made its comments to a [...]

When Oscar season hits Hollywood, count on three things: teary-eyed speechifying, long lines at Botox boutiques, and tightened security on the "screeners" essential to the Academy Awards process. These days, screeners are high-quality DVDs. The movie studios send them to voters as a convenience, since academy members, at least the conscientious ones, have dozens of [...]

Five days of Senate Judiciary Committee consideration ended with Chairman Arlen Specter announcing his support for President George W. Bush’s nomination of Alito for the high court.   The Pennsylvania Republican predicted all eight Democrats on the panel would vote against him.   "I intend to vote to support Judge Alito’s nomination as associate justice [...]

Will the FCC, which chased Stern off the public airwaves, now crack down on the pirates? The agency needs a complaint to begin an investigation.Will Stern or Sirius be the complainer?   Stern’s Sirius may have started a revolution it hadn’t planned on.   For those unfamiliar with pirate radio, here are the basics: The [...]

Since their debut a half-decade ago, satellite radio stations have had one main rival: traditional radio. And it’s not hard to see why winning subscribers has been easing pickings. Satellite radio offers ad-free music channels and boasts myriad specialized offerings, compared with a few dozen for traditional AM/FM stations. XM Satellite Radio (XMSR) and Sirius [...]

***UPDATE: Thanks to all our readers and the readers on Digg and other blogs for your support! A rep from GoDaddy has Called and "cleared up the misunderstanding" they Will restart the DNS services for MyBitTorrent.com and allow MyBittorrent to freely transfer to another registry of their choice. Again the power of Blogging has prevailed! [...]