Leading French lawmakers voted Thursday to water down a draft copyright law that could force Apple Computer to make its iPod music player and iTunes online store compatible with rivals’ offerings. But the changes did not appear to go far enough to satisfy Apple, which dropped the strongest hint yet that it might withdraw from [...]

The market is still guessing about Google’s continued purchases of “dark fiber” and what that will mean to the Internet. Yet another explanation was floated at a recent IT conference: IPv6, the next-generation Internet standard. During a debate on the adoption of Internet Protocol Version 6 at the Burton Group’s annual Catalyst conference in San [...]

For years, old recordings have piled up in the archives at Verve Records, including beloved jazz tracks that had no market big enough to justify pressing new discs. But thanks to the Internet, music lovers are rediscovering iconic titles like Ella Fitzgerald’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and Quincy Jones’s “Body Heat” — rekindling enough popular [...]

More evidence that Hollywood’s MPAA paid a hacker to illegally break into the Torrentspy dbase has come in a new court document. Last month Torrentspy’s US lawyer Ira Rothken alleged the MPAA’s Dean Garfield offered to pay the $15,000 for information hacked from Torrentspy.com, “after he and the MPAA reviewed it, if they found it [...]

Earthlink is betting on urban Wi-Fi — and Anaheim In the past decade Garry Betty has experimented with just about every possible way of connecting his customers to the Internet — and wiped $1 billion of his shareholders’ capital off the balance sheet in the process. But now the chief executive of Earthlink says he [...]

With digital distribution growing, mail order rentals may soon be outdated Netflix has a business model that’s not long for this world. The online video rental company depends on customers playing DVDs and sending them back and forth in the mail. But in the day of digital downloads, waiting by the mailbox will seem old-fashioned [...]

If you have a hobby or interest you are passionate about, the chances are that you have already found a website or a blog dedicated to it. But with the spread of high speed broadband there is an increasing possibility that you just might find a whole TV channel, not just on the internet, but [...]

France has given the thumbs-up to the defanged version of a controversial law that would have forced Apple Computer to open up its iTunes digital rights management to players other than its iPod. The Dadvsi law, which originally included provisions to allow people to crack DRM protections and oblige Apple to interoperate with its rivals’ [...]

Increased use of the Internet, along with the number of hours people are spending at work, are factors contributing to a drastic decline in the number of close friends that Americans have. The number of people who say they have no one to talk to about important matters has more than doubled, according to a [...]

Mobile broadband is making watching television anytime, anywhere, much more of a reality, and one Israeli company is committed to that vision of TV all the time. “Our motto is ‘enabling TV everywhere,’” the chief executive officer and president of Siano Mobile Silicon, Alon Ironi, told United Press International. Siano makes chips with receivers for [...]

Cyber-criminals are multiplying quickly and becoming more sophisticated in the ways in which they take advantage of unwitting Internet individual users and companies, a nationally recognized cyber-security specialist told an SD Forum seminar audience June 22. And peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire, Kazaa, Grokster and others aren’t helping to quell the increase in crimes committed [...]

Apple Computer Inc. said on Friday it was awaiting final approval of a French bill aimed at opening online media stores to rivals, which it hoped would leave the market to decide which systems prevailed. “We are awaiting the final result of France’s legislative process,” Apple spokesman Alan Hely said in an emailed statement. “(We) [...]

France has unveiled a new website offering high-resolution aerial imagery of its entire territory, in a bid to mirror the planetary success of the US pioneer in the field, Google Earth. President Jacques Chirac chaired the official launch of the Geoportal — found on the website www.geoportail.fr– a free service which allows users to zoom [...]

Last week’s column was about Bill Gates’ announced departure from day-to-day management at Microsoft and a broad view of the Net Neutrality issue. We’ll get back to Microsoft next week with a much closer look at the challenges the company faces as it ages and what I believe is a clever and counter-intuitive plan for [...]

Attention all shoppers, Verizon DSL is now available in Wal-Mart stores. On Thursday, Verizon announced that its DSL service will sold by specially trained Wal-Mart Connection Center associates in 549 Wal-Mart stores in 24 states. These associates will help shoppers use an automated ordering system that checks eligibility for Verizon DSL service and then lets [...]

The world’s biggest technology companies have kick-started a campaign for a US-wide privacy law. However, privacy advocates fear the proposal is too weak when compared to some of the state laws it would overrule. Google, Microsoft, Intel, eBay, HP, Oracle and Sun are among the signatories to a statement calling for personal information to be [...]

Production of counterfeit digital goods is increasingly carried out within the UK, according to Intellectual Property Crime Group, a unit of The Patent Office. In a report just published, the group said it had confiscated 20 per cent more DVD-R burners than in previous years, and that disc production was becoming domesticated in a way [...]

The managers of Avril Lavigne, The Streets and Elbow are amongst those who’ve signed an online petition organized by Flowerburger Records naming the British music industry for suing fans who use p2p networks. For British music industry read EMI (UK), Warner Music (US), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany), the Big Four Organized [...]

The original BitTorrent client that had at one point set the Internet world on it’s ear has received a facelift. This time it addresses issues ISPs have with the amount of traffic dedicated to the BitTorrent P2P network. A growing concern among ISPs has been that 60% of their network bandwidth is used for the [...]

A Long Island politician has dropped a federal lawsuit that had claimed the search engine company Google Inc. profits from child pornography. Jeffrey Toback, a member of the Nassau County Legislature from Oceanside, filed suit in May claiming Google had “paid links” to Web sites containing child pornography. Toback said he dropped the lawsuit because [...]