After 12 albums over nearly 30 years, “Weird Al” Yankovic has finally made it big. His latest album, titled “Straight Outta Lynwood,” debuted this month at the No. 10 spot on the Billboard 200, marking the first time in his entire career that one of his albums has been in the top 10. His single [...]

Among today’s press releases was one from a company called Skyrider announcing, “continued market momentum” with its P2P search marketing platform and a Series C Round of funding”. But what it all boils down to is: the company believes it’s going to make a pile by loading p2p search results with advertising. “P2P networks encounter [...]

With all of the excitement around online video and distributing digital content, you’d think peer-to-peer systems would be smack in the middle of things. But yesterday, when we visited a small conference1 for P2P companies, there was little of the excitement found elsewhere in the industry. It seems P2P, despite its being both efficient and [...]

P2P traffic generated by Internet file sharing is still on the rise in Germany. ipoque, provider of solutions for Internet traffic management and analysis, has conducted a survey on user behavior in the most popular file sharing networks during the last six months. P2P traffic generated by Internet file sharing is still on the rise [...]

DVD Jon, the Norwegian who as a teen hacked the encryption on DVDs has done it again. This time he has slayed Apple’s Fairplay encryption that prevents iPod users from playing music downloaded from places other than Apple’s iTunes. Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses, [...]

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has started to test out using a mesh network and P2P technology to stream live video from law enforcement vehicles traveling in excess of 100 mph. The Public Safety Broadband Consortium, a group that includes InfiNet Wireless, Lockheed Martin Information Technology, Public Safety Broadband and Wi-Fi Citywide, will soon be [...]

The final release version of Firefox 2 has been released and it was well worth the wait. For those of you still using IE now is definitely the time to change. New Tabbed Browsing Just like Microsoft’s new IE7, Firefox 2.0 has individually tabbed browsers to make opening and closing them much easier. Each of [...]

BitTorrent is looking to announce today that 7 routers and 2 NAS storage devices which have built-in BitTorrent clients inside are being released.

The Shins’ new album, Wincing the Night Away, leaked last week, and this weekend was all about the Internet going nuts about it. Wincing, which comes out in late January, is a huge release for Sub Pop–with the Postal Service going dormant, the Shins are the label’s biggest active band. So review copies were kept [...]

DRM is certainly being thought about in several different areas of the music industry and sales. Businesses are rethinking their approach to securing music from the hands of pirates. Just recently, Reuters reported that the current theory is that if the music industry wants to work to loosen the grip Apple has on digital music [...]

Google attracts millions of Web users every day. And, increasingly, it’s attracting the attention of plenty of lawyers, too. As Google has grown into the world’s most popular search engine and, arguably, the most powerful Internet company, it has become entangled in scores of lawsuits touching on a wide range of legal questions, including copyright [...]

Blockbuster, the No 1 video rental store chain in the United States, has withdrawn its lowest online-subscription price and is testing a program to allow its online subscribers to exchange DVDs at company stores as well as by mail. Blockbuster, which has waged a price-cutting war against Netflix and others, decided to end a test [...]

Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralized distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station –this is a public-transit version of the “Traffic Napster” that appears in my [...]

Private sharing of digital files is one of those things that just makes sense to people who spend a lot of time online. Everyone thinks the problem’s not solved yet, so people keep launching startups. ToPeer1, based in Ottawa, is the latest personal P2P effort we have come across. It is a (Windows only, for [...]

Sony has said it will use the “full scope of the law” to block the importing of PlayStation 3s (PS3) into Europe before its official release. The much-anticipated games console goes on sale in the US and Japan next month but is not out in Europe until 2007. Last week a British judge ruled that [...]

The banking haven of Switzerland is looking to mandate broadband as a universal service for all Swiss citizens. The country is going to issue1 a new license to ensure this mandate is carried out. The universal service license is currently granted to Swisscom and will expire at the end of 2007. The Swiss FCC notes [...]

Rapidshare.de, one of the most popular site for sharing really big files on the internet, has rebranded itself as Rapidshare.com. A good news is that if your uploaded file on Rapidshare gets popular, you automatically qualify for a free premium rapidshare account which means no limit on file downloads or any waiting time. While Rapidshare [...]

The phenomenon of Internet television is rising many controversies among the supporters and owners of traditional corporate TVs, because of the potentially devastating changes it might provoke in the mass media world. The unstoppable growth of the online social media networks automatically leads internet users to question whether there are alternatives to the corporate media [...]

The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) and i-SAFE Inc, the leader in Internet safety education, today announced a new partnership to help guide students to safely and legally access digital music. The announcement comes on the heels of the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in MGM v. Grokster a decision that established [...]

CBS Radio, a unit of CBS Corp (CBS) and NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer reached a settlement involving the broadcasting of certain songs in return for rewards. Under terms of the agreement, CBS Radio will make up to a $2 million payment to New York non-profit entities to fund music education and appreciation programs. CBS [...]