The Federal Communications Commission will soon release a new cable ownership order that would bar cable companies from serving over 30 percent of pay television subscribers in the US. If the order is adopted by the FCC, it would make the currently enforced 30 percent limit a matter of law. The 30 percent cap stems [...]

Lucky and Flo, Malaysia’s latest weapons in tackling rampant music and movie piracy, started work at the country’s biggest international airport Tuesday, sniffing out shipments for fake optical discs. The two black Labradors are on loan for a month from the Motion Picture Association of America, which says its members—including top Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures, [...]

For you Ubuntu users out there, it’s just been revealed that earlier versions of the KTorrent BitTorrent client server are vulnerable to attack. A malicious remote peer could send specially crafted messages to overwrite files or execute arbitrary code with user privileges. It has been reported that versions of the open-source BitTorrent client server KTorrent [...]

More bad news for the BitTorrent Entertainment Network. iTunes, the world’s most popular online movie download store, has announced that movies from Lionsgate films will be available for download on the site starting today. Among the titles to be included are “Terminator 2,” “LA Story,” “Basic Instinct,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Dirty Dancing,” “Total Recall,” [...]

The Internet is about to drown in digital video. Hui Zhang thinks peer-to-peer networks could come to the rescue. Ted Stevens, the 83-year-old senior senator from Alaska, was widely ridiculed last year for a speech in which he described the Internet as "a series of tubes." Yet clumsy as his metaphor may have been, Stevens [...]

A University of Chicago employee shares a recent letter he received from the Vice President & Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago. The recent crackdown by the MPAA and the RIAA on university and college students across the country has made some administrators become more proactive in their efforts to discourage illegal P2P [...]

European Union consumer chief Meglena Kuneva has hit out at Apple Inc.’s bundling of its popular iPod music players and its iTunes online music store, according to German weekly magazine Focus. "Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod? I [...]

Wikia Inc the San Mateo company co-founded by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, plans to challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. with a search engine that lets users edit and fine-tune its results. The goal for the project is to get 5 percent of the search market, Gil Penchina, chief executive officer of Wikia, said Thursday [...]

As usual, those eclectic cats over at the BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay know how to make headlines, and this time it’s about their recent decision to give their Swedish King a “diploma”. In a recent blog posting on The Pirate Bay site, they have announced that in the spirit of Swedish pride they [...]

The US music industry is asking 50 Ohio University students to pay $3,000 each to avoid lawsuits accusing them of pirating songs off the Internet. The Recording Industry Association of America asked the university in Athens to pass along letters to the students with Internet addresses believed to be used for illegal sharing of copyrighted [...]

Vivendi SA unit Universal Music Group and Bolt Inc said they reached an out-of-court, multimillion dollar settlement resolving UMG’s suit, which claimed Bolt let users share music videos and other copyrighted material without permission. The exact amount of damages to be paid by Bolt wasn’t disclosed. Bolt also agreed to introduce filters within the next [...]

Ray Beckerman of “Recording Industry vs the People” reaches out to all of the universities that have recently been the target of lawsuits by the RIAA. This is an historic opportunity for you to take steps to make the RIAA’s litigation campaign more of a level playing field. The way things are: Once the RIAA [...]

Annoyed at recent reports that online campus piracy rates top 50 percent, lawmakers warned college and university administrators Thursday if they don’t do more to curb the theft, Congress would. Complaining that a number of schools refused cooperate with a General Accountability Office (GAO) survey of campus piracy rates, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) said a [...]

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying — out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of [...]

With the increasingly beleaguered prospects for the viability of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, it seems worth pondering why it needs DRM and playback restriction in the first place, and also who and how they impact it’s ultimate long-term success. BitTorrent Inc opened up it’s new BitTorrent Entertainment Network video download store to much hype and [...]

Music didn’t really die in 1958 when the Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly took their fateful flight, but it sure is on life support today. The soul of innovation has been sucked out of music by the four major recording companies and the technology that allegedly protects most music. At the center of [...]

At GDC today, AMD announced a suite of tools for developing handheld gaming content for the company’s next-generation mobile graphics parts. The suite includes Rendermonkey 1.7, a shader tool that will let game developers write graphics code for a range of devices that support the OpenVG 1.0, OpenGL 2.0, and Unified Shader Architecture technologies. ATI’s [...]

Live for Windows will hold onto Xbox Live prices, and will offer cross-platform gaming No one doubts that Microsoft had plans to bring some form of its Xbox Live service and model to PC gamers after it announced its Games for Windows initiative to reinvigorate computer games. The biggest questions about a Live for Windows [...]

The technical name is syllogomania, from sylloge (“to collect”), but most psychiatric professionals call it compulsive hoarding. Like everyone else, compulsive hoarders have gone digital. Infohoarding may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of digital age. “Jim” is an infohoarder like few others. In the last four years, this 37-year-old Brooklyn native has downloaded and [...]

The streaming rock n’ roll music site fights back with a vengeance and countersues the bands and music labels that accuse it of illegally broadcasting content without the artists’ consent. It was about 3 months ago that Wolfgang’s Vault was sued by a number of artists upset over the fact that old concert footage and [...]