Windows XP will stop being available on new PCs from the end of January 2008. Microsoft is keeping to a plan to stop selling the operating system even though surveys show a lukewarm response to Windows Vista among consumers. A poll by US market research firm Harris Interactive found that only 10% of those questioned [...]

AS DIGITAL music hogs the headlines, the humble CD has made a comeback at the cash register. However, music retailers may still be feeling the pinch. Figures released by the Australian Recording Industry Association yesterday show an increase of almost 8 per cent in the volume of wholesale physical music products, such as CDs, in [...]

For all the whining about P2P and file-sharing services, a detail that seems hidden in all the fuss over declining music sales by the RIAA and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), is the fact that people bought over $9 billion USD worth of ringtones worldwide last year. That’s right, $9 billion USD! [...]

A detail that seems hidden in all the fuss over declining music sales by the RIAA and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), is the fact that people bought over $9 billion USD worth of ringtones worldwide last year. That’s right, $9 billion USD! This is about a 41% increase over last year [...]

Four years ago when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the company preached the good news of an easy-to-understand pricing structure for consumers: all tracks at 99 cents, most albums for $9.99. Since then, the notion of simple low price has been a mantra for digital music retail. Even those in the subscription business pursued [...]

Warner Music Group on Thursday demanded that online retailer AnywhereCD remove its digital albums from the site, saying the start-up had violated their agreement by selling Warner’s music without copy protection software. But the fourth-largest music company appeared to make a concession to calls for music without copy restrictions, known as DRM, by saying it [...]

CSI, Survivor, Late Night With David Letterman, news, sports shows, and more will all be offered online. CBS today agreed to deals with Joost, Microsoft, ComCast, and Time Warner to begin allowing them to provide CBS content online in exchange for a share of all advertising revenue generated. Some of the other companies involved in [...]

A couple weeks ago, EMI announced that it will begin offering DRM-free tracks in MP3, AAC, and WMA format. Apple jumped on the announcement, immediately confirming that they will sell these tracks on iTunes. Of course, they’ll charge 30% more for them—$1.29 per track instead of 99 cents—and you can “upgrade” your existing purchases for [...]

The US military plans to test an Internet router in space, in a project that could also benefit civilian broadband satellite communications. Cisco Systems Inc. and Intelsat General Corp., a subsidiary of Intelsat Ltd., are among the companies selected by the U.S. Department of Defense for its Internet Routing In Space (IRIS) project, which aims [...]

The Beatles have agreed a deal with music giant EMI to settle the band’s battle for £30m in unpaid royalties. Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison took legal action in 2005, claiming money from album sales. “I can confirm that we have reached a mutually acceptable settlement [...]

The RIAA announced yesterday that it had sent a third wave of 413 pre-litigation settlement letters to 22 universities across the country. A new wave of the RIAA’s "deterrence program" has begun, with the lobbying group claiming that it has caught students for "illegal file-trafficking" at 22 different college campuses. That’s right, I said "file-trafficking." [...]

While the internet has proved to be a powerful new way to distribute music, changing how people consume and buy tracks, it is also changing the traditional role of the record label. The internet has opened up a way for would-be artists and musicians to operate outside the traditional label system. Apart from building up [...]

Watch out BitTorrent Entertainment Network, for beginning today, iTunes customers will be able to purchase video content from the “largest modern film library in the world.” A month back iTunes added content from Lionsgate films to its popular online movie download store, and today it has announced that it has secured access to MGM Studios [...]

Here’s another dedicated BitTorrent client that can operate on its own, independently of any PC or Mac in the network. This time, however, it’s a full Network Attached Storage with two SATA bays and 1.5 TB maximum capacity called Jack In The Box MZK-NAS02. The NAS and BitTorrent functions can be administered using any Web [...]

M-Bit Network, that’s the new gig positioned as the world’s first Next-Gen peer-to-peer (P2P) experience in file-search, file-sharing and super-distribution through mobile networks. Quite a mouthful, but that’s the promise from Eugene Goh, CEO of MESDAQ-listed mTouche Technology Berhad (‘mTouche’), which announced the pre-launch on April 9. Currently, P2P technology has been limited to the [...]

The chances of a Zune Scene editor running into a Microsoft Zune employee in the wild are pretty slim, but recently the stars were aligned and I got the inside scoop on the Zune 2.0 and also the flash based Zune coming out in 2007. I will attempt to preserve the identity of the Microsoft [...]

Sony is currently in talks with a number of companies on the commercial use of the PlayStation 3. Following the launch of the Folding@home initiative, where latent PS3 power is used to help calculate research for Stanford University, commercial businesses could soon make use of similar scheme, reports the Financial Times. “We are discussing various [...]

New P2P system to be unveiled Wednesday is configured to share not only identical files, but also similar ones. Called Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), David G Andersen, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research Pittsburgh, have designed a new P2P protocol they claim could significantly increase download speeds because [...]

There’s a new program out called ShareMonkey that helps users turn their “tainted” music and movie files illegally downloaded from P2P and file-sharing networks into legal ones by showing users where they can be purchased and replaced online. Now I don’t know that it will find widespread popularity or instill some sort of groundbreaking catharsis [...]

Who knew that the BitTorrent Entertainment Network offered free tunes alongside the ones for sale?. BitTorrent Inc’s BitTorrent Entertainment Network offers a wide variety of tracks, concert recordings, and even videos for FREE download in addition to the ones for sale. The selection of FREE content is actually pretty good and surprising considering that it’s [...]