Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes
Employees could receive a bill each month for the cost of stolen
bandwidth and wasted time if Australia-based Exinda Networks’ URL Bandwidth monitoring system takes off
An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year
A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx — a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others — on Sun’s Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this unusual
event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor’s door and arrested him. He has pleaded not guilty — via BoingBoing
The New York Times Link Generator creates a non-decaying link to New York Times stories. When readers click on one of these links, they don’t have to sign into the NYT site, and they won’t have to pay a fee to read the story, even if it’s in the archives — via BoingBoing
The FBI is fighting in court to limit how hard it has to search for government documents requested by the public under the Freedom of Information Act, one of the main laws for ensuring openness in government. If the bureau prevails, people could have a diminished chance of getting documents from the nation’s most famous law enforcement agency — via MemoryBlog
Sony missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content
The identity of Australians could be subjected to unprecedented scrutiny under the biggest security protection plan since the failed Australia Card
The German national library, Deutsche Bibliothek, has received a copyright exemption that allows it to crack the DRM on the media in its collection, after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works
. This is fantastic news — and it should be a lesson to libraries, schools, institutions that serve the disabled, archivists, and others that they needt o fight for their own exemptions. We need to riddle the ban on circumventing DRM with so many little holes that it simply deflates upon itself — via BoingBoing
A generation ago they were considered part of an underworld frequented by criminals and bikers. Now, the UK’s tattooists, whose customers range from royalty to film stars, have ultimate proof of their mainstream status — a union card. The first trade union for Britain’s 1,500 tattooists and body-piercers was announced yesterday after the GMB said it was setting up a branch to represent their interests
A New York ISP is working to recover its hijacked domain name and e-mail services, according to a posting on its site Sunday in the US. A Panix.com representative said ownership of the domain had been moved sometime Friday evening to a company in Australia, the DNS records had been moved to the United Kingdom and that the company’s mail had been redirected to a company in Canada
Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies began using fluorescent pink handcuffs Thursday to transport inmates. Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he introduced the pink handcuffs because he was tired of losing them to his own deputies and other law enforcement agencies. Arpaio said he assumes nobody else has pink handcuffs, so they will be easy to spot. Maricopa County inmates wear pink boxers and sleep on pink sheets — via Warren Ellis
Both John Howard and Phillip Ruddock’s noses have been put firmly out of joint over the US announcing that it will release former terror suspect Mr Mamdouh Habib with no charges after three years of illegal torture and detention in Guantanamo Bay. Is anyone really surprised that the whiny toad is refusing an apology or compensation. If he can’t say sorry to the nation’s Aborigines, he certainly won’t be able to apologise to a single man
IBM has announced that it will turn 500 of its software patents over to a patent commons
that can be freely implemented by anyone. This is big news for free software authors, since it’s often impossible for all-volunteer projects to defend themselves from patent infringement claims when there is a bogus software patent (like the thousands that IBM has accumulated) that overlaps with their work — via BoingBoing
Blogs and message forums buzzed this week with the discovery that a pair of simple Google searches permits access to well over 1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world — apparently without their owners’ knowledge. Apparently many of the cams are even aimable. Oops!
CD sales rose by 2.3% in the US in the year 2004 despite the growing popularity of legal digital music downloads through services such as iTunes. On the other hand, a report from last July noted that pirated CD sales have hit a record high. Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma
Australian journalists who witnessed a confrontation between Indonesian soldiers and alleged separatists in tsunami-ravaged Sumatra yesterday were ordered to leave the area and warned not to report on the incident
Four Sydney high school students have been arrested for their part in an Internet banking scam that has generated millions of dollars — via GeneWeb.info
The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds the government does not have enough evidence to charge in court
Federal officials are developing government-wide identification card standards for federal employees and contractors to prevent terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into government buildings and computer systems. The project is known as the Personal Identity Verification Project, and is being managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
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