Lala.com — a new website that helps song lovers trade entire compact discs for less than the cost of a single iTunes video download — is either the music industry’s salvation or yet another nail in its coffin.

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Women are powering a significant portion of the digital music boom in Britain, according to a recently-released report. The study, conducted by London-based Emap, noted that women listen longer and discover more music than men. Emap also found that three-quarters of women in the 16-45 range own a portable MP3 player or MP3-enabled mobile phone. The study traces the increased uptake to a higher-than-expected female readership of music magazines, including rock magazine Kerrang.

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A recent study reveals the Web search engine terms that return the most malware-ridden sites, including:

• “Free screensavers”
• “Bearshare”
• “Screensavers”
• “Winmx”
• “Limewire”
• “Download Yahoo messenger”
• “Lime wire”
• “Free ringtones”

The study, which tested almost 1400 of the most popular search terms, also showed that the sponsored results for these keywords are also very likely to try to install adware and spyware. Call me naive, but shouldn’t there be some kind of screening process or something for the ads?

A couple of months ago, a man with the screen name x-amount logged on to Recidivism.org , the blog he maintains with a few of his friends, and made a pronouncement. “YouTube’s obviously blowing up. We’re living in that Napster-like magic moment where you simply can’t believe the kinds of historic stuff available to you with just a simple search. Which means of course that it’s all gonna get shut down ANY MINUTE.”

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It was former teacher Larry Mead’s love of classical music that led to an addiction to child pornography, his attorney said Monday.

Monterey lawyer Joe Cisneros said Mead, then a sixth-grade teacher, was downloading classical music from a “peer-to-peer” file sharing program on his school computer when he found a file obviously containing child pornography and downloaded it.

“Unfortunately he then stumbled onto one of these sites and quickly became addicted to it,” he said.

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MTV, the television company that is credited with popularising music videos, is turning its attention to the online and digital download market. Its music service Urge will offer users 2 million songs from Wednesday that can be bought either separately for $0.99 (£0.53) or via a monthly subscription.

The service will be the featured music player on Microsoft’s Media Player. Urge will be compatible with more than 100 digital music players but not with the market leader, Apple’s iPod. ‘Well-recognised brand’ “We will concentrate on people who don’t have iPod’s,” said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group.

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In response to the RIAA’s irrational lawsuit campaign against the tens of millions of American P2P users, EFF set up a petition asking Congress to stop the madness and support ways for artists to get paid without fans getting sued. We’re now close to our goal of 100,000 signatures, and, with your help, we hope to surpass it by a longshot and deliver the petition to Congress. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly.

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That’s Bizarre: A furious husband took revenge on his cheating ex by selling racy images of her on eBay. The man offered bidders 200 saucy snaps of 24-year-old Linsey at £4.99 each.
He even wrote on the internet auction site: “She was playing away with my so-called best friend and now it is payback time.”A day later, all the shots had been sold.A spokesman for eBay said: “We saw no reason to take the listing off.”

This is an old interview with the COO of Limewire back in 2003 as was done by OpenP2P. It is intersting to look back at what was said then and look at P2P and the RIAA was we see it today. How much has changed and how much turned outt hey way they thought it would.

Greg Bildson is the COO of LimeWire and president of P2P United, a consortium of P2P software companies created to help educate Congress and the public about peer-to-peer software, technology, and culture. P2P United is the organization that paid 12-year-old Brianna LaHara’s $2,000 RIAA settlement after the RIAA served her with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena.

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Thousands of people who used an online registration for an August 2001 Defense Department conference on health-care fraud are at risk, says the Pentagon.
Warning letters saying names, social security numbers, credit card numbers, employer identification and other personal information were entered into a computer database by conference attendees, states Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith, quoted by the Washington Post.

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“I know next to nothing about Apple, so it really surprised me when I received an email from them this morning, threatening to sue me for a post on the forums,” says SomethingAwful.

“The thread in question was posted to help people who purchased a MacBook Pro, which apparently overheats due to Apple engineers failing to apply thermal grease properly or something else completely asinine. It also linked to the Apple Service Manual, to help people get inside their computer. Apparently, this is grounds for Apple to sue me.”

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The  Business Software Alliance (BSA), owned by the likes of Microsoft and Apple, is trying to spam surfers with a bizarre online version of Cluedo.
It’s, “part of its campaign to stamp out software piracy,” says Digital Bulletin.
Developed in association with games company Hasbro, it, “lets people play detective to uncover the software pirate,” says the story. “The game, which has been developed by Banner in conjunction with Cluedo’s owners Hasbro, involves players taking the role of a managing director moving from room to room in an office, working out how illegal software was allowed to proliferate.

“The game is being sent to workplace email addresses and has a direct marketing element, encouraging players to visit a BSA-run website that uses a fictional character called Sam to help firms with software problems.”

Here’s a surprise. Russia’s AllofMP3.com is more popular than the disinterred Napster, says XTN, basing its finding on Alexa.com stats.
Actually, given Napster’s dismal performance, that’s not much of a compliment.
Moreover, Alexa.com data are far from representative and in the real world of online music, AllofMP3.com downloads probably easily exceed those of iTunes, usually cited by the lamescream media as the standard for the all-but non-existent corporate music industry online music business.

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We don’t have an idiot section so we will place this story under humour.

Two teenagers were charged with setting fires in suburban Washington after they bragged about the blazes on MySpace.com, authorities said.

The 17-year-old schoolmates were involved in 17 fires in Montgomery County, fire officials said Friday. The teens face 22 charges, including two counts each of first-degree arson and four counts of second-degree arson.

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Like millions around the world, you have an iPod, the market-leading digital music player made by Apple Computer Inc. and have spent perhaps a few hundred dollars buying songs from the company’s iTunes music store.

But do you really own the tunes? Whether you do, however, depends on how you define ownership.

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