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Feed Record Store Owners Blame RIAA For Destroying The Music Industry (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It's not like it hasn't been said many times before, but it's nice to see the NY Times running an opinion piece about the RIAA from a pair of record store owners which basically points out how at every opportunity, the RIAA has made the wrong move and made things worse:

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it's not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.
Also, it's not every day that you see a NY Times piece use the word "boneheadedness" to describe the strategy of an organization. At this point, this story has been so obvious for so long, it's worth asking why anyone (well, mainly policy makers in DC) still bother listening to the RIAA. If you could have scripted out the worst possible strategy to damage your own industry, I don't think you could have planned anything worse than what the RIAA has actually done.
Mozilla

Submission + - Thunderbird 2 RC 1 Released

Submitted by
chip_whisperer
chip_whisperer writes: "So, folks, it looks like finally TBird 2 RC1 has just come out. The rumbling edge below has some of the latest bug fixes here. It still runs on the Gecko 1.8 Engine, but sports a host of improvements over the 1.5 series, including custom tags, automatic GMail and .Mac account sign-ups, conversation branching, and much more."
Television

Submission + - Remote recording disallowed timeshifting status

Submitted by bugnuts
bugnuts writes: A ruling that remote DVRs are not the same as personal DVRs may have some farther-reaching consequences on the Betamax defense of "timeshifting". Cablevision wanted to offer the ability to record programs on their own hardware at the user's request, which the user could playback later. Although it sounds innocuous (simply duplicating the DVR capabilities), it constitutes a service — which therefore does not get the protections of the Betamax case.
Censorship

Submission + - Turkish Assembly Votes Censoring of Web sites

Submitted by
unity100
unity100 writes: "Cnn has some piece of news about recent a development in turkey, where turkish assembly, totally in lieu with turkey's commitment to european union membership and european ideals, have voted to have sites that "insult" Turkish Republic founder M.Kemal Ataturk censored from entire Turkish population.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/04/06/turkey .youtube.ap/index.html"
PlayStation (Games)

Grey Markets Compared - PS3 vs. Wii 82

Posted by Zonk from the comparative-shopping-for-next-gen-swag dept.
Kotaku has a follow-up feature to their earlier look at the declining PS3 market on EBay. Post author Michael Fahey has now gone back and looked at Ebay sales, comparing the PS3 and the Wii. Unlike the sharp dips and spikes the PS3 market has suffered, the price seems to be fairly constant for the Wii console. From the article: "Considering the small window that the PlayStation 3 auctions had to turn a truly amazing profit, prospectors would have been better off in the long run purchasing a couple of Wiis, which have maintained an average profit margin of 45-50% since preorders became available. Definitely not a windfall, but a much more financially sound investment in the long run. Unfortunately these launches weren't about being sound financially. They were about betting on the big bucks, and the majority of the PS3 prospectors out there played the tables and lost."
Security

Submission + - Flaw found in ADOBE PDF reader

Submitted by Englishuk
Englishuk writes: Web users are being urged to upgrade their Adobe reader software as a security flaw is found in older versions of the program.

Millions of people use the reader software to view documents prepared in the popular PDF format.

Security researchers said malicious hackers exploiting the flaw could view victim's hard drives or use it to make phishing scams look more plausible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6234181.stm
Sony

Submission + - French court slaps down Sony DRM

Submitted by john-da-luthrun
john-da-luthrun writes: A French court has ruled that Sony's CONNECT Store infringes French consumer law, reports the TechnoLlama IP blog. Under French law, it is illegal to tie the purchase of a service (such as downloading a music file) to the purchase of a another product, so Sony were held to be breaking the law by selling music files that required a Sony player in order to access them. The court also found that Sony had failed to inform customers that its ATRAC 3 files can only be played on Sony digital players. A similar case in France involving Apple's iTunes/iPod tie-in is ongoing.
Biotech

Submission + - Army "Smellcheck" Sniffs Terrorists &

Submitted by
docinthemachine
docinthemachine writes: "Cutting edge military R&D from DARPA has developed a way to smell out bad guys- literally. Move over fingerprints and biometrics- this is what I call "smellcheck". Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops." There is real science behind this. Specific molecules excreted in urine were related to MHC molecules. The MHC (major histocompatibility complex) antigens are molecules on the surface of cells that the body uses to recognize self vs non-self. The MHC genes are the genes that code for these molecules. Whena person is "matched" for an organ or bone marrow transplant these are the factors that are being matched. Therefore- this new military technology being used to sniff out terrorists in a group could be used to rapidly and noninvasively screen large groups of people for potential transplant matches. This medical concept has already been tested in mice and appears to work. Just get ready to have your arm pits sniffed at the border to see if you are a suspected terrorist. That's another bad job for the list. You can read further details at docinthemachine.com at http://docinthemachine.com/2007/01/05/smellcheck/"
Security

Voice Over IP Under Threat? 148

Posted by Zonk from the keeping-phone-calls-expensive dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The IT Observer is discussing the possible scary future of Voice over IP targeted viruses, and what that could mean for the consumer. The article discusses the likelihood that VoIP is going to become even more popular, and the damage that a targeted 'flash virus' could perpetrate in a very short amount of time. From the article: 'Let's imagine a scenario that could become commonplace in the near future: A user has an IP telephony system on his computer (both at home and at work). In his address book on the computer there is an entry, under the name Bank, with the number 123-45-67. Now, a hacker launches a mass-mailing attack on thousands or millions of email addresses using code that simply enters users' address books and modifies any entry under the name Bank to 987-65-43. ... If any of these users receives a message saying that there is a problem in their account, and asking them to call their bank (a typical phishing strategy), they may not be suspicious, as they are not clicking on a link in an email ... If they use their VoIP system to call the bank, they will be calling the modified number, where a friendly automated system will record all their details. ' "
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Wireless + Biodynamic Farming in Organic Vineyard

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Green RFID Guy: Ceago Vinegarden, an organic winery in Northern California, applies biodynamic farming methods to enhance vineyard biodiversity. It also incorporates a mashup of radio frequency identification (RFID), Google Earth and NASA-developed wireless sensor pods to help monitor grapes' growing conditions.

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