soldrinero writes "Yahoo! news is hosting a story about a new competitor to Apple's iTunes Music Store. Nearly all the other iTunes competitors have been strongly controlled by the music industry, shackled in DRM, and giving little back to artists. The new MySpace music store will feature vanilla MP3 downloads at prices set by the individual bands (3 million of them!), all or nearly all of whom are unsigned musicians with no industry affiliation. Is this the example we have all been waiting for of how the Internet will obviate the business model of the recording industry?"

eastbayted writes "Samsung shifted wireless networking into a higher gear yesterday, demonstrating for the first time in public the power of it WiBro (Wireless Broadband) 4G technology. The company had two 4G demonstrations. A mobile stunt entailed providing delegates on a specially designed bus with a live broadcast of the forum, Internet access, and video on demand, all simultaneously at speeds of 100Mbps. Inside the forum venue, Samsung showed off its 1Gbps 4G service with 32 HD channel broadcast downloads, Internet access, and video telephony. The downside for users craving that kind of speed: WiBro won't be out until 2010, though Sprint has a 4G WiMax service in the works for later this year. The downstream speeds will be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, which seem downright sluggish — compared to WiBro."

Nom du Keyboard writes, "Last week Comcast shutdown e-mail forwarding from NameZero entirely. People who have bought private domain names (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com) and have e-mail forwarding to their current Comcast e-mail account through NameZero aren't receiving it any longer. No warnings — no e-mail. Now, again without warning, they've blocked out The Well, one of the oldest ISPs on the net. And nobody can get through to the Comcast people in charge of this to discuss the issue with them. Not the ISPs being blocked. Not the customers who pay Comcast to deliver e-mail to them. Comcast says they're protecting 10M customers from spam. I am a current Comcast broadband customer and I feel I should have the right to whitelist and receive e-mail from whomever I designate. I don't want as much protection as Comcast is giving me. Is it a basic right to be allowed to receive e-mail from whomever I desire, or does Comcast have the right to censor as they wish?" Last week Comcast was also blocking mail from alum.mit.edu. I (probably among many others) left a complaint on the phone line identified in bounce messages; the block was eventually lifted.

d.3.l.t.r.3.3 writes "James Jones (Turbine), declared on an interview at MMORPG.COM that D&D Online and Turbine basically built the world of Eberron introducing and inventing many elements that, in reality, were already present in the Campaign Settings since early design, like the Warforged race. Since MMORPG dodged the bullet when a well informed Eberron fan pointed out the glaring errors, I asked Keith Baker (Eberron Game Designer) to clarify the matter. He promptly gave his own opinion, confirming that Warforged were his own original creation and that the words of James Jones were a poor choice. He also doctored the Turbine staff about what a Campaign Setting really is. The inevitable conclusion of the article is: how much can online gaming sites be trusted, when they are protecting their own sponsor's image?"

PetManimal writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the company that produces 'Barney and Friends' for harassing the creator of a Barney parody Web site. Barney producers Lyons Partnership has threatened lawsuits over the past few years against Stuart Frankel and his parody site, actions which the EFF says violates freedom of speech and fair use laws. The parody site contains doctored images of Barney, and claims the purple dinosaur is the Antichrist. From the article: 'Lyons Partnership has sent multiple cease-and-desist letters to Frankel for a Web page that includes a depiction of the fuzzy purple dinosaur as Satan. In an October letter, Lyons demands that Frankel immediately take down copyrighted images of Barney. The company threatens to take legal action or contact Frankel's Internet service provider if he doesn't comply.'"

eldavojohn writes "Recently, setting up prediction markets that people play was the big thing to guess the future. But is there a chance that computers will replace investors? From the article: 'Quantitative investment managers use a model to identify sets of characteristics for their investments. Computing power is now relatively cheap. Obviously, computing power can access data almost instantaneously and simultaneously. Asset classes and financial instruments within those asset classes can then be screened and investments are selected. They reflect the manager's views.'"

BlueCup writes to tell us that even though some seem willing to let eBay's Chief Executive Meg Whitman slide on recent problems, many eBay sellers are calling for a change. From the article: "'EBay's core (auction) performance is suffering tremendously,' says Steve Grossberg, a longtime videogame seller on eBay. He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago. Adds Andy Mowery, an eBay seller of home and garden gear: 'It is time for new leadership at eBay.'"

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Ark Linux 2006.1, which launched earlier this month. Overall, the reviewer likes this free KDE-based distro, but had to question some implementation choices, such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser. And for a distro that bills itself as 'a Linux distribution for everyone — designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux' the installation should hide command-line scrolling and be able to more automatically install standard graphics card drivers."

mytrip writes to tell us that Google may have television advertising in the cross-hairs. CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that viewers shouldn't have to stand for tv commercials that are a "waste of your time" and says Google is planning to deliver "targeted measurable television ads." I just hope I can still skip them with my TiVO in a couple years.

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Gamasutra article about a surprising announcement from EA. They've made the move to license the Unreal 3 Engine for a series of next-generation titles. "The brief announcement states that EA 'employs a variety of engines, tools and technologies to best serve the needs of each game and development team', but raises interesting issues regarding the Criterion-authored Renderware engine, purchased by EA in 2004 alongside the Burnout developer, and its intended global EA rollout."

WilliamSChips writes "The United States military has announced that they are shutting down the facility at Cheyenne Mountain, home to the high-tech NORAD which tracks every object in the sky. NORAD's operations will be moved to the nearby Peterson Air Force base. The mountain facility is being placed on standby in case they need it again." From the article: "The Cheyenne Mountain center, at the eastern foot of the Rockies near the base of Pikes Peak, was constructed underground in the mid-1960s. Fearing nuclear attacks at the time, the United States built sites such as the Cheyenne Mountain complex. The Navy prepared a floating White House aboard the communications cruiser USS Northampton, in case the president needed to be evacuated from U.S. soil. Another protective bunker was created near White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., for members of Congress."

nman64 writes "The Fedora Project, the project behind the Fedora Core Linux distribution, has introduced Fedora Women, a program to reach out to women who are interested in using and contributing to Fedora Core. This follows in the footsteps of LinuxChix, Debian Women, and Ubuntu Women and is part of a larger trend to support women in the FOSS world. At present, women are believed to make up only about 1.5% of the FOSS community. Is that finally set to change?"

Daniel Pronych writes "BusinessWeek is running an article about how outsourcing call centers in India are no longer an 'inexpensive option' for American companies. These shops are now striving for better outsourced work from the U.S. and Europe multinational companies; many are fed up with U.S. clients trying to continually lower prices. New Delhi-based EXL Services, for example, terminated a contract with Dell Inc. because EXL was losing money in the deal."

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Zango's still under suspicion for problems on MySpace. ZDNet has the story, discussing rumours of multiple accounts, paid Zango hawkers, and mass emailings. From the article: "Boyd posted some choice snippets from the email, like this: 'Zango is fairly new with myspace sites and it took me some time to see what works and what doesn't ... more profitably, *go to a bunch of your friends* who have popular profiles and pay them (it's up to you so much. One of my partners said 5$..maybe offer to split the money with them?) to put a zango video into their profile through your site. This will give you hundreds of extra installs a day (this probably works even better than having them on your actual site).'"

nuyorker and hdm wrote to mention the new releases for Thunderbird and Firefox. hdm writes "This release of Firefox fixes 12 security holes, many of which can be used to execute malicious code. The Browser Fun project has provided an online demonstration of one of these flaws. This demonstration is capable of executing code on Windows, Linux, and both architectures of the Mac OS X platform; you're going to want to upgrade today!"