p2pnet - rss feed: p2pnet headline roundups, May 20, 2008
p2pnet headline roundups | Last of the day
WikiSubtitles Taken Down By Spanish Anti-Piracy Outfit - TorrentFreak
A site specializing in creating video subtitling for the benefit of foreign and deaf Internet users has been closed due to the threat of legal action. WikiSubtitles received a cease and desist from the Anti-Piracy Federation (FAP) and is now offline pending legal advice. Yesterday the collaborative subtitle creation site WikiSubtitles received a cease and desist letter from a Spanish anti-piracy outfit.
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Web monitoring for ads? It may be illegal - CNET News
Online advertising has ballooned into a roughly $45 billion-a-year business, to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, ad networks, and innumerable speciality and hobbyist Web sites. One corner of this ecosystem that hasn’t managed to cash in on advertising is, by some measurements, the largest: broadband providers. So it may have been inevitable that they would seek additional revenue by monitoring their customers’ online activities and creating behavioral profiles that could yield hyper-relevant ads. The only problem with this practice is that it may not be entirely, well, legal. The first warning sign came last week when two members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Charter Communications, a large cable provider, raising "substantial questions" about the legality of deep packet inspection and asking the company to hold off. (See our Q&A with a Charter executive.) In interviews with News.com over the last few days, privacy advocates and attorneys pointed to a collection of federal laws–written in the 1980s when broadband services were merely a pipe dream–that combine to create a treacherous legal landscape for broadband providers that plan to conduct Web monitoring.
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iPhone 3G Launch Date Confirmed - Gizmodo
We all suspected it, but now it is confirmed: someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch has told me that Apple will announce their new model at the WWDC Keynote on June 9th. The second-generation iPhone will be available worldwide right after the launch, and not at year’s end, as previously thought. The new model will also herald new sales policies in some countries. In Spain, for example, the 3G iPhone will be available for sale at the June 18th grand opening of Telefonica’s megastore - an Apple Store-like shop located in the company’s historical building in Madrid’s Gran Vía - with nationwide availability the next day or after a few hours. The other European countries with iPhone availability will have similar launch schedules.
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Netflix Unveils Streaming Video Device; Lehman Upgrades - Barron’s
Netflix today unveiled a new set-top box to be produced by privately held Roku Inc. that will allow subscribers to stream an unlimited number of movies and television shows directly to televisions. The device costs $99. The video content is free to anyone with a Netflix subscription of $8.99 a month or more. Most of the video content will consist of older material, rather than new releases. The obvious comparison here is with Apple’s Apple TV box, which costs more, requires paying for movies downloaded from iTunes, but also offers more functionality, like the ability to stream personal music and photo content to your television. Older movies for free? Newer movies for a fee? It’s an interesting choice.
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Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell - Rolling Stone
For Austin rockers Spoon, 2007 was a breakthrough year - but not because they sold a lot of records. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their album on the indie label Merge, garnered more radio play than any disc in their 15-year history and earned them an appearance on Saturday Night Live. So far the disc has moved just over 250,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan - about half of what Spoon’s manager, Ben Dickey, believes it would have sold even five years ago. "But as far as the band is concerned, the record is a hit," says Dickey. The reason? CD sales are no longer the yardstick the band uses. While hip-hop and pop artists ranging from Jay-Z to Britney Spears have long used recordings to sell everything from perfume to liquor, rockers are only just starting to think of album sales as a component - rather than the sum of - the commercial equation. Spoon have been actively licensing their music for use in films, television shows and a Jaguar commercial, making money, gaining exposure and moving up from clubs to 3,000-seat venues.
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[OT] How a magnet turned off my speech - Telegraph
Words failed me. I stuttered as Prof Vincent Walsh turned off the speech centre of my brain for a few thousandths of a second to demonstrate the power of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a popular way to interfere with the most complex known object in the universe. Sitting in the basement of a lab in Queen Square, London, where the nation’s greatest concentration of brain surgeons can be found, I am told to recite a nursery rhyme as a way to see if the experiment has worked.
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