Pirate Tweets? IMDb
The latest contrivance to alert BitTorrent downloaders to new movies and television shows online is called TorrentTwitter — a message service that allows “followers” to read posts from their friends who share their BitTorrent links with them.

German Publishers Demand Govt Action On Piracy Billboard
German music publishers have called upon the federal government to implement a warning system to clamp down on the illegal use of music on the Internet. At the German Music Publishers Association’s (DMV) annual conference in Dresden, DMV president Dagmar Sikorski said urgent action was needed. “Germany is on course towards becoming a land of paradise for Internet piracy,” he said. “France, for example is combating the illicit use of music by taking a series of measures ranging from the issue of warnings through to a ban on Internet access.” [France? Not any more ...]

Message from Last.fm founders
After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins. This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world.

Tennessee city considers suing Dell Cox Newspapers
City officials in Lebanon, Tenn., are discussing whether they should sue Dell for failing to live up to its agreement to provide 1,000 jobs to the town in return for property tax breaks. Lebanon and Wilson County each gave Dell a 40-year property tax break in 2000, and the company agreed to provide 1,000 jobs at the plant to receive those tax breaks, said Councilman William Farmer.

Most firms unaware of Web domain changes: survey Reuters
Two thirds of businesses are unaware they will be able to use their own name in place of domain extensions such as .com, .org, or .net when Internet domains are liberalized next year, according to a survey. The change would let the likes of Nike or Microsoft control their own domain and better exploit their brands, and also counter cyber-squatters who use variations of brands on the 280 or so existing domain extensions. “If you have ‘.nike’, for example, you can create real and specific branded Websites, like ‘running.nike’ or ‘runlondon.nike’,” Joe White, chief operating officer of domain registrar Gandi.net, told Reuters in an interview.

‘God probably doesn’t exist’: Swedish humanists The Local
The role of religion in public life in Sweden has been brought into sharp relief by a provocative ad campaign questioning the existence of God. Earlier this week, billboards went up in several Stockholm subway stations and elsewhere around the city proclaiming, “God probably doesn’t exist” (Gud finns nog inte).

Emotional Raitt apologizes for ’sexy’ isotopes comment CBC
An emotional Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt apologized on Wednesday for referring to the medical isotopes shortage as a “sexy” problem that she could take credit for fixing.

Long Shot: Planet Could Hit Earth in Distant Future LiveScience
Our solar system has a potentially violent future. New computer simulations reveal a slight chance that a disruption of planetary orbits could lead to a collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus in the next few billion years. Despite its diminutive size, Mercury poses the greatest risk to the solar system’s order. Results of the computer model show a roughly 1 percent chance that the elongation of Mercury’s orbit will increase to the point where the planet’s path around the sun crosses that of Venus. That’s when planetary pandemonium would ensue, the researchers find, and Mercury could be ejected from the solar system, or collide with the sun or a neighboring planet, such as Earth. The potential smash-ups, however remote, are detailed in the June 11 issue of the journal Nature.

IT staff snooping on colleagues on rise: survey Reuters
More than one-third of information technology professionals abuse administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues’ salary details or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey. Data security company Cyber-Ark surveyed more than 400 senior IT professionals in the United States and Britain, and found that 35 percent admitted to snooping, while 74 percent said they could access information that was not relevant to their role. In a similar survey 12 months ago, 33 percent of IT professionals admitted to snooping.

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June, 2009