A Boston federal jury has ordered Joel Tenenbaum to pay a total of $675,000—$22,500 per song—to the major record labels for infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network. The figure is closer to the $222,000 award in the first Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial than the $1.92 million figure from the second trial.

The verdict came down at late Friday afternoon after less than three hours of deliberation.

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Joel Tenenbaum is a “hardcore, habitual, long-term, persistent infringer, who knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway,” recording industry attorney Timothy Reynolds argued to the jury who will determine how much the 25-year-old grad student will have to pay for his admitted use of peer-to-peer software to obtain music for free.

But it is “hard to imagine an infringer who is lower on th[e] scale [of culpability] than Joel,” countered his counsel, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

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Amazon attracted a lot of unwanted attention when it used its Kindle e-book reader’s always-on network connection to delete copies of works by George Orwell that had been sold without a proper license. The company has since apologized to its users and promised that it will never happen again, but those steps aren’t enough for some. A lawsuit has been filed in Seattle that seeks class action status for Kindle owners and Orwell readers, alleging that Amazon has done everything from committing computer fraud to eating a high school student’s homework.

One of the plaintiffs, Justin Gawronski, has a compelling story about his experience with Amazon’s memory hole. Apparently, he was reading his copy of 1984 as a summer assignment for school, and had been using one of the Kindle’s selling points—the ability to attach notes to specific parts of the e-book text—to prepare for his return to school. Since he was actively reading the work when Amazon pulled the plug, he actually got to watch the work vanish from his screen. He’s left with a file of notes that are divorced from the text that they reference. A second plaintiff is named, but he just seems to have gotten poor customer service when he complained about the deletion.

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The Mozilla Foundation announced Friday morning that the open source Firefox Web browser has been downloaded over 1 billion times. This significant milestone, which was reached several days earlier than expected, is a clear sign of the browser’s growing mainstream popularity.

Firefox has transformed the Internet by bringing innovation and a strong standards-based browsing experience to the masses. Its swift rate of advancement has been accompanied by rapid adoption, leading to the emergence of an enormous following of loyal users. The Firefox phenomenon has contributed greatly to leveling the playing field on the Web and reigniting competition in the browser market. Formidable alternatives are also gaining ground and helping to popularize emerging standards. This trend of emerging competition could eventually unseat Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer.

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eBay is developing a new backend for Skype as it tries to resolve a legal dispute before spinning off the VoIP service next year. The company revealed its plans in its 10-Q regulatory filing on Thursday, noting that eBay and Skype are confident in their legal position vis-a-vis the technology they’re currently using for peer-to-peer connections, but that the new system is being developed “just in case.”

Skype currently uses technology from Joltid to make its P2P connections on the backend. Joltid was founded by Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström and recently turned against Skype, saying that the popular VoIP service could not “possess, use, or modify” certain source code as part of the license agreement. Skype apparently did anyway, leading Joltid to terminate the agreement and accuse Skype of infringing on Joltid’s copyright and misusing confidential information.

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Microsoft is launching a free video service in the UK that will be focused on streaming full-length television shows. Dubbed the MSN Video Player, and powered by Flash and Windows Media Video, the service will go into a six-month trial version next week. While it’s quite surprising that Microsoft is not using Silverlight, there are whispers that this will change if the service ever moves out of trial. The move comes right before the company kills off Soapbox, its would-be YouTube competitor that never made it out of beta, at the end of next month.

The MSN Video Player will launch with over 300 hours of content both old and new from BBC Worldwide and All3Media, including shows such as Shameless, Peep Show, League of Gentlemen, Hotel Babylon, The Young Ones, Hustle, Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Jack Dee Live at the Apollo, and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Programs will not, however, appear on the MSN service right after airing. Users will have to wait until the online catch-up TV window on broadcasters’ own websites expires, which can range from a week to six months.

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It’s all over for Joel Tenenbaum—except for the size of the check he’ll be told to write the RIAA. In a reversal of her decision last night, Judge Nancy Gertner has granted the record labels’ motion for a directed verdict on the issue of copyright infringement. Tenenbaum is now liable for infringing all 30 songs at issue in the case. All that will be left to the jury is to determine the size of the damage award and whether the infringement was willful.

Judge Gertner’s change of heart came after she had a chance to review the transcript of Thursday’s testimony by Joel Tenenbaum. During direct examination, Tenenbaum was asked a simple question by the labels’ counsel: “on the stand now, are you admitting liability for downloading and distributing all 30 sound recordings that are at issue and listed on Exhibits 55 and 56 of the exhibits?” His simple “yes” answer was enough to hand the labels a victory on the question of liability. 

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As in just about every other field, computers have become an essential part of biological research. Complicated algorithms and analyses that once took months of work by specialists are now available as Web services, and whole areas of study, such as genomics, can be pursued entirely in silico. But, even though most biologists know how to plug in their data and act on the output of computational tools, precious few understand the math that’s going on behind the scenes, as most bioscience degree programs don’t require computer science or any math more advanced than calculus.

Two papers in the latest issue of Science argue that that’s a bad thing. One focuses on the ability to represent the behavior of biological systems through algebraic notation, an area that’s badly neglected in both science and math education. The second focuses generally on the incorporation of biology-specific math and computer science into the education system. Both assume that the lack of a math background is a serious problem.

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With healthcare reform currently the number one topic of discussion in Washington DC, chipmaker Intel is seizing the moment in order to gain exposure for its own health product, the Intel Health Guide. In a recent Politico op-ed, Intel CEO Paul Otellini argued for moving personal, preventative care into the digital age (with Intel inside, of course). At yesterday’s Intel Technology Summit, Louis Burns, VP and General Manager of Intel’s Digital Health Group, also spent some time talking in detail about the product.

You’re probably wondering why Intel, which is a fab-driven component company, is building not just an end-user gadget, but an entire enterprise-class IT system. Intel may have the expertise to do this, but to say that it falls well outside the chipmaker’s wheelhouse is an understatement. It’s worth taking a look at the larger dynamics that are driving Intel into the health systems market, because it says something important about the present moment in computing. In short, insofar as Intel’s capacity to produce cheap transistors is exploding faster than the existing computer industry’s ability to absorb those transistors, Intel is fast becoming a victim of its own success in driving Moore’s Law.

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An Amsterdam court has ordered The Pirate Bay to block all Dutch visitors to its website, threatening the site administrators with daily fines for noncompliance.

Dutch antipiracy group Stichting BREIN, whose website is still down from an extended denial of service attack, filed a suit against the three Pirate Bay administrators who were found guilty earlier this year of aiding copyright infringement in Sweden—despite the fact that the three claim not to own the site. (They say it is owned by a Seychelles company called Reservella.)

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“Joel Fights Back,” proclaims the website for Joel Tenenbaum, the Boston University grad student standing trial for copyright infringement this week in a federal courtroom. But today, when he took the stand at his closely watched copyright trial, he didn’t.

Instead, over and over, Tenenbaum admitted under oath that he used KaZaA, LimeWire, and other peer-to-peer software to download and distribute music to others unknown.

“This is me. I’m here to answer,” said Tenenbaum. “I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it,” he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

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When Skype launched its “Prime” pay-to-speak-with-an-expert service back in 2007, it gave everyone in the world the chance to become a paid expert phone sex operator. Simply hang out your virtual shingle, set up the price you want to charge, and watch the money roll in. Want to teach a foreign language? You can! Want to offer astrological advice? You can! Want to provide “tranny sex talk”? You, err, can do that too (and someone has).

Two years later, we decided to take a look at how the great Skype Prime experiment in selling expertise, sex talk, and horoscopes has worked. Short answer: not well.

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The World of Warcraft forums are buzzing with complaints from players claiming that their accounts have been suspended because of chargebacks filed against them by a company that they have no connection with. The problem, though, is that the company behind the charges is unresponsive to complaints, and many players don’t know what to do in order to get their accounts re-authorized unless they pay these bills.

According to the thread, multiple players have received the following message when trying to figure out why their account is currently inaccessible: “Access to the World of Warcraft account *********, has been temporarily disabled due to a chargeback filed against the account’s past payment(s) which were billed to a telephone number via PaymentOne.” PaymentOne is a payment service provider, and has a system in place to bill players’ ISP accounts for their WoW subscriptions.

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Key developers behind the JRuby project have left Sun and signed on with Engine Yard, one of the most prominent companies in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. The move could accelerate JRuby development, contributing to broader interoperability between Ruby and Java.

The Java virtual machine was not originally conceived as a multilanguage runtime, but Sun began to take serious steps to make it more accommodating to dynamic programming languages in 2006 with the introduction of the InvokeDynamic bytecode operation and other related proposals. At roughly the same time, Sun also hired several leading JRuby developers, including Charles Nutter. The project has evolved considerably since then and now delivers reasonable performance for running relatively complex Ruby code on top of the JVM.

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Like so many of the Internet protocols invented decades ago, the Domain Name
System has some serious security issues. Earlier this week in Stockholm, the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Engineering Task Force, and DNS experts provided a status update on DNSSEC, the secure DNS protocol designed to close a security hole in the bowels of the Internet that has been the target of exploits.

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Intel VP Sean Maloney kicked off the Intel Technology Summit today with a broad-ranging discussion of a number of themes that Intel has been pounding recently, including the state of the global computing market and the chipmaker’s recommendations for and relationship to various government stimulus projects. Maloney also spoke to a few other hot topics in the ensuing Q&A, including netbook cannibalization of existing laptop sales, the impact of Windows 7 on the upgrade cycle, and rumors of the end of Moore’s Law.

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Novell has launched a new Web service called SUSE Studio that simplifies the process of building Linux-based software appliances. It provides a convenient interface for creating custom versions of Novell’s SUSE Linux distribution with specialized configurations. The service is part of Novell’s broader SUSE Appliance Program initiative.

Enterprise software deployment comes with a lot of serious technical challenges. Getting a complex piece of server software up and running on backend infrastructure often requires system administrators to wrestle with dependencies and configuration issues. Software appliances are increasingly viewed as a compelling solution to this problem.

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Hold onto your iPhones—a company called VoloMedia was yesterday granted a patent on a “method for providing episodic media content.” Or, as the company puts it in today’s announcement, VoloMedia now owns the “US patent for podcasting.” Prepare to pay up?

Even the patent’s chief inventor, Murgesh Navar, knows that the claim is controversial. Before anyone had time to start asking questions about the patent, Navar authored a blog post explaining just why he’s entitled to control podcasting. The short answer: he’s been working on it for years.

The patent in question “was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting. This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media… Today, podcasting is 100 percent RSS-based. However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.”

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Its been clear for some time that Joel Tenenbaum would face a steep uphill battle countering the record label plaintiffs’ evidence that he infringed their rights in 30 sound recordings by downloading and distributing them over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network—but it was still jarring to hear one of his attorneys openly admit liability today in court.

Tenenbaum has himself admitted to his KaZaA use multiple times, under oath, during his two days of depositions. And Judge Nancy Gertner’s last-minute order granting summary judgment for the plaintiffs on Tenenbaum’s proposed fair use defense removed his ability to argue to the jury, “Yes, I did it, but it wasn’t against the law.”

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When he opened Wednesday’s hearing on the hazards of inadvertent file sharing via peer-to-peer software, Representative Edolphus Towns (D-NY) said he was done with letting the industry solve the problem. By the end of the hearing Towns had lowered the boom, announcing that he plans to introduce a bill to bar LimeWire-style software from government and government contractor computers and their networks.

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A small Web development and open source software company called CityWare was recently named alongside Google, Yahoo, Amazon and other software giants in a patent infringement lawsuit. What makes this unusual is that CityWare has no products or customers and no longer exists. The company was formed by software developer Nate Neel in 2004, but folded soon after due to lack of customers.

The art of patent trolling has inherited an important maxim from the real estate business: location is everything. The defunct company became the victim of a patent infringement lawsuit because it was operating in the Eastern District of Texas, a jurisdiction that is notoriously friendly to patent trolls. Bedrock Computer Technologies, the company that filed the patent suit, likely named CityWare in the suit solely to increase the chances of having the case heard in that region.

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The popularity of sites like YouTube continue to grow rapidly as people are finding more ways to consume online video offerings, according to a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The firm says that the share of adults who watch video on the Internet has nearly doubled since 2006, and that the practice is near-universal among young adults. What’s helping it along? Broadband and mobile adoption.

Pew surveyed 2,253 US adults over the age of 18 and discovered that 62 percent of all Internet users watch video on sites like Hulu and YouTube—this number is up from 33 percent in December of 2006. Almost one in five say they do so on a daily basis, which Pew attributes to the continued proliferation of broadband (the firm says 63 percent of American adults have access to broadband, and we’re sure it’s no coincidence that this number seems to match up with those who watch online video). Among young adults—those between 18 and 29—online video watching is at 89 percent, with 36 percent watching every day.

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When Wal-Mart announced in 2008 that it was pulling down the DRM servers behind its (nearly unused) online music store, the Internet suffered a collective aneurysm of outrage, eventually forcing the retail giant to run the servers for another year. Buying DRMed content, then having that content neutered a few months later, seemed to most consumers not to be fair.

But that’s not quite how Big Content sees things—just ask Steven Metalitz, the Washington DC lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA, and other rightsholders before the Copyright Office. Because the Copyright Office is in the thick of its triennial DMCA review process, in which it will decide to allow certain exemptions to the rules against cracking DRM, Metalitz has been doing plenty of representation of late.

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As expected, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a partnership this morning that will essentially stick Microsoft’s recently relaunched search engine Bing in place of Yahoo search and Yahoo’s ad sales in place of Microsoft’s. The two companies said that their complementary strengths would help them become a stronger market competitor (to *cough* Google), and that the deal would spur innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and “real consumer choice.”

The terms of the initial agreement will last for 10 years wherein Bing will be the “exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform” for all Yahoo sites. The companies aren’t giving up on Yahoo’s search, though, as Microsoft will also have a 10-year license to Yahoo’s core search technologies and the ability integrate Yahoo’s search mojo into Bing. Yahoo will also be responsible for ad sales for both companies’ premium advertisers, though self-serve advertising will still be handled by Microsoft’s AdCenter.

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Millions of Americans are turning to the Internet to look for new jobs. But in many parts of the United States, public libraries are the only free provider of that crucial combo: a computer plus Internet access. This means that low-income job seekers depend on them when searching for employment. Oddly, as library development directors look for funds to beef up their networks, they’re not finding the support they expected from the White House’s $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package.

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Jon Peddie’s latest graphics shipment numbers are in, and the results are well in line with the trends identified in our previous reporting on the Intel and AMD earnings calls. Specifically, the entire channel is preparing for a boost in sales soon, as seasonal back-to-school buying starts. Everyone is also hoping and praying for a round of IT upgrades that are now overdue. The thinking is that there is a ton of pent-up demand in the IT market as everyone is keeping costs down by not upgrading, so all of that demand will have to come rushing into the market the minute that IT managers get some money to spend again. In this respect, the channel is “pricing in” the expected IT upgrade spending, so let’s hope that it isn’t disappointed.

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Ever had a sneaking suspicion that your broadband download speeds never quite measured up to the “up to” speeds trumpeted by your ISP—and that everyone around you was probably in the same boat? If so, you now have some solid empirical evidence that this is indeed the case.

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom today released the results of a lengthy study that compared advertised download speeds with the actual speeds received by home users, and the results are shocking—average speeds are only half what is advertised.

Geeks have always understood that the top line speeds promoted by ISPs are rarely going to be seen by a home user, and ISPs are careful to include “up to” language in their advertisements, knowing that actual speeds will be affected by everything from a home’s distance from the local exchange, network congestion, Internet congestion, server problems a particular websites, and even issues with old home wiring. Still, they don’t typically reveal that people who subscribe to 8Mbps plans have average download speeds of only 4.1Mbps.

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Upon closer inspection, Microsoft’s browser ballot proposal for the EU is much more drastic than one would expect. Users will choose from up to 10 different browsers. And it won’t be limited to Windows 7 users; the ballot screen will be pushed as an update to current Windows XP and Windows Vista users. PC manufacturers will also have the option of shipping one or more third-party browsers in place of IE8 without fear of retaliation from Microsoft. It’s a big change for a company that just last month wanted Windows 7 to be shipped in Europe without Internet Explorer 8 so as to avoid a ballot screen in the first place.

The balloting process will last for five years from the date the European Commission agrees to it, which pushes it into Windows 8 territory. So let’s look at the nitty gritty of the browser ballot announced late last week.

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Joel Tenenbaum downloaded and distributed thousands of songs without paying for them, and continued to do so for years after he was sued by the major record labels for this very activity, charged Tim Reynolds, the record labels’ lead attorney, as the trial of the 25-year old physics grad student got underway in earnest today in a Boston federal courtroom.

“We are here to ask you to hold the defendant responsible for his actions,” said Reynolds, a partner in the Boulder, Colorado office of Holme, Robert & Owen. “Filesharing isn’t like sharing that we teach our children. This isn’t sharing with your friends.”

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At this point, you would think that most users would be aware that they should keep embarrassing information off of Facebook. Everyone from potential employers to the press regularly check users’ accounts on the service, looking for evidence of illicit or debauched behavior, and a number of jobs have been lost due to the information found there. Still, many fail to exercise discretion when using the service, people in positions of power are catching on, and there continue to be problems that result from the blurring of boundaries between public and private.

In what may be the latest example, a suit was filed in Mississippi that alleges a school official—more specifically a teacher acting in her capacity as a cheerleading coach—demanded that members of her squad hand over their Facebook login information. According to the suit, the teacher used it to access a student’s account, which included a heated discussion of some of the cheerleading squad’s internal politics. That information was then shared widely among school administrators, which resulted in the student receiving various sanctions.

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Those 140-character “microblog” posts to Twitter don’t constitute much more than links, dinner recipes, and bitching, right? Be careful with the bitching, though—a property management company in Chicago has filed a lawsuit against a tenant who tweeted an off-the-cuff comment about the company. The company, Horizon Group Management, says that the Twitter user in question sent the message maliciously, and is now asking for $50,000 in damages.

It all started when Twitter user @abonnen (Amanda Bonnen, who has since deleted her Twitter account) said to a friend on May 12, “You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.” At the time of the tweet, Bonnen’s profile was public (meaning that everyone could read her Twitter stream) and she had about 20 followers.

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Several major US studios have filed a lawsuit against The Pirate Bay, seeking a judicial injunction that would shut down the notorious torrent tracker. The move is the latest in the continuing legal saga that surrounds The Pirate Bay. The site’s operators were found guilty in Swedish court earlier this year of assisting copyright infringement, and were sentenced to a year in jail and fined 30 million kronor.

The sentence failed to include an injunction forcing the operators to shut the site down. Instead, TPB admins have audaciously stated they will not pay the fines, convinced that “what we do is right.” The group first moved for a retrial, suggesting the judge was biased against copyright holders. Though the retrial was denied, the group still plans to appeal the guilty verdict against them. Meanwhile, the site continues to be a thorn in Big Content’s side, with the appeals process expected to last at least a couple years.

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The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to “apply protective format to news.” The AP’s news registry will “tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,” and it will provide a “platform for protect, point, and pay.” That’s a lot of “p”-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news—”enforcement,” in AP-speak.

But how could that possibly work?

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The Chinese government has never really been a fan of video games, and the Chinese Ministry of Culture is now tightening its control of what kinds of games can be accessed via the Internet. The Ministry issued a notice on Monday saying that certain types of games posed a “serious threat to the moral standards of society” and that they would be blocked as of this week.

The games in question would be those that “promote the glorification of mafia life.” What, exactly, does that include? Foul language, drugs, vandalism, theft, sexual assault, and other various crimes. According to the Ministry of Culture, all of these things go against public morality and “the nation’s fine cultural traditions.”

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The recent Pew survey on the status of science in the US public included two findings: the public is interested in the latest news about health issues, but it doesn’t necessarily feel the press does a good job. Last Friday produced a clear indication of why. Multiple news sources credulously repeated health “facts” that were essentially made up. The reason? Someone claiming to suffer from a condition that doesn’t appear to exist is releasing an album named after the apparently nonexistent condition, and wanted to raise its profile. In short, the news reports provided false health information because the reporters fell for a PR stunt.

Reports appeared in The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Daily Mail, and were picked up by Fox News and spread as far away as India. The articles describe the tormented life of a British DJ who is convinced that WiFi signals set off a variety of health symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, and nausea. With the proliferation of wireless devices, not only has this individual found it difficult to pursue his career, but also simply to find a house, shops, and pub that he feels comfortable occupying. And he is apparently not alone; the reports consistently claim that two percent of the population suffers from the same issues.

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At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, the search giant revealed an intriguing new communication service called Wave that aims to deliver concurrent messaging and collaborative editing in a single cohesive environment. The underlying Wave Federation Protocol is designed to make it possible for third parties to host their own interoperable Wave instances.

Google intends to open the source code of its own implementation in order to encourage widespread adoption of the protocol. The company took its first major steps in that direction on Friday by releasing the source code of its Operational Transform (OT) code and a simple client/server reference implementation that is built on top of the protocol. This code, which is available under the open source Apache Software License, will give developers a way to start experimenting with the protocol and potentially even building their own Wave-compatible services.

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The rise of Twitter and other microblogging systems with constrained character counts has led to renewed interest in Web services that shorten URLs. Support for these services is often integrated into desktop client applications so that users can take advantage of the functionality without having to open a browser window.

Most desktop clients, however, make users jump through a few extra hoops in order to shorten a URL. For example, Seesmic makes users click a toolbar button and then paste the link into a popup dialog. Gwibber, my microblogging client for Linux, avoids the extra step by automatically shortening URLs when they are pasted directly into the message textbox. This seems to be a popular feature and I’ve been asked to explain how it works on several occasions. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to intercept and manipulate text as it is being pasted into a GTK+ textbox.

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It sounds like something out of The Matrix: a giant, world-spanning electronic network where high-powered machines, some of them using GPUs to gain a speed advantage, run secret, rapidly-evolving software algorithms that battle it out for profits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, attack-counterattack, that yields some $21 billion a year for the winners and can spell ruin for the losers. Except that it’s not The Matrix—it’s the stock and commodities markets, and the fact that these markets mainly consist now of computers trading against one another has been brought closer to the public’s attention by last month’s alleged theft of Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading code.

The collection of computer-automated, high-speed trading technologies and techniques that are typically lumped under the heading of “high-frequency trading” (HFT) have been around for a while, but HFT has recently become heavily identified with the banking giant, Goldman Sachs, that dominates some aspects of it on the New York Stock Exchange. And as Goldman draws more media and congressional scrutiny, so will HFT. To prepare you for the high-frequency trading media onslaught, we’ll take a look at HFT and at a stock market that really isn’t what you thought it was.

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The Joel Tenenbaum case opened today with a full, slogging day of jury selection, the defense reeling from Boston federal judge Nancy Gertner’s last-minute decision to remove Tenenbaum’s proposed fair use defense from the closely watched copyright case.

Tenenbaum’s hopes of letting the jury determine whether his acts of alleged infringement constituted fair use under the Copyright Act were dashed by an order e-mailed to the parties this morning at 1:37 am, granting the record label plaintiffs’ motion for partial summary judgment on the fair use defense. Judge Gertner’s order, handed down less than eight hours before trial got under way, said the fair use defense proposed by Tenenbaum failed because it would “shield from liability any person who downloaded copyrighted songs for his or her own private enjoyment” and would “swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created.”

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Internet users have grown immune to security certificate warnings and are more than happy to click past them, according to a new report out of Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers found that users won’t hesitate to engage in this risky browsing behavior, especially since most warnings are for benign things like expired certificates. This behavior leaves them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and the report calls for a reform in how warnings are handled in both safe and dangerous situations.

The researchers studied the behaviors of 409 Internet users in order to monitor their reactions to and understanding of various SSL warnings, and found that “far too many participants exhibited dangerous behavior in all warning conditions.” This was despite the fact that many users understood the meaning of the warnings—for example, 50 percent of Firefox 2 users understood what an expired certificate meant, and 71 percent of those users said they actively ignored such a warning (47 percent and 64 percent for Firefox 3 users, respectively).

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Verizon is currently wiring up New York City with fiber optic cables, but Boston mayor Thomas Menino wants to know why FiOS isn’t coming to his city anytime soon. Menino has a theory, one that he recently aired during a radio interview: Verizon is retaliating. “They insinuated that we weren’t going to get it because of my position on telecommunications,” he said.

Menino’s “position on telecommunications” is that Verizon should pay more money. Specifically, Menino has been trying to change state law so that Verizon has to pay taxes on more of its network equipment that sits on public property.

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Industry insiders say that the big four record labels are working with Apple to boost full album sales, as individual songs have come to dominate digital downloads. A project called “Cocktail” is reportedly underway and set to launch this fall, which will bundle interactive “booklets” including artwork, liner notes, and other content with a full album purchase. Another interesting twist is that the new content may be launched alongside a long-rumored Apple tablet.

Apple has worked with labels and bands in the past to promote digital music. Many albums are now available with digital booklets, a PDF file that includes cover art and liner notes. A few artists have released a “digital box set,” most notably U2, which released a package that contained every song that band ever recorded—it could also be purchased alongside a special edition U2 iPod. Most recently, Apple unveiled what’s called an iTunes Pass with the release of Depeche Mode’s latest album Sounds of the Universe. iTunes Pass gives purchasers access to exclusive remixes, b-sides, videos, and other content leading up to the release of a new album.

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This weekend did not go well for AT&T. The broadband provider began blocking access to parts of 4chan on Sunday (img.4chan.org, which of course includes /b/) thanks to what AT&T says was a denial of service attack coming from that domain. AT&T was uncommunicative with customers at the onset of the 4chan blockage, leaving many users questioning whether the telecom was trying to censor 4chan. AT&T’s official silence on the matter also led some 4chan denizens to launch attacks against the company.

The block began in the early evening Sunday and went on through the night, with numerous users (including some of our own staff members) confirming that they were unable to access 4chan’s image servers. Why? According to an Anonymous posting on 4chan itself, it seems as if there were hundreds of thousands of connections being made from the IP address of the image server (888,979 at the time of that posting, to be exact).

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There will be no fair use defense for Joel Tenenbaum at trial this week.

Everything about the Tenenbaum case has been highly unusual, and Judge Nancy Gernter’s final pretrial order was no exception. Tenenbaum goes on trial in Boston today at 9:00am for sharing 30 songs on KaZaA, but the judge did not make a ruling on the fair use issue until early this morning. And what a ruling it was.

Tenenbaum has essentially admitted to the accusations during his depositions, and recording industry investigators have the hard drives from his computers. These two facts alone make the case materially different from the first US file-sharing trial, the case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset in Minnesota, where Thomas-Rasset claimed she didn’t share the files in question and said that the hard drive in use at the time had been destroyed.

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Jolicloud is a custom Linux distribution that is designed specifically for netbook devices. It uses Mozilla’s Prism Web runtime and Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) to deliver a Web-centric Linux environment that is easy to use. The platform and its associated Web service are at an early stage of development and are currently in closed alpha testing. We took the latest Jolicloud alpha release for a test drive to see how it stacks up against other popular netbook Linux distros.

The Jolicloud live installer is distributed as a 600MB .img file that can be written to flash media, such as a USB memory stick or an SD card. Users can boot from the removable media device and use it to install the operating system on a netbook. I tested Jolicloud in VirtualBox and on a Dell Mini 9 that was originally shipped with Ubuntu. The graphical installation program is the same one that is used in the conventional desktop version of Ubuntu.

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Free Software Foundation (FSF) founder Richard Stallman published a statement last week expressing concern about the Swedish Pirate Party’s copyright reform platform. The party’s ambitious goals for copyright term reduction would blast holes in copyleft licensing, a serious blow to Stallman’s Free Software movement.

The GNU General Public License (GPL), a widely-used open source software license that was originally written by Stallman, exploits fundamental characteristics of copyright law in order to guarantee that the freedoms granted by the license are extended to derivative works. The underlying legal principles that facilitate copyleft cannot function without conventional copyright.

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Although not without controversy, the initial testing of the Australian government’s Internet filtering system has gone off with few problems according to reports from some of the participating ISPs. Five of the nine ISPs testing the government’s filtering system reported few problems during testing, even though only 15 customers participated at one and a couple of customers at another were unable to access a completely legal porn site. The other four IPs have either yet to comment on the filter’s performance or have refused to talk publicly about the results. 

Australia’s government first announced its intention to add a Great Barrier Reef of sorts around the nation’s virtual shores nearly two years ago, in August 2007. Initial testing began in the island state of Tasmania in February 2008, with cost estimates running as high as AUS$189 million (about US$154 million). The filters were originally intended to be on by default, with consumers able to opt out.

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As capable as most computers are today, typical OEM systems have fairly limited gaming prowess since it isn’t their market. Enthusiasts need more memory, more video card, more processor, more something beyond the basics that usually ship with the average pre-built box. And selecting your own components to fill your exact needs is much more fun and often cheaper once you start talking $1,000+ systems. The various enthusiast System Guides around the Internet can help, but here in our Gaming Boxes Guide, we aim to provide a little more gaming focus than we do in our main three-box System Guide.

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<img vspace=”4″ hspace=”4″ border=”0″ align=”right” src=”http://www.slashfeed.com/media/07-27-09/handset_congress_hearing_ars-thumb-230×130-7238-f.jpg” alt=”companion photo for Verizon offers wireless concessions to a skeptical Congress” />

No doubt about it—we’ve got a Congress and Federal Communications Commission that are far more skeptical of the wireless industry than they’ve been in the past. And if the average cell phone user hasn’t sensed this, Verizon has. The mobile giant has been very pro-active of late on hot button issues like roaming and exclusive handset deals. Its CEO has been running around Washington, D.C. making announcements and floating policy recommendations that will appear to some as olive branches, but to others as bids to ward off stricter government scrutiny.

And it sure looks like said scrutiny is coming. Even before FCC Chair Julius Genachowski actually got his job, he promised a probe on the exclusive handset question.

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It’s amazing what happens to even a friendly game of… well, whatever when there’s a few dollars on the line. Even a dollar bet gives you an emotional stake in a sporting event. World Gaming is hoping that gamers are ready to bet on their gaming prowess in order to chase that thrill, and the company has already had $176,000 wagered through its service. Do you think you’re better than someone else at Halo 3? Are you ready to put down money to prove it?

Billy Levy, the president of World Gaming, spent the majority of his time in college gaming competitively, and often drove long distances to find the best talent to compete against. “It was around this time when I realized that there was no arena for all these competitive gamers to do what they love to do, yet with one twist—they need to be able to do it in the comfort of their own home,” he told Ars.

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