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The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome — Oscar Swartz reports. — Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison.
Discussion:
Epicenter, Digits, p2pnet, Music Ally, SlashGear, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo and MacDailyNews
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Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict - Guilty — While only a few weeks ago, it seems like an eternity since the trial of The Pirate Bay Four ended and the court retired to consider its verdict. The prosecution claimed that the four defendants were 'assisting in making copyright content available …
Discussion:
TechCrunch, CNET News, BBC, ReadWriteWeb, Guardian, Slyck, 9 to 5 Mac, Homotron.net, The Local, New York Times, The Register, Kotaku, CNN, paidContent, Electronista, TechSpot, Music Ally, Mashable!, Gamasutra, the Econsultancy blog, Download Squad, GMSV, Boy Genius Report, iGeneration, MediaMemo, p2pnet and Hardware 2.0
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:Pirate Bay Loses A Lawsuit; Entertainment Industry Loses An Opportunity
Discussion:
TorrentFreak, BetaNews, PaulStamatiou.com, Gawker, Telegraph, Music Ally, Threat Level, TeleRead, hypebot and Kotaku
CNN:
Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter ‘turning point’ — (CNN) — As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?
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Andrew Hampp / AdAge:
Secret to Ashton Kutcher's Twitter Success? Billboards — Should He Be Disqualified for Such Old-School Advertising? — OAAA gets Twitterpated — Here's how Ashton Kutcher really won the Twitter war with CNN: digital billboards. — Lamar Advertising, the third-largest billboard company …
Thanks:mrinaldesai
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
This iPhone App Helps You Make iPhone Apps — Do you have a great idea for an iPhone app but not the coding skills to actually build it? Well, there's an app for that. The AppIncubator iPhone App from MEDL Mobile lets you submit your ideas which the company's development team will then build into apps for you.
Dan Nystedt / PC World:
Google's CEO Predicts Strong Year for Android — Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Thursday predicted good times ahead for Android, the company's mobile phone OS and software. — “Overall, it looks like Android is going to have a very strong year,” he said during the company's first quarter investors' conference.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Seeking Alpha, Silicon Alley Insider, AndroidGuys, Technologizer, InformationWeek, FierceWireless, mocoNews and Phone Scoop
Ki Mae Heussner / ABCNEWS:
Hacking Their Way to a Job? — 17-Year-Old Behind Recent Twitter Worm Offered Job After Claiming Responsibility — For the social networking darling Twitter, it was a headache and potential threat. But for the young man behind the computer worm that attacked the micro-blogging site this week, it was a fast track to a job.
Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:
New discoveries turn up in betas of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software [u] — Developer sources familiarizing themselves with betas of Apple's iPhone 3.0 software have uncovered a handful of additional tweaks and improvements to the system in recent weeks, including changes to Safari's window handling …
Kevin Poulsen / Threat Level:
Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years — A sophisticated FBI-produced spyware program has played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in federal investigations into extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back at least seven years, newly declassified documents show.
Discussion:
Threatpost Blog
Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:
Review: YouTube's New Premium Shows Design — We'd worried that YouTube's redesign to promote premium content would crowd out the site's homegrown stars. But now that YouTube has launched its site refresh, we see we might have been overly concerned. The new shows and movies section is well-contained within a little header tab.
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Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows Mobile 6.5 launch: Pencil in May 11 — The first Windows Mobile 6.5 phones aren't expected to be available until this fall, but it looks like that isn't stopping Microsoft from “launching” the next version of its mobile operating system on May 11. — May 11 is the opening …
Joseph Galante / Bloomberg:
Twitter Posts on Paint Projects, Ear Infections Start to Irk Some Users — Rachel Gard, who started using Twitter two months ago to keep in touch with friends, says she may stop using the site if companies keep contacting her. — Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room …
Brad Stone / Bits:
Apple Tops PC Customer Service Rankings — When it comes to customer service, PC manufacturers aren't held with quite the same contempt as cable companies, health insurers and Internet service providers — but they don't have much to brag about, either. — Forrester Research's 2008 customer …
Reuters:
Sony Ericsson says Android phone to take time — HELSINKI (Reuters) - Sony Ericsson will take some time developing a phone using Google's Android operating system, its chief executive said on Friday, but declined to say when such a handset would be available.
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Brian Krebs / Security Fix:
World's First Mac Botnet? Not Quite. — This morning, as I scrolled down the list of security Web sites I normally check via my RSS reader, I noticed several items referencing news about the “world's first Mac botnet.” As I read on, it became clear this was neither news nor a first.
Discussion:
PC World, Security Watch, Ars Technica, Newlaunches.com, Softpedia News, The Register and Technologizer
Variety:
Best Buy plans downloads — Co. hatching digital movie biz — Stung by falling DVD sales, Best Buy is on the verge of launching a digital movie service that could debut as early as this summer, according to studio insiders. — The chain is in talks with CinemaNow and other online movie services …
Adrian Covert / Gizmodo:
Sidekick LX 2009 is a Lean, Mean Twittering Machine (With a Better Screen) — T-Mobile's new Sidekick LX 2009 isn't a radical new departure from past models, but it brings a beautiful, 3.2-inch, 854x480 screen to the table along with Twitter integration. It's also the slimmest Sidekick to date.
Discussion:
The Technology Chronicles, IntoMobile, BetaNews, eWeek, Gearlog, Electronista, Obsessable, Engadget Mobile and Crave
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
NBC Universal Earnings Sliced In Half, but There's a Bright Side — The bad news for NBC Universal: The TV and movie powerhouse saw earnings drop 45 percent in the last quarter. The good news: The GE unit says that if you stripped out one-time costs, charges, etc., it would have only been down something like 15 to 25 percent.
Gabriel Madway / Reuters:
U.S. video games sales fall 17 pct in March: NPD — SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Overall U.S. video game sales fell 17 percent in March to $1.43 billion, research group NPD said on Thursday, a revealing figure for an industry that had so far shown resilience in the economic downturn.
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