Culture and Society

Hitachi introduces new new optical disc drive that can record on all types of recordable DVD and CD: The drive is different from some of the multiformat DVD drives that have been announced recently by companies such as Sony because it also handles DVD-RAM discs. These are used in several …

If this report is accurate, it is very serious and has all kinds of implications, including civilian casualties: Sources have revealed to the mi2g Intelligence Unit that some of the most sophisticated hackers originating from Eastern Europe and Russia are being offered financial incentives to hijack satellite communications through covert …

PayPal, now owned by eBay, has been accused of violating the Patriot Act by providing payment services to online gambling operations: Silicon Valley-based eBay said it received a letter on Friday in which the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri accused PayPal of violating a provision of the …

Forbes looks at the next wireless standard: This new standard is dubbed 802.16a by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, which disdains catchy names. Some are calling it Wi-Max, but a better tag might be Wider-Fi. Meanwhile, a rival group at IEEE is working on 802.20–a kind of Mobile-Fi …

New GPS-enabled mobile phone: NTT DoCoMo announced today that it will introduce it’s first Global Positioning Service (GPS)-compatible handset F661i, at the end of April. The GPS mobile phone enables users to determine their location at the touch of a button, and download location specific information via i-mode like graphical …

The US recording industry appears ready to shoot itself in the foot once again.

The legal foundation of P2P is “substantial non-infringing use” – here’s a pretty substantial use and the only people being “infringed upon” are Iraqi troops: Various forms of peer-to-peer technology, which allows computer users to bypass central servers and connect directly with one another, are being used to plan battlefield …

Bootleg recordings of live shows used to be of very poor quality and had to be distributed manually. No more: The day after Tori Amos shocked fans in England with a piano rendition of the Eagles’ “Desperado,” MP3s of her performance showed up in Nashville, Tennessee, where David Mobley downloaded …

We ran a substantial portion of attorney and P2P advocate Philip Corwin’s exceptional testimony before the California Senate Select Committee on the Entertainment Industry. Other testimony yesterday was equally explosive: Free peer-to-peer music file-sharing has become larger than the multibillion-dollar recording industry, with a growth trend that has become “fundamentally …

Justin Sodano got behind closed doors at the UN while the “no military action under any circumstances” weasels were rehearsing their theme song: “Appease Me” (Set to the tune of The Beatles’ “Please Please Me”) Al Qaeda plans to nuke our cities, Be sure to note this in committee, Give …