Joe Rogan’s character on Newsradio stated it well:

Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet… that’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.

A high-profile case has again proven that point. In February 2007 the AACS processing key was disclosed. This key allows copy protection to be broken on HD-DVD and BlueRay media produced before April 23. The AACS is backed by heavyweights like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Disney and WB. They took an aggressive stance to have the content containing the key removed from the Internet. They sent cease and desist notices, and shut down sites that didn’t comply.

Enter Digg. Their first reaction was not to wage battle with the AACS, and they removed the content as requested. Digg CEO Jay Adelson, “Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law.” That response only fueled the fire, and by late yesterday, the democratic Digg frontpage was filled with HD-DVD stories and comments that included the forbidden key. The site administrators couldn’t keep up, and the site was even unavailable for a time.

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MySpace is going into the news business with a service that will scour the internet for news stories and let users vote on which ones receive the most exposure.

This approach blends elements of Google News and sites such as Digg and Netscape, which rely on readers to submit stories and determine their prominence. It also marks the site’s ambitions to become a web portal like Yahoo!, providing its users with a front door to the internet.

MySpace, which is owned by News Corp, also the parent company of Times Online, will display headlines from external new sites, a practice that attracted legal challenges when Google used it for its news service.

View: Full Story @ TimesOnline

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 – $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 – $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click “Stumble!” and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person “stumbling.” More often than not, it’s something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily.

View: Full Story @ techcrunch.com

There are all sorts of tools for sharing files without having to choke your email server or upload them to your own web host account. Pando supports emailing huge attachments by using a special version of BitTorrent to serve up the file in p2p fashion. Box.net, Xdrive, and eSnips provide easy upload and sharing with large amounts of cheap or free space. senduit offers a two-step process for uploading files and giving them a private URL. Titanize backs up your files to a secure online site and then allows you to share links to the backed up versions of the files.

Now there’s izimi, a download for Windows aimed at making it really easy to share anything directly from your computer to someone’s browser via the izimi website. izimi is similar to Avvenu, another Windows-only desktop install that turns your machine into a file server. These services remind me of Parakey, a web publishing tool for the masses under development by Blake Ross, one of the co-founders of the Mozilla Firefox project. They all aim at the mass market of nongeeks who want to share photos, videos, and other files on the web but aren’t necessarily interested in or aware of the latest online file storage service.

View: Full Story @ webworkerdaily.com

Those amusing YouTube Latest News about YouTube video clips that Internet Free How-To Guide for Small Business Web Strategies – from domain name selection to site promotion. users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn.

It’s an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.

However, no one disagrees that the Web’s capacity is being pushed to its limits.

“We don’t see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there’s this fundamental wall we’re heading towards,” said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International (NYSE: Q) Latest News about Qwest Communications, one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network’s center.

View: Full Story @ technewsworld.com

Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader’s invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM.

The expansion, scheduled to be unveiled Thursday, threatens to bog down Microsoft Corp.’s efforts to persuade businesses to buy the latest version of its market-leading Office suite that was developed along with its new Vista operating system.

Google’s software bundle, to be sold for a $50 annual fee per user, also poses a challenge to International Business Machines Corp. and its Lotus suite.

View: Full Story @ newsday.com

Microsoft announced Friday it has hit the 100 million installation milestone for Internet Explorer 7, a figure that makes the new browser the second most used behind IE6. Web analytics firm WebSideStory reports that 25 percent of all Web surfers in the United States are now running IE7.

“We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up AU distribution, and with the consumer availability of Windows Vista on January 30, 2007,” wrote IE group program manager Tony Chor on the IEBlog. Because IE7 is built into Windows Vista, Microsoft expects adoption rates to jump further as consumers upgrade. Already, Microsoft is preparing to discuss the next version of Internet Explorer at the company’s MIX conference that begins April 30.

Via: BetaNews

Netflix will start showing movies and TV episodes over the Internet this week, providing its subscribers with more instant gratification as the DVD-by-mail service prepares for a looming technology shift.

The company plans to unveil its Watch Now feature Tuesday. But only a small number of its more than 6 million subscribers will get immediate access to the service, offered at no additional charge.

Netflix expects to introduce instant viewing to about 250,000 additional subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the demand.

View: Full Story Via: USA Today

The HD-DVD has been cracked, and high definition content is now being distributed freely over BitTorrent. We all knew this would happen sooner or later, looks it was “sooner”. The first HD-DVD to be uploaded to BitTorrent is Serenity, the Firefly movie.

It hasn’t even been a month since the HD-DVD ripper, BackupHDDVD was released and we’re already seeing high definition feature films pop up on torrent sites. Other than Serenity, it is rumoured that HD-DVDs of the movies 12 Monkeys and King Kong have been decrypted and consequently shown up on torrent sites. Yesterday, a handful of hackers figured out how to extract the unique volume key from HD-DVDs.

According to HDTV Blogger, the torrent is “a 19.6GB file in native EVO format that should play on PowerDVD and WinDVD with HD DVD playback.” Apparently, he got a “very, very nasty email” after posting about the first HD-DVD torrent. It seems the anonymous mailer was upset at the fact that he was bringing unnecessary attention to the P2P community. Looks like his plan just backfired.

View: Full Story Via: torrentfreak.com

Microsoft Virtual Labs launched a new Test Drive site to help give exposure to the Windows Vista operating system. The test drive site allows anyone to launch and try out various scenarios in a completely isolated, sandbox environment before they purchase and install the product on their own equipment.

In the past, many Microsoft applications have been made available on a test drive or trial basis by utilizing a Citrix client connection. The Vista OS trial is more of an “eat your own dog food” type demonstration as Microsoft is utilizing Microsoft Virtual Server to push out the trial.

In order to test drive this online trial, you must be using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, you must have JavaScript enabled, and you must install the ActiveX control “Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control” from Microsoft. And don’t forget about your popup blocking software. Mine complained numerous times as I tried to launch various scenarios within this test drive.

View: WindowsVistaTestDrive.com
View: Full Story Via: InfoWorld.com