Five years after its launch, Skype is now the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world, Telegeography says. Or as my friend Andy Abramson would say: The world’s biggest minute stealer.
tdobson writes “The popular online radio service Last.fm has announced that users outside of the UK, USA and Germany will need to start paying 3 Euros (about .40 USD/£2.80 GBP) per month to continue streaming music on their service. Last.fm doesn’t offer much of a reason as to the change, other than writing on their blog that ‘[t]here will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio.’ Already, there appears to be quite a backlash in responses so far, amongst subscribers and non-subscribers of all nationalities — has this killed Last.fm’s appeal, globally?”
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Arriving back home, PM Brown settled in to watch “Psycho” only to receive a far greater horror than the movie itself could bring — none of his DVDs would play, due to zone restrictions. While saddened and shocked, the PM maintains that American and Britain still have a “special partnership”.
Exactly a year ago one of the largest torrent sites shut down for good, and a month later the owner was ordered to pay a 110 million dollar fine. We catch up with TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell, who’s still in court fighting the MPAA, to see how he views the developments of the past year.
This is an insightful tutorial that covers some useful effects. In particular, using brush dynamics to generate particles and creating an artificial bokeh effect was pretty cool.
Johannes Larcher will be Web TV startup Hulu’s new SVP in charge of procuring international rights, according to PaidContent. Johannes takes over for Andy Forsell, who is still with the company.
We scoured the Internet to come up with 101 innovative, entirely free downloads and services. Don’t miss our Best Bets.
Web developers these days are often expected to know and work in multiple languages. As a result, it’s tricky to learn everything a language has to offer and easy to find yourself not utilizing the full potential of some more specialized but very useful tags.
O2, Apple’s mobile phone partner in the UK, is to offer the iPhone 3G for free as part of a new contract deal available from next month.
Popsikle writes “A few days ago one of the Web’s largest hosting discussion forums was supposedly hacked via their backup servers. From the story: ‘We’ve since learned that this very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated hack against Web Hosting Talk was carried out by gaining access to our offsite backup servers. From our backup servers, the hacker gained access to the WHT db server. The malicious attacker deleted all backups from the backup servers within the infrastructure before deleting tables from our db server. We were alerted of the db exploitation and quickly shut down the site to prevent further damage.’ What sort of security do you put on your backup infrastructure? Looking at your backup solution could you be completely taken down by either someone obtaining a backup or accessing your backup servers? What sort of recommendations does everyone have for this not to happen?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
