My former colleague Vito Pilieci has a nice little scoop in today's Canwest papers: A musician's group will put forward an idea today that it hopes will solve the illegal music downloading debate: Make every Internet user in Canada pay $5 a month to a musician's fund and, in exchange, you can download all the music you want for free.... "That's a very reasonable amount of money to legally, without fear of any legal repercussions, to be able to download that and share it with [whomever] you want to and as many times as you want," said Eddie Schwartz, president of the songwriters' group.

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New York Times reporters Matt Richtel and Eric Taub phrase it nicely: HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness.... The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.

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"...Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets..."
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She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.... As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.

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Two University of British Columbia professors contend that consumers tend to trust the reputations of sellers affiliated with Amazon.com/Amazon.ca more than they trust sellers at eBay. This has important implications for online commerce because, in several studies, one of the significant barriers that inhibit consumers from making ...   more »

A top executive at America's biggest Internet service provider says the interests of Hollywood are more important than the interests of its customers . . .   more »

Global net censorship 'growing'

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.
The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content ...   more »

Canada continues to be tops among the G7 group of industrialized nations when it comes to relative number of high-speed Internet connections in the country, according to the most recent stats released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD measured 23.8 broadband subscribers in Canada per ...   more »

My good friend Oxblood Ruffin, the top Canuck in that famous hacker outfit The Cult of the Dead Cow, posts an essay accusing search engine giant Google Inc. of aiding in the cultural genocide of Tibet and asking the Silicon Valley-based company to stand up to the ...   more »

Just about everyone on Parliament Hill — MPs, political aides, journalists, and so on — rely heavily on their Research In Motion BlackBerry to communicate. And you never realize how much you depend on the service until it’s taken away. That happened last night around 8 p.m. after an “infrastructure ...   more »