In the future, “heavy users” of Comcast’s broadband service speeds may face not just a periodic slowing–sorry, deprioritizing–of their service, but a capping of that service as well. Broadband Reports brings word today that Comcast plans to implement a 250GB broadband cap come October.
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French cinephiles are illegally downloading from the Internet as many films as they pay to see in theaters. This according to a new study from the Association Against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA) that was–My God, THE IRONY–itself leaked to the Internet without its creator’s knowledge or consent.
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In a 2004 email to Steve Jobs, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser asked the Apple CEO to consider a “tactical alliance” with his company. License us your Fairplay digital-rights management system, allow our customers to play their digital music collections on the iPod, wrote Glaser, and we’ll make the iPod our primary device for the RealNetworks store and for RealPlayer software.
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Telekinesis was a great little iPhone remote — while it lasted. But come July 11, its days may be numbered. Hidden away in the latest developer build of iTunes 7.7 is a new Apple-designed remote control application for iPhone and iPod Touch users that navigates tracks on Macs and Windows PCs from any of Apple’s current handhelds.
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Apple’s iTunes digital media store has now sold more than 5 billion songs since its 2001 debut. And with downloads of digital movies having reached 50,000 a day, the service has become the leading purveyor of online music and videos.
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Looks like Firefox 3 Download Day will be one for the record books after all. Though its servers were initially overwhelmed by the volume of download requests yesterday, Mozilla soon had the Firefox 3 download site humming along nicely. Within five hours it had broken Firefox 2’s single-day record of 1.6 million downloads and by 5 a.m. PDT today–18 hours into its world record attempt–it had already blown the doors off the 5 million mark it had set for itself with 6,424,790 downloads.
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Of the 1,770 songs stored in the average MP3 player of the average 14- to 24-year-old, nearly half are pirated. This according to a new study by the University of Hertfordshire, which found nearly two-thirds of that demographic willing to admit it downloads music illegally.
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With Apple’s much lauded iPhone having captured about 19.2% of the smart-phone market, expectations were high in advance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And Jobs did not disappoint, unveiling the iPhone 3G, which will go on sale July 11 for $199.
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Wow. Blockbuster is completely out of ideas, isn’t it? This morning the foundering movie rental chain went public with its bid to acquire ailing retail consumer-electronics chain Circuit City.
In a Feb. 17 letter to Circuit City CEO Philip Schoonover, Blockbuster (BBI) offered to pay more than $1 billion for the chain. But, to date, Circuit [...]
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As far as solutions for California’s $14 billion budget deficit go, taxing “digital property” is nearly as outlandish as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed $4.8 billion cut in education spending.
Yet it’s being bandied about by Democratic State Assemblyman Charles Calderon, whose Assembly Bill 1956 would expand the state’s sales tax to digital goods–music downloads, e-books, pornography [...]
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Lest there be any doubt that DVR functionality was purposefully left out of Apple TV, consider this patent recently unearthed by AppleInsider. Filed in October of 2006, the patent describes not just a version of Apple TV capable of browsing and recording live TV programming, but a touch-based remote that could be preloaded with [...]
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The concept is simple: The music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to ‘get legit’ in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway–share the music they [...]
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