Pay-per-download Napster has landed itself a very high-profile marketing partner. The one-time peer-to-peer kingpin, resurrected as an online music store, has a multiyear deal with electronics retail giant Best Buy to promote Napster as its top digital music service in-store, on the air, in print, and on the Net. The deal involves Best Buy receiving up to $10 million of Napster parent Roxio's stock for the term of the deal, with Napster joining Best Buy in jointly-funded marketing activity. Best Buy also agreed to market a co-branded version of Napster through the retailer's Website…
A lot of people agree Russia has a large volume of talented young computer mavens, including only too many who spend their talents spawning big viruses more than big advances. One of them is going to be 3,000 rubles lighter in the wallet for his trouble: He's been convicted of sending an obscene text message to 15,000 cell phone users, the first Russian spammer to be convicted. The unnamed whiz kid got a one-year suspended sentence in addition to his fine…
Texas authorities have gone mobile in a bid to suspend the Web perverts using online chat rooms to set up sex dates with underage girls. Seven such chatters were indicted June 23 after they got nailed in Huntsville by a new van rigged with high-speed wireless satellite computer devices. Thought to be the first in the United States, the Texas lab was financed with a gubernatorial grant. "In many of our rural areas, they lack the infrastructure we need to support this kind of investigation," said the state attorney general's chief for criminal investigations, David Boatright. "So we now have the technology and ability to bring it with us. It's self-contained and we're ready to go."…
Yahoo is ready to keep Trillian from communicating with Yahoo Messenger, blocking the software beginning June 23 in a bid to keep Messenger from spammers. "Spammers are being aided by entities that are abusing our systems, where they effortlessly gain knowledge of pathways and back-alley access to send spam," Yahoo's Mary Osako told reporters. Yahoo previously blocked Trillian last fall, but Trillian's maker, Cerulean Studios, countered with a workaround that restored Trillian's Yahoo Messenger access. Yahoo vowed to keep changing protocols to keep Trillian and similar programs from finding new ways to meld Yahoo…
British Netizens would like to keep premium-rate phone charge fraud from rising even more, according to ICSTIS, the British premium-rate telephone regulator that says it was forced to bring in the big boys – namely, Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit – after a surge in fraud complaints. The regulator says some involve possible Trojan horse programs and others involve dialers downloaded secretly onto victims' computers "If it's only a few cases, then we can put it down to the husband or kids not admitting to surfing porn," said ICSTIS policy advisor Suhil Baht. "But if 300 customers are saying the same thing about one company, then we can't ignore it. We can't work out what the problem is, so we have recently started talking to the Hi-Tech Crime Unit, so they can do a criminal investigation."…
Authorities in Scarsdale, New York may be doing a criminal investigation of a tape, circulated on the Internet, of high school boys trying to coax two high school girls into “intensified” sexual activity. The videotape was said to be made at an unsupervised party during spring break. It features the girls being urged on by the videographer and onlookers making "coarse sexual comments… [with] one girl… saying 'stop' and 'no' numerous times and pushing the other girl's hands away as the group pressures her into continuing," according to one report. Authorities including possibly the Westchester County district attorney want to know whether a crime took place…
Speaking of high-tech sexual harassment, it seems to be rising down under. Tasmanian workers are said to be filing more claims of sexual harassment involving explicit mobile phone messages, e-mail, lesbian porn, and graphic sexual acts on screensavers being used to harass them, according to Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Jocelynne Scott, who says such claims have jumped dramatically since her group began work in 2000…
One pleasant thing jumping somewhere is in Israel, namely a rise in the country's Netizens. The Israeli media is reporting the number of Israeli Netizens 13 and over is now 2.7 million, up from 2.5 million reported last November. Of these, 82 percent are believed to hit the Net every day (up from 74 percent last November), 41 percent surfing more than ten hours a week (36 percent in November), and 82 percent of Israel's Netizens using e-mail compared to 78 percent last fall. And, the country's Net population is getting more into the Net for news – 73 percent reading news publications online compared to 67 percent last fall…
One especially unpleasant surprise received by visitors to the NSW Coalition's Website this week: getting directed to Websites touting lesbian porn, sex toys, or a matchmaking agency for women. The under-construction site featured links under several topics, one of which was headed "Woman" and yielded lists including "woman sex toy," "black woman," "woman sex," and others which produced sites offering the aforesaid unexpecteds. One report indicated the domain name nswcoalition.com was supposed to be used by the NSW Coalition but was sold, reportedly, to an American company, Alternative Identity, which is believed to be a firm helping people keep their identities online concealed.
