YouTube Launches Music Service

YouTube has launched its own Music Discovery service, for want of a better description, boasting the heading “Find > Mix > Watch.”

YouTube’s new service, which you can find fairly simply by heading over to YouTube.com/disco. For now, it all seems fairly straightforward, all you need to do is drop a name into the “Artist” box and YouTube works some kind of behind-the-scenes witchcraft and comes back to you with, on the right hand side, a list of songs to listen to by that artist. However, it’s the left hand side that’s really interesting.

Yahoo Closes for Christmas

Yahoo has announced that it is to close up between Christmas the January this year as part of its ongoing, and apparently increasingly extreme, cost-cutting measures.

Yahoo has been in a fairly sticky monetary situation this year, managing not to turn a loss by firing a significant proportion of its staff. Apparently, the cost-cutting continues this Christmas, with the company to effectively close-up shop over the Christmas break. Strangely enough, its staff hasn’t been given the choice as to whether or not it wants time off… it’s a choice between holiday time or unpaid leave. Seems a little hard, but that’s life.

AMD Receives Intel Money

AMD has announced that it has received the $1.25 billion sum that the New York Attorney General ruled it was to be paid by Intel after allegations surfaced that Intel had used bribery and coercion to earn it a top position in the processor market.

Word comes via Trading Markets that AMD has received the monetary remuneration it was due from Intel, and that we can likely expect the rest of the rest of the bits and pieces that Intel has promised to go quite smoothly. For those who haven’t been keeping up with the story, Intel wasn’t just forced to pay out the $1.25 billion to AMD, but also:

The Pirate Bay Gets Tougher

In a genuinely bizarre turn of events, it seems as though renewed attempts to have file sharing haven and practical Mos Eisley of the internet, The Pirate Bay, shut down have pushed the site into a position where it could be impossible to do so.

There’s a very lengthy write-up of the history leading to the most changes to the Pirate Bay’s structure over at TorrentFreak, but the long and short of it is that the fact that the Pirate Bay no longer boasts its own tracker could well have done an awful lot to shake up the cases against the illegal filesharing service. For one, it could well mean that the current cases being fought in Sweden don’t mean quite as much, with the site in question now entirely outside of Sweden.

Repeated attempts to disconnect the Pirate Bay have seen the site move around so much, geographically, that it was eventually carried out of its home country. Those individuals behind the Pirate Bay itself are now quite a bit outside of Sweden’s jurisdiction, with Frederik Neij safely holed up in Thailand while Gottfrid Svartholm is, apparently, spending his time in Cambodia.

Neij was good enough to comment on the current situation of the Pirate Bay last week when he said that,

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden.”

Certainly, it’s an interesting question, but the fact is that there’s an awful lot of money behind the case against the Pirate Bay, and it seems entirely likely that the case will be pursued as far as it possibly can be. Still, the whole thing is very interesting, given the lengths to which the copyright holders involved have gone to in shutting down the whole thing down.

For those interested in reading (an awful lot) more on the topic, the TorrentFreak article on the current state of the Pirate Bay has much more detail.

BBC Refuses iPlayer for Xbox

Microsoft has been trying to gain access to BBC’s fantastically popular iPlayer service for quite a while, but word has come out that the BBC has blocked the company from making it available.

Managing to boast support for the BBC iPlayer would be a major feather in Microsoft’s cap, but for now it seems as though Xbox users are to remain out in the cold when it comes to the web-based video service. The BBC’s refusal to allow the service to hit Microsoft’s Xbox 360 seems, according to The Telegraph, to be wrapped up in the way that Microsoft charges for Xbox Live Gold memberships, which would likely be required to view the service. According to the Telegraph, the BBC explained the whole thing in fairly certain terms, saying,

“Microsoft only wants to offer its users access to platforms it can charge for as this is the model it is pursuing. It wants to ensure that only those paying for Xbox Live Gold accounts can access its additional content services and even then there is usually a charge on top to get access to those.”

While all of this means relatively little to those of us in Ireland, with ways to use BBC’s iPlayer having been fairly quickly locked down, it’s still a fairly interesting point in the Xbox 360’s development.

It’s well worth pointing out that both Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii boast their own iPlayer offerings for free. The BBC has been more than happy to provide access to its content on the basis that users aren’t being charged to access that content… if we take this news in the light of Microsoft’s offer of free Xbox Live Gold membership for European users during the week, rumours that the service is being tested to see just how well a free service could be provided start to look a little more plausible.

For now, there’s no way to know, and it could well all be just wishful thinking, but that’s life.

Twitter to Charge in Japan

Twitter is changing shape dramatically for its Japanese users beginning this coming January, with a move to a subscription model to charge users, depending on the manner in which they use the service.

While the average user won’t be charged to actually write to and update their own Twitter accounts, MediaAsia is reporting that those users looking to follow popular accounts will be charged for the privilege. So-called “premium” accounts will require users to pay to follow them. It’s certainly a monumental shift in the way the whole thing works, but for now we’re just curious to see how well it manages to launch…

Of course, many have been quick to point out that the Twitter model is fairly different for Japanese users, with the official Twitter.co.jp having only launched around a month ago. Moreover, the Japanese version of Twitter is already being billed as a bit of a different animal to the international version; it boasts its own video upload service for one, which makes the whole thing a little different.

Obviously enough, there are different cultural considerations for Twitter in different regions, but if the service manages to catch on in Japan with a for-pay model on premium accounts then we’d be curious to see if that’s something that the micro-blogging business starts to adopt in other regions.

For what it’s worth, we certainly doubt it’ll ever hit on our end; the fact that Twitter is free at the point of use has long been the driving force behind adoption of the service. The idea that people might have to pay to use it sounds as though it could be the fastest way possible to lose half of a service’s userbase, even if it is just to follow so-called “premium accounts.”

Still, if Twitter Japan can do it…

Facebook in Talks About Virtual Currency

Facebook may well not be something too many of us consider actually spending money on, but the company has had its own virtual currency in place for quite some time. Now though, it’s talking to developers about how they can use the “credits” system themselves.

At the moment, credits on Facebook are bought and used to buy gifts, whether Facebook-based cards to celebrate birthdays or songs made available thanks to Facebook’s team-up with popular US only music service Lala.com. Until now though, third party developers had been left out of the loop when it came to people actually coughing up their own cash for Facebook.

Insurance Scuffle Around Facebook Photos

A Canadian woman diagnosed with depression and on sick leave has found her disability benefits cut off thanks, in no small part to Facebook.

Word comes from Yahoo that the insurance company involved cut disability payments on the strength of the fact that she had posted photos to her Facebook page in which she looked happy and was smiling. If it seems a little like a disproportionate response, then that might well be because it is, but the insurance company involved felt it was within her rights, and will now likely find itself on the wrong end of a legal battle.

Dell Profits Cut in Half

Dell has had a fairly rough time this year, with its recent earnings report indicating that the company has seen a relatively small decline in revenue, but a fall in profit by over 50%.

According to Cnet, Dell managed to match industry analysts’ predictions when it came to revenue, reporting $12.9 billion, but the problem is that profit hasn’t been quite as good as revenue, with Dell seeing profit drop by fully 54%, to the tune of 17 cents per share. Dell has placed the blame fairly firmly on the reception of Windows 7, which, while good, didn’t really live up to Dell’s expectations. At a conference, Dell CFO Brian Gladden said of the fall,

“We saw some weakness in orders in some of the weeks preceding Windows 7 … our inventories were in place and people were waiting to see how the launch went. After the launch we saw a surge in orders. We believe that affected our October revenue a bit, but we’ll ship that through in the fourth quarter.”

New Trojan Steals Money from Bank Accounts

The security world is abuzz today with news of a new Trojan that calculates amounts of money to steal based on a combination of your account balance and what anti-fraud programs will pick up.

Now that's a trojan.

Cnet is carrying word that the new Trojan, called URLzone, lies in wait on a user’s machine until they decide to look up their bank balance on a banking site it recognises, at which point it starts communicating with a home server for details of how to proceed based on your balance and amounts that would likely be picked up as fraudulent transfers. For now though, it seems that only German banks have been effected, but that hasn’t stopped it being highly successful.