Webcasting 'Day of Silence' Heard Worldwide
In protest of royalties fees which take effect next month, the amount of which has been recently estimated to surmount their revenues by nearly four times, America's largest and best-known streaming music sites, plus others worldwide, have gone silent for the day. The sound of silence could grow familiar, some streamers are saying, if the US Copyright Royalty Board's recently imposed rate structure fails to be stayed by bills that are still before Congress. This morning, Yahoo Music and LaunchCast, with the nation's second largest Internet radio audience, replaced all their music channels with links to SaveNetRadio.org, which represents the effort to stop the new performance royalty tier from being imposed. In a message on its music blog this morning, Yahoo Music's Ian C. Rogers states in unequivocal terms, his company will not continue to produce streaming music online if no legislative action is taken between now and July 15.

Apple, AT&T detail iPhone service plans
Apple and AT&T on Tuesday announced cellphone service plans for the iPhone starting at $59.99. Typically, you activate a cellphone in the store when you buy it. Whether you're an existing AT&T customer or a newbie, Apple wants you to activate iPhone and pick your wireless plan at home through iTunes, without having to wait on line. The iPhone goes on sale at 6 p.m. Friday across the country at $499 for a 4-gigabyte version and $599 for 8GB of storage. Across all the plans, which are pretty aggressively priced, you get unlimited data for e-mail and the Web, plus visual voicemail. So what you're choosing are voice and SMS text messaging minutes. Monthly plans start at $59.99 for 450 voice minutes, 200 SMS text messages and 5,000 night and weekend minutes. An additional $10 a month buys 1,500 extra text messages; $20 buys unlimited texts. There's a onetime $36 activation fee, and you must sign up for a two-year service agreement with AT&T. Family plans, ranging from $80 to $310 a month, are also available. They include one phone line; additional iPhone lines are $29.99 each. Current AT&T customers can keep their current voice plan and add an iPhone data plan for $20 per month. A series of straightforward setup screens in iTunes walks you through the activation drill. If you're an AT&T customer, you can replace a handset on your account with iPhone or add a new line to an existing account. You can also transfer an existing mobile phone number from another wireless provider. The process only takes a few minutes, after which you can sync the device with your music, videos, photos, TV shows, calenders, movies, email accounts and Web browser bookmarks.

Google Seeks Extension of Microsoft Oversight
Google asked a federal judge to extend the Justice Department's oversight of Microsoft, citing concern over a compromise between the software company and the federal government that was announced last week. Google made the request in a filing to the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia that oversees the sweeping agreement reached with the Justice Department, several state attorneys general and the Redmond, Wash., software company in 2002 to resolve complaints that Microsoft was acting anticompetitively. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly today will hold a quarterly hearing in which she will determine whether Microsoft is sticking to the terms of the agreement, which is due to expire in November. Google, has complained that Microsoft's new Vista operating system is unfairly disadvantaging rivals. Specifically, it alleged that Vista's desktop-search function, which enables a user to scan the contents of their personal computer's hard drive including email, wasn't interchangeable with similar software from other companies. Microsoft is obliged to make so-called middleware technologies compatible, given its dominance in the market for personal-computer operating systems. The company recently reached an agreement with the Justice Department and a handful of state attorneys generals to alter Vista. Pending approval by Judge Kollar-Kotelly, the matter appeared resolved.

US court convicts 'dirty duo' spammers
Two US men have been convicted for their part in an international spam operation which bombarded internet users with explicit adult content. A Federal jury convicted James R. Schaffer, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, and Jeffrey A. Kilbride, of Venice, California, on multiple charges including conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials. Spam sent by Schaffer and Kilbride resulted in AOL receiving more than 600,000 user complaints between 30 January and 9 June 2004. Assistant attorney general Alice Fisher said that the spam messages, which promoted pornographic websites, grossed the two men more than $2m. "This dirty duo used a variety of tricks to try and hide their whereabouts from the US authorities," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "This included logging-in remotely to servers based in Amsterdam to make their spam messages appear to be of non-US origin, and using bank accounts in Mauritius and the Isle of Man. "The spammers worked hard to protect themselves and disguise their identities, but did not lose any sleep over the hundreds of thousands of innocent families and children who were receiving their unwanted explicit emails." Schaffer and Kilbride face up to five years in prison for each spam and obscenity offence. In addition, they face a fine of up to $500,000 and a maximum 20-year prison sentence for money laundering. Sentencing is scheduled for 24 September. Other members of the gang, including work-at-home 'mum' Jennifer Clason and Kirk Rogers of Manhattan Beach, California, have already admitted their involvement in the international spam operation.

The wide world of Wi-Max
Wireless Internet service works great - so long as you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot. But what if you could have wireless Internet everywhere you go, available on your laptop and cell phone, at speeds that can leave both DSL and 3G data networks in the dust? That's what Sprint Nextel customers could get later this year, when the Reston, Va., carrier starts rolling out its $3 billion mobile Wi-Max network. The promise of Wi-Max, which stands for worldwide interoperability for microwave access, has been talked about for years. Unlike Wi-Fi, which was designed to send signals no farther than 300 feet, only a few Wi-Max transmitters are needed to blanket an entire city with high-speed Internet connectivity. Fasten your seat belts: The Internet service model of telecoms, cable companies, and cellular operators is about to be disrupted. Sprint says its new service will go live in three markets - Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington - by the end of 2007. It will be the first U.S. carrier to launch the next-generation network, which already exists in South Korea and is five times faster than current 3G cellular data services. Sprint hopes to have coverage available to 100 million Americans in about 35 regions nationwide by 2009. That could provide a much-needed boost to the nation's third-largest mobile operator, which has lately been suffering. Last quarter alone, the company lost more than 200,000 postpaid subscribers.

Blinkx debuts video ad platform
Video search engine blinkx has launched a contextually relevant video advertising platform. The company said its new ‘AdHoc’ platform will match customised TV-style ads to users based on their keyword searches. AdHoc uses blinkx’s patented speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology to understand video content and dynamically place advertising against it. In addition, the AdHoc platform offers media companies and advertisers a solution for customising the timing and appearance of video ads, with options that include pre-, post- and mid-roll placement, as well as dynamically-selected banners, in-video mini-banners and a unique, post-roll catalog view. Partners can select which ad databases to use: their own, the blinkx AdHoc platform, or external ad systems, such as Google’s AdWords. The AdHoc platform is available to advertisers, media companies and other partners effective immediately. blinkx has also struck partnerships with meta-search firm InfoSpace and meida provider Real Networks. The Infospace partnership will see blinkx offer video search capabilities for InfoSpace's family of metasearch brands including Dogpile.com, a search engine which returns top results from Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and Ask.com. In addition, blinkx video search is now embedded in the new RealPlayer giving users a video search box with a fully-searchable index of over 12 million hours of online video, including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, and video blogs.

Samsung intros 64GB solid state drive
Electronics firm Samsung has begun the mass production of 1.8in 64GB solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs offer greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. Such devices can also improve battery life by up to 20% in notebooks because of the lack of a motor and other moving parts. Samsung's 64GB SSD consists of 64Gb single-level cell Flash memory chips. Use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair. The company has already introduced 32GB SSDs into ultra-mobile personal computers, and its SSDs also are being considered for server applications such as in advertising and for web search engines. Other digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers can now be equipped with SSDs ranging from 4GB to 64GB. Samsung predicts that sales of SSD units will increase by 270% between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the Nand Flash industry. The company believes that rapid expansion of the 1.8in SSD market will spark demand for even smaller SSD formats for mobile consumer electronics. Samsung said that 2.5in and 3.5in SSDs will also gain a great deal of momentum over the next three years for widespread use in standard notebooks and desktop PCs.

Cost is biggest barrier to green IT
Cost is the single biggest factor hampering companies that want to adopt a 'green' IT structure, according to new research. The study reveals that 82% of the IT managers surveyed considered the environmental impact of their IT infrastructure and hardware as either "extremely" or "very" important. The survey of 100 IT managers attending the Citrix iForum conference in June was carried out by Neoware, a US thin client provider. Some 71% of respondents said they would choose an IT system or product specifically because it is more environmentally friendly or energy-efficient. But the results also show that a range of factors stand in the way of these intentions being put into practice. Survey respondents named cost as the key preventative factor (24%) when it comes to going green, followed by "difficulties in replacing existing technology" (18%) and "lack of green products available" (17%). Other barriers cited included "lack of understanding" (15%), no "green champion" within the IT department (10%), "lack of management buy-in" (10%), and "not formalised into company's CSR (corporate social responsibility)/green initiatives" (4%).

Two-tiered net could be coming
ISPs may start charging some websites for faster access to customers, a report has predicted. It could create a "two-tiered internet" which, while making money for providers would risk alienating consumers. Charging both customers and websites for access could prove too tempting for ISPs to resist. ISPs currently operate on incredibly tight margins in order to offer cheap broadband deals to the public. One way of creating a new revenue stream would be to supply faster, prioritised access to a select group of websites willing to pay. Such a system would be easy to set up with the traffic management tools that many ISPs already use to help control bandwidth. For ISPs that already offer their own value-added products such as IPTV or voice-over IP, there will also be an incentive to prioritise access to their own services. A survey conducted by broadband pressure group thinkbroadband earlier this year showed that a number of providers are marketing products as an 'up to 8Mbps' service, but have "a fair proportion of customers" still on fixed 512kbps, 1Mbps or 2Mbps services. 16% of net users want a guarantee from their ISP not to restrict access to third party websites while 29% want flat-rate pricing with no usage limits. It is important that ISPs continue to offer broadband packages that are free of usage caps in order to appeal to the small but influential group of early-adopters, who tend to be heavy users of net video, games or digital music.

EU telecoms lose battle to reclaim 3G taxes
Vodafone Group, Deutsche Telekom and other mobile-phone companies lost a bid at Europe's highest court to recoup billions of euros in tax refunds from nations that sold high-speed Internet licenses in 2000. Twenty European countries sold more than $100 billion worth of high-speed third-generation licenses to mobile-phone companies at the peak of the telecommunications boom. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice rejected the companies' claims that the license fees included refundable value-added tax. Companies including Vodafone, Hutchison Whampoa and France Télécom's Orange acquired more than €39 billion, or $52 billion, worth of the 3G licenses from Britain and Austria. Today's appeals against those nations, the first to reach the EU court, set a precedent for the consumption tax. Across Europe, governments sold more than 70 of the licenses. The British government faced rebate claims of about £3.3 billion, or $6.5 billion, according to court documents. Britain raised £22.5 billion from auctioning five licenses and Austria got €832 million from selling to eight companies, according to court documents. In Britain, the claims were made by Vodafone, Hutchison, Orange, Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile mobile-phone unit and O2. Austria faces claims by companies including T-Mobile Austria, Telekom Austria's Mobilkom Austria and 3G Mobile Telecommunications, Hutchison's 3G Austria unit and ONE, which France Télécom and private-equity firm Mid Europa Partners agreed to buy on June 20. The decision may also affect mobile-phone operators, including Telefónica in Spain and Vivendi's mobile-phone unit SFR.

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