Pub fined £8K over WiFi piracy

A pub has been fined £8,000 after a customer used their WiFi hotspot to download pirated content, in what the managing director of The Cloud believes is the first case in the UK.

The pub has not been named, but is a customer of The Cloud and the incident happened this summer.

To say the law covering this area is a grey matter would be an understatement.

Should the Digital Economy Bill be passed, they would be exempt from any piracy measures and classified as a communications service provider, but even under current copyright law Lilian Edwards of Sheffield Law School believes that the pub would "not be responsible in theory" for unauthorised downloads by users.

The Cloud's own legal advisers said:

"Wi-Fi hotspots in public and enterprise environments providing access to the internet to members of the public, free or paid, are public communications services."

Which all goes to make you wonder why it was the pub and not the user doing the downloads that was the subject of the lawsuit - under data retention laws normally providers are required to retain records of users as long as they're a big enough provider for the government to have told them to do so, and that might be the crux of the issue on this occasion.

Carphone appoints new TalkTalk head

The Carphone Warehouse have appointed a new chief executive of their TalkTalk business as they prepare to separate the telco division of their company into a separately listed business.

The as-yet unnamed head was mentioned by current Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone, who will also move aside from that role to become chairman of both companies when the separation happens.

Dunstone said:

"We've found a chief executive, and we have signed the contracts."

The mystery will be resolved "early next year" according to Dunstone.

How would a hung parliament affect broadband rollouts?

At the same session where BT and Virgin Media had a bit of a faceoff over BT's next generation broadband investment last week, the Broadband Stakeholders' Group (BSG) warned over the implications of a hung parliament or a change of government on increased broadband rollouts to 'notspots' and areas that have slower speeds.

While Labour party are driving forward the Digital Economy Bill, the Tories have a very different approach as outlined by BSG head Anthony Walker:

"There is the Labour industrial activism approach, which I call the nuts and bolts ... and the heart of that is that we know there is a problem coming up.

The Conservative approach is very different ... it looks at the market mechanism, looking for a new market entry [and to] grown the value of the market in the hope that the market exceeds the expectations that we expect today and actually delivers more."

The contrasting policies could hinder any additional private investment ahead of the next election.

PlusNet Problems

BT-owned provider PlusNet has apologised to their customers who have been experiencing a raft of network related problems over recent weeks - with a detailed posting on their site summarising the problems customers have been having:

• Slow speed test results, especially when comparing the results across different gateways.
• Poor download speeds from download sites/servers like Akamai & Limelight Networks. This includes access to popular websites such as Apple/iTunes, Amazon, eBay, BBC News and Facebook.
• Lower speeds than expected for lower priority Internet activities like Peer to Peer and binary Usenet.
• 'Page can't be displayed' or DNS errors trying to browse to certain websites or servers, which then seem to work fine seconds/minutes later.
• High latency when gaming (including those on our Pro package).

Apart from that things have been OK!

Seriously, in the same post they outline the activity they have been undertaking to resolve the problems:

• Increased the amount of bandwidth available on our network.
• Rebalanced our network to ensure customers see more consistent speeds when things are busy.
• Refined our traffic management rules to ensure that customers are getting the best possible experience the network can provide at any given time.
• Identified and resolved a problem with congestion on a number of our core network interfaces.
• Identified and resolved a problem causing unintentional packet loss across our traffic management platform.
• Identified a problem with the gateways that is occasionally causing large numbers of customers to be disconnected from the Internet; this has been reported to our hardware vendor for investigation.
• Identified inefficiencies with our DNS platform and subsequently upgraded the platform to run on new software.

Customers are still experiencing slow speeds and performance problems in the evening peak, and the woe was componded by a hardware failure on Friday morning.

Wikipedia blacklists Volvo

Wikipedia has blacklisted Swedish producers of boring cars Volvo after someone used one of the company's connections to post some racist rants on the site.

The rants were posted on the pages about Pakistani cricketers Wasim Akram and Inzamam-ul-Haq (who was famously abused with 'Aloo' chants at a match in Canada once), and the company's IP address was quickly banned from updating the site until December.

One Wikipedia insider said:

"It's one thing when kiddies at home or school do a bit of Wikipedia vandalism, but this is a reputable IT company with people who should know better.

Or perhaps they don't realise IP addresses are tracked and logged in which case they get what they deserve."

Volvo's security department are investigating the incident.

Payment to be demanded from 30K suspected pirates

Solicitors ACS:Law are notorious for working on behalf of copyright holders in trying to get payment out of Internet users whose connections have been used to download pirated content.

In their latest case, they have had approval from the law courts to request the personal details of 30,000 users whose connections have allegedly been used to download approximately 291 movie titles.

They will write to the users demanding a payment of between £300 and £500 to settle or threaten legal action otherwise.

25,000 of the IP Addresses belong to BT customers.

Mininova forced to remove pirated torrents

Dutch torrent sharing site Mininova has removed all torrents enabling users to download pirated content, complying with a recent legal ruling.

While the site hasn't shut down, it might as well have with its 'featured content' now being minimal and unlikely to attract the kind of users that the site previously had.

Vodafone offers free handset broadband. For one day. If you don't use a smartphone.

The Register have rightly accused Vodafone of being cheapskates for their free mobile handset based broadband day last week.

It turns out that it not only do most of their contract customers have unlimited Internet access included in their bundles, but that the PAYG users this is targeted at were only able to use WAP access for free under the terms of the offer - it didn't apply to users of mobile broadband or smartphones:

The devil's in the detail - the cheapskates indeed!

The dual screen laptop

Mashable is covering something I've not seen before - a dual screen laptop:
I'm not sure if I like it or not - I'm favouring it being a bit too weird for me at the moment.

If you want one, you can buy it here.

Virgin and BT clash over next generation rollouts

On Thursday BT and Virgin Media clashed over the former's next generation rollouts - which are in areas already covered by Virgin Media's DOCSIS3 network, which currently goes at speeds of 50Mb.

Speaking at a broadband forum event, BT's public affairs director Tim O'Sullivan said:

"We are working to ensure that the UK is in a position of strength in the world of high-speed broadband with this commitment to financing the installation of next-generation access to broadband."

Virgin's Jon James countered though, suggesting that the people who should be disappointed with BT's plans are BT's own shareholders:

"We already offer high-speed broadband in the areas BT is proposing to move into, and have the capability to introduce speeds in excess of 50Mbit/s for the future as well."

Naturally this wound up O'Sullivan, who found it:

"[...] surprising that anyone would suggest that spending £1.5bn on new fibre in the current climate was 'disappointing'."

O'Sullivan also added that there was "no commercial case" for rolling out the faster network beyond 40% of the population coverage, something backed up by Matt Yardley of Analysys Mason:

"Installing FTTH for two-thirds of the population would cost around £10bn, but to reach the final third it could rise to around £28bn. Similarly, for FTTC it would rise from £2bn at 40 per cent to £5bn for a nationwide rollout."

All good stuff for the headline writers though.

Wikipedia editors leave in droves

Wikipedia apparently had 49,000 editors leave their site in the first three months of 2009, compared with just 4,900 in the same period a year earlier.

While people sill always come and go from such voluntary roles on the web, the figures make stark reading and leads to questions being asked as to why there has been such an exodus.

One editor and an author about a book on the site Andrew Dalby believes it's reached critical mass. Dalby says:

"One question is, is there any new stuff to do on the site? When Wikipedia reaches 3 million articles, how many new articles can there be?"

The Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) has previously recognised the fall in volunteers but did not comment when asked about the research.

Google apologises for Obama gaffe

Throughout much of the week, anyone searching for Michelle Obama on Google was shown a racist image depicting the First Lady as a monkey as one of the top search results.

Google have naturally been receiving much criticism as a result of the image appearing so prominently in their search results.

Firstly they banned the image from their search index, saying it could contain malware, and then when it appeared again indexed from somewhere else they showed the image but displayed an apologetic Google advert above it.

The image has now disappeared from the search results because the blog where it was hosted has taken it down, but Google's handling of the whole incident was clumsy at best - and their lack of media comment about is didn't do them any favours either.

LinkedIn to IPO - but not yet

Business social networking site LinkedIn is likely to go IPO with a public listing at some point in the future, but its not imminent according to site founder Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman said:

"Probably at some point a balance will occur when that's the right thing. That will not occur in the near term."

They had their last round of public funding in 2008, but have not had the need to spend any of it yet.

Half of users oblivious to file sharing on home network

Some research by TalkTalk - who we all know are leading the opposition against the file sharing regulations the government are in the process of introducing - has revealed that half of all their customers who have P2P file sharing activity happening on their home networks are oblivious to it.

They say that this is down to children downloading files without the knowledge of the parent and of unsecured networks being piggybacked, something that they have mentioned before.

Carphone Warehouse-owned TalkTalk's Sylvain Thevenot:

"I think that the principles of the government's policy to disconnect illegal filesharers are wrong because you cannot identify who is actually guilty.

Practically it is unfeasible as well because we would have to go back through a huge number of logs, and even start logging data we don't collect yet."

The government are expecting ISPs and copyright holders to share the costs of any development needed to meet the proposed regulations.

TalkTalk are planning on releasing tools that will enable parental controls of P2P activity.

SendSocial

Since Twitter's launch of OAuth, a number of fascinating applications for the micro blogging site have come out - the latest of which is innovative gift sending service SendSocial.

Twitter users login to the service via authentication against Twitter itself, and can purchase gifts that are sent to other users via 'tweets', with them authenticating the same way to claim their gift and arrange delivery details.

And it's launch just before Christmas is no coincidence!

BT to regain top spot

In their review of the broadband market in the UK, Enders Analysis have stated that they expect BT Retail to regain the largest provider (including business lines) crown of broadband ISPs by 2010, with their recent permission to bundle their services being a key driver to this.

They expect subscriber numbers to look like this up to 2014 (assuming no further consolidation of providers):

[Click on image for a larger version]

They expect 800,000 net additions to the broadband market in 2010 and 19.8m broadband households by 2014.

Enders also called out Tesco's recent announcement about an aggressive play into the market and Virgin Media's LLU service as being key developments to watch over the next few years.

Virgin's filesharing measurement trials

Virgin Media are teaming up with Detica to rollout technology on their network for the measurement and monitoring of file sharing traffic as part of their upcoming music service.

The deep packet inspection (DPI) technology is the same that Detica have been talking to Ofcom about recently, and will be trialled on 40% of the cable company's network.

The DPI system will operate at the core of their network on aggregated traffic and not monitor any individual's usage (in fact it will be anonymised) - and is in place to try and capture what proportion of file sharing traffic is of unauthorised copyrighted traffic.

Virgin Media's broadband executive director Jon James:

"Understanding how consumer behaviour is changing will be an important requirement of Virgin Media's upcoming music offering and, should they become law, the Government's legislative proposals will also require measurement of the level of copyright infringement on ISPs' networks."

What traffic is unauthorised will be based on information provided by the music industry as part of the trial.

As the data is anonymised and aggregated, customers won't be told if their connection is part of the 40% of the network being monitored.

IE hit by bugs

It's not been a good week for the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, with news that two major bugs have hit their web browser - which is struggling to maintain market share against other browsers that are pushing new functionality forward at a pace.

Symantec identified a bug in IE6 (still the most popular browser version out there on the web) and IE7 which could be used by a remote attacker to crash the browser or take the user to a malicious website, and while no exploit is yet out to take advantage of the bug the security firm expects one "in the near future".

See their blog for further information.

The other bug is with how IE - all versions - shows PDF documents, revealing the local full path of the hosted files, opening up avenues of attack for curious hackers looking for sensitive documents.

Microsoft are no doubt beavering away on fixes now.

Thunderbird 3 almost out

Mozilla are nearing the final release of the next major version (v3) of their popular Thunderbird e-mail client software with news that the first release candidate is out.

Version 3 is about a year after it was originally planned, and it's thought that the final release won't be too long after the initial release candidate.

The new version includes a number of features influenced by Gmail, including archiving and improved contacts features.

Which makes you wonder as to why people wouldn't just use Gmail?

Half of consumers would pay for online news

As we know, Rupert Murdoch plans to withdraw free news content and start charging for it online.

Contradicting much earlier research, a study from the Boston Consulting Group suggests that as many as 48% of UK and US consumers would be willing to pay a few pounds a month for online news.

The average UK consumer - only 12% of which pay anything for online news content at the moment - would pay around £2.40 per month for their news content, a figure much lower than the Australian media mogul would like.

Researcher John Rose:

"The good news is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, consumers are willing to pay for meaningful content.

The bad news is that they are not willing to pay much."

Quite.

What does the Universal Service Commitment mean?

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards and Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms got a hard time in front of a government select committee this week, with Timms in particular being pressed on what the Universal Service Commitment (USC) as outlined in the Digital Britain report actually means in practice.

ThinkBroadband picks up the story:

The closest we got seems to be that virtually all households will get a line capable of 2Mbps at some point during the day. In other words it is the connection speed, not the speed you will see from a download in the evening. The danger here, particularly with the bidding process, is that the lowest cost bidder who offers on paper a good solution might be making the cost savings by using higher contention and thus the performance when the kids are home from school and people are not at work is so bad that even basic video streaming may not work. The committee was informed that the definition of the USC will be done by the Network Design Procurement Group, with the staff of this being appointed early in the New Year. This means the time frame to define the service, and accept bids and actually start work will be very tight if the deadline of 2012 for all those without broadband now to have a USC meeting service will be met.

It was also confirmed that the government's 50p (per telephone line) broadband tax would also be levied on Virgin Media cable connections.

Broadband tax to be levied on each line

Leaked government documents have revealed that the proposed broadband tax of £6 per year per landline is indeed set to be levied on every landline - so homes with a fixed line, a fax and a DSL based broadband connection would pay three times. The documents also reveal that the tax is subject to VAT - taking the cost to as much as £21.15 per year in such cases.

The tax, which is set to be introduced in a finance bill next year, will hit the 1.7m households with more than one phone line hardest.

Naturally the ISPs are not best pleased at the revelations. Saying that it "added insult to injury for consumers", a Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk) spokesman added:

"The original 50p a month tax is regressive and unfair. On top of all this now the Treasury will steal yet more off homes in VAT."

Sky said:

"This is a question of basic fairness. A telephone licence fee will penalise the less well-off so that faster, premium-priced broadband services are available to an unknown number of people in rural areas who both want and can afford them. This is not a good basis for a universal tax."

The government said that they do not comment on leaked documents, but the devil's clearly in the detail on this one.

Germans trying to declare Google Analytics illegal

Several government officials in Germany are trying to make Google's website usage tracking package Google Analytics illegal - and to put in place penalties of up to €50,000 for any sites using it.

Their beef is with the amount of data that Google collects on end users, with them trying to force sites to use a local open source alternative instead.

Naturally, if anything comes of it, Google will fight the case as strongly as they normally do.

Mobile broadband: How slow can you go?

We all know the issues with web based speedtests, but the lower the speed is the more reliable they often are.

A price comparison site has analysed 8,700 tests using their speedtest tool by mobile broadband users, and found that the average throughput is just 0.87Mb - well short of the 'up to' 3.6Mb or 7.2mb that providers tend to advertise.

In fact just 0.5% of users got speeds over 3Mb.

OFT not concerned by Google dominance

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have said that they will not challenge Google over their dominance of the search engine sector - of which they are said to have over 92% market share in the UK.

The OFT said that there was no reason for them to challenge Google's market dominance, emphasising their belief that they have achieved their market share legitimately.

OFT spokesman John Fingleton:

"Where a company has achieved that position by superior innovation, foresight and better targeting of customers, we're very wary of intervening.

Thus far, while lots of people have talked to us about harm to competitors, nobody has articulated to us harm to customers or related companies in this market.

Nobody has brought us a good, convincing case around this type of issues. We see a lot of customers benefit from what's happening in this marketplace from very high innovation – it's good for the British economy. We don't want to send a negative signal about that."

The news will be a blow to Microsoft, who are trying to get a hold for their Bing search engine in the UK.

T-Orange refuse to relinquish mobile spectrum

When the UK divisions of T-Mobile and Orange announced their intentions to merge, it was hoped that one of the results (should the merger go through) would be for some of the joint company's spectrum ownership to be freed up for competing mobile broadband services.

Now it looks like, to the disappointment of many, that they have no intention to free up any of their spectrum - and the new company would have control of 37% of the market and over half of all spectrum - unless they are made to do so by Ofcom, and it's questionable how likely that is given that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is unlikely to investigate the proposed merger.

The deal isn't likely to go through ahead of the next election anyway, when the landscape may yet significantly change.

Virgin upgrades firewall infrastructure

Virgin Media have upgraded their internal firewall infrastructure, enabling their teams to better service external customers.

The new technology is called Tuffin SecureTrack and enables them to streamline their IT infrastructure.

The company's corporate networks manager Colin Miles said:

"The organisation had a disparate infrastructure estate which threw up many problems in terms of firewall rules and stability.

In addition, some of the platforms were being badly managed due to lack of skill, while others were getting towards end-of-life and end-of support.

We needed to get these firewalls running and able to pass traffic because the problems were having a direct impact on our external customers. Even though it's an internal service, there's a requirement for real-time updates for the team to service external customers."

The upgraded infrastructure has also enabled them to take a more proactive stance towards IT security management than before.

41% steal data from previous jobs

It's enough to make the Information Commissioner shudder with horror.

A survey has identified that as many as 4 out of 10 people working in the financial industry in the UK and the US have confessed to taking sensitive company data from one job to another.

Customer and contact data was the most thieved, with business plans and proposals coming next according to the survey by security company Cyber-Ark.

85% of respondents were very aware this is illegal behaviour but still chose to do it.

Woman loses benefits after posting pictures on Facebook

Just a day after a man was arrested for refusing to post something on Twitter, another person has suffered the pitfalls of social media.

A 29-year-old Canadian woman has lost her sickness benefits for posting some pictures on Facebook of her enjoying herself. The woman was signed off work with depression, and the conclusion is that someone with depression cannot be seen enjoying themselves clearly.

The pictures were of Natalie Blanchard, an IBM employee, at a party with male strippers the Chippendales and her insurance company concluded that therefore she can't be suffering depression.

With insurance companies now trawling Facebook looking to see what claimants are up to, many will raise a number of questions about the extension of the surveillance society.

Fasthosts in e-mail outage

Web hosting firm Fasthosts have been known for outages in the past, and history is repeating with a period of instability to their e-mail service compounding in a day long outage yesterday.

Some customers reported that the problems started as early as Monday night and also affected their support portal, which is contradicted by the company's statement:

"We did experience performance issues with our email platform today which resulted in intermittent access to the email service for some of our customers for which we apologise.

The full service was restored as quickly as possible today and we thank our customers for their patience and understanding. Customers can also rest assured that no emails have been lost due to this service interruption - all emails were queued and delivered at the earliest opportunity."

Their helpdesk was also reported as being uncontactable, presumably due to inbound call volumes.

Europe issues piracy action warning

The European Union (EU) has issued a warning to any countries and ISPs looking to take action against pirates by disconnecting their broadband service without a court order having been gained first, as Spain are looking into at the moment.

EU Commissioner Vivane Reding said:

"Spanish measures that allow for the disruption of Internet access without a fair hearing before a judge, are certain to clash with the European Union."

The EU recently implemented some safeguards to govern any such schemes across the continent.

Opera closes Chinese loophole

The Norwegian makers of the Opera web browser have released a new version of the mobile version in China to close a loophole which meant that usage of it avoided the country's notorious Internet filters aka the Great Firewall of China.

As a result users can now no longer access sites like Facebook.

When questioned by the BBC, the company put a PR spin on it:

"The difference between the Chinese and the international version is that the former connects to compression servers within China.....benefits are higher speed, lower costs and an overall improved mobile web browsing experience."

But refused to discuss the "background for this decision".

Mobile providers unable to comply with piracy regulations

The fallout from the announcement of the government's Digital Economy Bill being published continues.

Mobile broadband providers have advised that they will be unable to comply with the Bill when it comes into force as they don't have the end user tracing capability, and that's not to mention the problem of PAYG mobile broadband dongles, which are usually not registered to a person.

Given that the problem of piracy is thought to happen less on mobile broadband connections than fixed line ones, the mobile players aren't expecting the laws to apply to them from day 1 - and are set to take advantage of the provisions in the Bill looking for joint ISP & rights holder funding of the enforcement process if they do need to develop further subscriber recognition capability.

Of the providers asked for further comment by ZDNet, only Vodafone responded:

"If Vodafone comes into scope (i.e. there are sufficient notifications to merit inclusion) then anonymised customer data will have to be passed on."

Which kinda states the obvious!

UK added 2m Facebook users in October

The UK added 1.98m users in October alone on Facebook, as the social networking site hit 326m active users worldwide in the month.

According to Inside Facebook, the UK now has the fourth largest penetration across the continent (behind the Scandinavian countries) but the largest overall user base at 22.6m users - or 36% of the country's population:

What it doesn't do is tell you what proportion of these users are 'active', which seems to be a closely guarded secret in Facebook land. If it's anything like e-mail, around 2/3 of users will drop away over time.

Man arrested for not using Twitter

Not using Twitter has now become an arrestable offence, with news that a record executive in New York has been arrested for refusing to send a tweet.

A teenage sensation was making a public appearance, with the executive asked to tweet a message to calm the baying teenage girl masses who showed up. When he refused to do so he was arrested on charges of obstruction.

YouTube coverage of the melee can be found below:



Definitely the first I've heard of this one!

eBay outage

eBay are looking at compensating sellers after they experienced a site crash over the weekend.

The company confirmed that the problems were capacity related as a surge of Christmas shoppers flocked towards the auction site causing an outage for several hours from around 7pm on Saturday night.

They said on their blog:

"The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season.

eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 per cent more than at this time a year ago."

Marketplace president Lorrie Norrington added:

"Our immediate priority is to resolve this issue. Once that is achieved, rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately.

In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits for affected listings."

Much of the demand is being attributed to people shopping online in these credit crunch times, although given the time of the outage maybe it was just people looking for Jedward merchandise?

TalkTalk's Digital Economy manifesto

As we all know, TalkTalk have been leading the ISP opposition to moves that will force them to take action against file sharers of copyrighted content, and in response to last week's publishing of the Digital Economy bill they are on the PR offensive again.

They have posted a manifesto which states:

1. Unless we are served with a court order we will not surrender your details to rights holders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and will maintain it.
2. We will continue to fight this draconian legislation as it makes it way through Parliament.
3. If we are instructed to disconnect your account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rights holders we'll see them in court.

The manifesto is an extension of their 'Don't Disconnect Us' campaign.

iPhone worm identified

For the second time in quick succession, Finnish security vendor F-Secure has found a worm that affects jailbroken iPhones.

The vulnerability affects users with SSH installed who have not changed their default password, and seems to be designed to steal information from the devices.

More information can be found on their blog here.

Businesses warned of cloud computing risk

If you go with cloud computing solutions to outsource key services (such as e-mail) as a business, you need to make these decisions with your eyes open - as has been emphasised by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

The agency - which is charged with promoting best practice in the IT industry across the continent - has published a checklist of things for companies to consider and warned of some of the risks.

Primarily they warned of lock in to such services, with a spokesman saying:

"There is very little in the way of tools and standards for exporting data from one provider to another.

That's one of the biggest risks."

They went on to also warn of data protection compliance and ensuring that laws such as RIPA are followed when doing such outsourcing.

The other risk of course is down to the sheer scale of some of the services - if your users have multiple GB inboxes, you can't migrate their mail away to other services easily ... the physical storage technology and ability to read & write files on that scale just doesn't exist.

Spammer jailed for four years

Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky - aka The Godfather of spam - has been jailed for four years for a share manipulation scheme that netted him USD$2.7m in 2005.

His 'pump and dump' stock fraud scheme was run through an army of botnetted PCs, with millions of messages a day being sent through innocent user's PCs.

Some of Ralsy's associates were also imprisoned.

Such schemes are less common now thanks to a crackdown from the SEC and due to the credit crunch.

The Spamhaus listing for Ralsky can be found here.

Google opens the chequebook again

Google have agreed a deal to buy advertising start up Teracent for an undisclosed sum as they continue anew their purchases in the technology sector.

Teracent have developed technology that makes us of complex algorithms to show customised display ads on websites and it will sit well alongside Google's other acquisitions in the sector such as DoubleClick.

Teracent has a partnership with Yahoo! to deliver mobile advertising, and it's currently unclear how that will be affected by the purchase.

Swedish music sales boosted in wake of Pirate Bay closure

Music sales in Sweden are up 18% (well, revenues from them are) in the wake of the closure of torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay and with the popularity of legal services such as Spotify.

Naturally the music industry are being bullish about the news, with the IFPI's John Kennedy saying:

"The increase in sales in Sweden, set against the backdrop of innovative new digital services and tighter copyright laws, is encouraging. It is too early to say if Sweden has permanently turned a corner, but we hope that users there will permanently switch from unlicensed filesharing networks that give nothing back to the music community to great value legal services whose operators recognise continuous investment is needed to discover and promote the talent of tomorrow."

Whether similar results are being seen elsewhere is currently not known.

EC extends Oracle's Sun deadline

The European Commission (EC) has extended their deadline for approving the proposed USD$7.4bn purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle from January 19 to the 27th of the same month after Oracle asked for more time to address antitrust issues.

The main issues they have are over what the deal would mean for Sun-owned MySQL, with the Commission having voiced concerns which came out in a leaked document seen by Bloomberg:

"Oracle has strong incentives to adopt a commercial and technology strategy for MySQL which prevents it from cannibalizing Oracle’s significant revenues from proprietary offerings."

Many firmly believe that only by Sun selling off MySQL will the deal be allowed to go ahead.

Microsoft bites on Murdoch bait

Microsoft are looking to pay some content owners to remove their sites from Google search and list them on their Bing search engine instead, in what will be music to the ears of Rupert Murdoch - who has stated that he will likely remove his content from Google.

The move is being widely recognised as part of the ongoing war between the two tech giants, with industry commentators seeming being split between thinking it's a crazy move and Microsoft "asking the right questions".

Last week an eccentric American billionaire offered the top 1,000 sites in search rankings USD$1m to de-list from Google.

eBay completes $2.75bn Skype sale

With the barrier of a lawsuit from the founders removed, eBay have completed the USD$2.75bn sale of Internet telephony service Skype to a group of investors including the founders who take a minority stake in the new business.

eBay retain around 30% of Skype as a result of the deal going through.

Windows 8 three years away?

Having just released Windows 7, some are starting to ponder towards what is next for Microsoft's Operating System (OS).

While the obvious answer would be Windows 8, some slides that came out from the company this week suggest that the next major release of the OS is set for 2012 and that it's code name is indeed Windows 8.

Microsoft said little when asked about the slides by CNet.