BitTorrent has made deals with Paramount, MTV Networks, 20th Century Fox, and smaller studios to permit its users to purchase or rent movies and buy TV shows when the new video service begins in February 2007. The company signed a similar agreement with Warner Brothers earlier this year. Initially, customers will be able to play [...]

Novell stopped participating in the Hula open source e-mail and calendaring software project it began in February 2005. According to Novell representative Peter Teichman, business customers already had e-mail and calendaring services in place. The company is thus shifting its resources to other projects, asking members of the Hula community to take over its previous [...]

As part of its legal defense in a lawsuit over its book-scanning project, Google has sought information from other companies about similar projects. The lawsuit was brought by a group of publishers and the Authors Guild, alleging that Google violates their copyrights when it scans protected books. Amazon.com offers shoppers previews of books they are [...]

Google Answers, a service that lets users submit questions that researchers answer for a fee, will end this week. The service will no longer accept questions, although it will permit new answers to questions until the end of the year. The archive of questions and answers will continue to be available online for browsing. PCWorld, [...]

Security company Scanit blames the vulnerability of sensitive data sent using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) on inadequate network security, leaving 7 of 10 calls open to wiretapping. Scanit’s audit of data transfer at call centers and service providers pinpointed the main cause–assumptions that VoIP vendors on the network had already installed security measures. According [...]

Juniper Research estimates that the global mobile entertainment market is currently worth $17 billion and will grow to $47 billion by 2009 and $77 billion by 2011. The company predicts European and Asia Pacific countries will come to dominate the global market for mobile entertainment. Today, mobile music is the largest sector, followed by “infotainment,” [...]

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that although laptop-using students have more flexibility in when and where they study and spend more time on assignments than students who visit computer labs, their academic work shows no measurable improvement. Both groups of students get approximately the same grades. The researchers discovered that the laptop users spent [...]

The U.S. Copyright Office granted narrow, three-year exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that permit circumvention of access-control technologies on electronic media if specific conditions are met. Under one exemption, professors of film and media studies can circumvent the access-control technology of DVDs in their libraries to use film clips in class. Another [...]

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in mid-November that unsolicited e-mails advertising cruise vacations were permitted under the federal antispam law called the CAN-SPAM Act, even though they included a false Internet address and a nonworking “From” address. In the case involving antispam activist Mark Mumma of Oklahoma, the three-judge panel ruled that the [...]

Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have developed software that they hope will allow Internet users in nations that practice censorship to have full access to the Web. Available as of December 1, the software, called psiphon, operates using social networking principles. Users in countries without censorship will download the application, [...]