Author: Duncan Geere
Isle of Man gets free, legal, P2P downloads
Residents of the Isle of Man, take note. You may soon be able to download all the music you like, from wherever you want, but you’re going to have to pay a little extra on top of your broadband bill for it. The Manx government wants to enforce a blanket music consumption license, tied to broadband bills.
“At the end of the day, we are not going to stop piracy, so let’s embrace it,” says the remarkably sensible Inward Investment Minister, Ron Berry. Surprisingly, the BPI endorses the move as well, with head honcho Geoff Taylor saying: “If ISPs take the position advocated in the Isle of Man, we’d be in an enormously better position.”
Helphound.com – local business review site, plus dispute resolution
I know what you’re thinking, yet another business review site. On the face of it, that’s true – at first glance there’s nothing separating Helphound from Yell, WeLoveLocal or TouchLocal. Look closer, however, and you’ll find plenty to like.
Much like the aforementioned sites, Helphound provides a community centered around reviewing organizations and businesses. Helphound’s differentiating factor, though, is a dispute resolution mechanic, where businesses can dispute a bad review, allowing them to remove it temporarily from the site and try to engage the customer instead. If they fail, the review goes straight back up.
Another Xpress Music phone from Nokia – the 5730, with QWERTY keyboard!
Although I’m violently opposed to Comes with Music’s DRM, sometimes nasty things come in nice packages. This is the Nokia 5730 Xpress Music, straight outta Russia. It’s packing an awesome dot-matrix-effect QWERTY keyboard, 2″ screen, 1,000mAh battery, GPS, 128MB of RAM and USB/Bluetooth connectivity.
Interestingly it doesn’t have 3G – just EDGE – so downloading music on the device won’t be fun. It’ll be showing up in European markets this April for €220 (£204). I’m afraid we’ve not got anything more specific on the release date. If you can uninstall the “Comes with Music” software, and don’t need 3G, then this isn’t too bad a phone.
(via Engadget)
Related posts: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic coming very soon, in time for Christmas perhaps? | Nokia 5800 ‘Tube’ finally touches down in the UK
Spammers take advantage of Obama's inauguration
Later today, Barack Hussein Obama will be inaugurated as President of the United States, and thousands of spammers are using it an opportunity to.. well… do what they do best. Emails are circulating with subjects like “Barack Obama refused to be president of the USA” complete with links to phishing sites and viruses. Symantec warns of one in particular called W32.waledac.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened – the people who run these spam networks are well in-tune with current events and often use major holidays and other big world events as social engineering to get people to click links that they might normally be wise to. So be careful, you hear?
Symantec’s Warning (via TechRadar)
Related posts: Stupid spammers attempt to fool Brits with “Postcode Lottery” win | Opinion: Judgements against spammers are a waste of time, try educating users instead
Belkin is 'extremely sorry' for buying good reviews on Amazon
Belkin’s slapping its own wrists, after The Daily Background caught them offering 65 cents for every good review posted on Amazon.com, and asked participants to “Mark any other negative reviews as not helpful”. Rather shady, no? Well, it turns out that Belkin’s upper management agree, and have issued a full apology.
The upper echelons claim not to have been aware of the tactic, which was instigated by one Michael Bayard, a Business Development Representative at Belkin. All the requests are now down, and any reviews posted have been removed. Still, I suspect Mr Bayard is now either out of a job, or keeping his head way down.
Belkin’s apology (via Geek.com)
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DEADLY GADGETS: Sniper-rifle mounted iPod dock
We’ve seen deadly iPod accessories before, but this is the first iPod accessory I’ve seen for killing people that aren’t you. It’s a handy iPod Touch mount for your sniper rifle. What do you mean you don’t have a sniper rifle?
On the App Store, there’s some matching ballistics software, called Bullet Flight. Though if you live in Washington DC, I wouldn’t recommend buying it until tomorrow, unless you want a visit from the FBI. You can choose to correct for distance, wind direction, elevation and temperature. No coriolis effect, sadly.
In the meantime, it gets boring on a rooftop for hours on end – so what would be on a sniper’s playlist? I’ve started making a Spotify playlist here. Let me know your suggestions in the comments.
(via the Firearm Blog)
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Denon introduces the DN-S3700 CD Deck
Although Pioneer’s CDJ-1000MK3s are the standard CD player in every nightclub across the UK, Denon produces a range of DJ-standard CD players, too. They’ve just announced a new iteration, too – the DN-S3700. It’s got a rotating 9″ platter on the top with vinyl emulation, so if you can’t mix CDs with the buttons, then you can do it using the platter.
Additional features include USB and MIDI control, internal USB sound card, five built-in effects, and loop functionality, as well as your standard pitch/speed adjust and slot-loader. It certainly competes with the CDJ-1000 on features, but it lacks a lot of the style of Pioneer’s rival player – the DN-S3700 is covered with garish buttons and flashing lights. It doesn’t compete much on price either, costing £900 new, compared to £770 for the Pioneer. I’d love to give it a spin and see how it compares when actually ‘in the mix’. You can buy it ‘soon’ from from HTFR.
Denon (via Akihabaranews)
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Microsoft to announce MobileMe competitor
Next month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft will be announcing three new web services, which will rival Apple’s MobileMe ‘cloud’ services. First in the list is “SkyMarket”, which we’ve posted about before.
Then there’s “SkyBox”, which will allow syncing of data into the cloud. There’ll be automatic backup and restore services, remote access and management of phone data and easy communication and sharing with others. There’ll be syncing of contacts, email/SMS, calendar items and pictures into the cloud. Most interestingly, Microsoft could be planning to offer this to non-Windows-Mobile phones.
Lastly, there’s “SkyLine”, which will be the enterprise version of SkyBox, targeted at small businesses. They’ll be able to setup their phones with Microsoft’s Exchange hosting with their own domain names. I should note that all these are codenames, so it’s highly likely that they’ll be called Windows Live Somethingorother when they finally get announced.
(via Neowin)
Related posts: Microsoft to launch “Skymarket” for Windows Mobile 7 | Ballmer: Zune to show up on Windows Mobile, Android/Apple bashing
The iDAPT modular charging unit saves you a wiry mess
I’m filing this one under ‘gadgets I actually want’. I see a lot of gadgets every day and, if I’m honest, I’m not actually that bothered about owning most personally. The iDAPT, on the other hand, is definitely on that list. It’s a little box that sits on your desk and lets you plug stuff in standing up, and it’ll charge them. No more wires, chargers, or lost gadgets to contend with.
Sure, it’s not perfect – there’s no Zune adapter, and pink isn’t exactly my colour (it’s available in other colours too, thank god) but it’ll charge almost everything you can think of – BlackBerry, Nokia, iPod, PSP and TomTom, among others. The full list is on the manufacturer’s website. It’s available now, and set you back just £35. Bargainous.
Amazon (via ShinyShiny)
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Pioneer introduces BDP-LX91 Blu-ray player
Pioneer is launching another Blu-Ray player, called the BDP-LX91. The company is referring to it as its ‘flagship’ player, and for good reason – it’s got a freshly-developed 16-bit video engine which will perform decoding, conversion, scaling and other adjustments at a rapid pace, as well as upscaling DVD content to 1080p.
As well as lovely video, the player delivers crisp audio with 7.1 channel Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding and bit stream output. There’s dual HDMI outputs, too, and it’s been certified as sounding really rather good by none other than legendary Beatles producer George Martin’s AIR studios.
This player’s available now, but it’ll set you back £1,700. Ouch. Still, it’s a damn fine machine, and if you’re even considering it, then you won’t bat an eyelid at that price.
Pioneer BDP-LX91
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