Tim Conneally

A simple bug with a drop-down menu on PayPal has been preventing international transactions for over twelve days, and users are understandably upset.

"One Time Purchases" between countries remains functional, however, when on the "Subscription Checkout Page," PayPal customers cannot choose their country when entering credit card information during checkout.

The latest betas of Adobe's Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, and Fireworks tools are now available for free download. But unless you already own CS3, they'll only give you a brief peek at the product, before the 48-hour self-destruct timer goes off.

Registered owners of Creative Suite 3, however, will be allowed to use these betas until the release of CS4, which currently has no release date. However, unless Adobe has some kind of registration system built into those betas, they may need to be installed on production systems alongside CS3.

The Web 2.0 concept has impacted the creative sector yet again with Crowdspring, a marketplace for graphic design, illustration, and art professionals.

Users of the site can be categorized into "Buyers" and "Creatives," and the former group posts projects that they need to have completed, and how much they will pay for the results. Once posted, the "Creatives" can then see what is needed, and work on providing it. From there, the buyer can choose from the submissions which product best suits his needs, and pay the creator the advertised sum.

A member of Internet piracy group Apocalypse Production Crew (APC) under the handle Dextro (nee Barry Gitarts) has been found guilty of piracy, and now faces criminal charges of up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and more.

Gitarts, 25, was convicted of "conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement" and found guilty by a jury in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia yesterday for his 2003-2004 participation in a release group that provided pirated content on the Internet.

Now-defunct movie sharing sites Cinematube.net and Showstash.com were ordered by Los Angeles judges to pay $1.375 million and $2.7 million, respectively, to the MPAA for linking to movie downloads.

Like the $110 million case against TorrentSpy.com, Showstash and Cinematube were cited for "actively searching for, identifying, collecting, organizing, indexing, and posting on their websites" links to pirated copies of Hollywood films and TV shows.

What began as paid Wiki hosting service JotSpot, was bought by Google in 2006 and re-launched a year and a half later as Google Sites. Finally, this service is open to the public, not just subscribers.

Google Sites is an addition to the company's suite of online tools, and as such, is intended to be used in tandem with them.

The beta period for Nokia's navigation software has ended, and now the company's answer to Google Maps is available to the public.

Nokia Maps 2.0 beta saw over 400,000 downloads, and the company is expected to ship 35 million GPS-enabled handsets this year. With the sales of PNDs dramatically dropping off, analysts are expecting cellular handset navigation systems to dominate the market in the next two years.

Orb Networks, who produce remote PC access/place shifting software naturally called Orb, have announced a partnership with BitTorrent which will bundle the filesharing client into the free Orb PC application.

Since Orb makes users' PCs accessible through most Wi-Fi connected devices equipped with a browser, the new partnership looks to expand the BitTorrent experience. Perhaps in doing this, it will also expand the consideration given to the protocol by content providers.

Details have emerged about the Communications Data Bill currently in pre-legislation in the UK. Home Office representatives have declined to address whether passage of this bill will mean keeping a central database of all e-mails and texts sent, calls made, and Web pages viewed.

More details have emerged about the Communications Data Bill currently in pre-legislation in the UK, leading many to speculate that the British government is assembling the means to spy on its citizens.

Redlasso, a service that syndicates live television and radio and which also allows users to create their own clips from footage to embed in their own sites, has received a cease-and-desist order from three major TV networks.

Fox, CBS, and NBC have jointly sent Redlasso a written demand giving it until May 29th to shape up or get sued for, among other things, unfair competition, false designation of origin, and trademark infringement. The networks charge that copyright law has been violated because the service syndicates video and audio material that neither belongs to it, nor that it has been given permission to use.

Though rumors began in 2006, actual news of Time Warner separating its cable division into a standalone company came in late April of this year. Today, the "complete legal and structural separation" of the two entities was announced.

In spinning off Time Warner Cable, parent Time Warner stands to gain $9.25 billion of a total $10.9 billion in shareholder dividends. For those counting, that means the media conglomerate holds 85.2% of the cable company's common stock.

In an environment predicated upon all users updating as frequently as possible, social microblog Twitter has revealed its hamartia: that it can absolutely not sustain downtime.

Granted, the service experienced numerous outages in the course of two weeks -- to say nothing of the past few months -- but in combing through the Twitter support forum under the heading "May 20: Twitter Downtime," it becomes apparent that every time the site experiences a service disruption, users are left stranded.

Like Nintendo doling out classic games on the Wii Virtual Console, CBS Home Entertainment has opened up its vault and pulled out some classic shows to be viewed freely on CBS.com and on its partnering CBS Audience Network sites.

Starting today, clips and full episodes of The Love Boat, Beverly Hills 90210, Twin Peaks, Family Ties, and Perry Mason will be available on over 300 participating CBS Audience Network sites. Partners include the recently-acquired CNET and its related subsidiaries, AOL, Microsoft, Comcast, Joost, Sling Media, Veoh, and Bebo.

Testing in public beta, BBC's Sound Index determines a music artist's popularity based on what people are blogging about, listening to, watching, and downloading, with updates every six hours.

The Sound Index crawlers comb through data from partner sites Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google, and YouTube, tallying the most blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads, profile views, and search queries associated with an artist, and ranking them among the top 1,000 most popular.

EA DICE announced early this year that it would be releasing a free, ad-subsidized version of its Battlefield franchise by summer. Sign-ups for the beta of this upcoming game have opened.

Battlefield: Heroes has drawn a lot of comparison to Team Fortress, taking what would otherwise be a serious game, and turning up the cartoon factor. The result is like if Pixar did a version of "The Longest Day." The story is ridiculous, and the characters are over-the-top.