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Literally millions of unauthorized documents -- some of them personal, easily too many of them classified -- have made their way freely through P2P networks, many of them without any malicious user whatsoever even requesting or copying them. Sometimes, literally, they just show up. If the problem isn't P2P itself but the people using it, then shouldn't the users of P2P services be given warnings? That's the question being tackled by the US House of Representatives today.

H.R. 1319 or "The Informed P2P User Act" was heard today by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The bill seeks to curb the inadvertent disclosure of tax information, health records, and confidential or personal documents over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

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It's like the golden age of radio for the Internet generation. The same company that in 1927 formed a nationwide network from 16 affiliate radio stations announced it has spun off the single largest online radio service to date. CBS has formed a new business unit called the CBS Interactive Music Group, which rounds up more than 100 sites and 400 stations and combines them with AOL Radio, Yahoo LaunchCast, and Last.fm under a single governing body.

CBS says that in March, CBS Radio had over 6.5 million listeners who streamed a combined 83 million hours worth of audio. Taken alone, it sounds like a massive number, but when compared to the consumption of audio through sites such as Pandora and Jango, the grandiosity promptly dissolves. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, cbsradio.com enjoyed only 97,150 unique visitors in March while radio.aol.com only had 41,108.

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Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit from Fileforum now.

Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit from Fileforum now.

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Just three months after rolling out Kindle 2.0, Amazon's hosting an event in New York on Wednesday, during which it's expected to preview another upgrade -- one with a bigger screen, PDF support, and annotation capability. The unit will be tested this fall at various universities.

An assortment of magazine and newspaper publishers are also invited to the event, hinting that a change in the relationship between those content providers and Kindle's no-ads-no-pricing-control philosophy may be at hand.

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The first release candidate of Windows 7 has been posted for download, and will remain available until the end of July. Windows 7 RC is a free download as part of the Customer Preview Program, and will expire on June 1, 2010 (at which time you should be running the final release).

Microsoft suggests a system with a 1GHz processor or faster DirectX 9-enabled graphics processor with WDDM 1.0+, 1 GB RAM and 16GB of storage for a 32-bit installation, or 2 GB RAM and 20GB of storage for 64-bit. Both the 32- and 64-bit versions are available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

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NextGov has a depressing little item from the Associated Press concerning a former government contractor who's going to jail for a year and a half for stealing at least 83 laptops from his employer and fencing at least some of them on Craigslist. It's a mighty light sentence for Darryl Lyles considering he stole from us taxpayers; it's even worse when you hear what effects his actions had on his co-workers. Sorry stuff.

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Ever since the command-line tool code-named Monad escaped by the skin of its fingernails from Microsoft's laboratories in 2006, there has been debate and dispute over whether the company has finally, once and for all, replaced DOS. Since that time, we've seen the arrival of an entirely new generation of Windows users who believe "DOS" is an acronym for "denial of service," and who are baffled as to the reasons why anyone would want to command or control an operating system using text.

It isn't so much that text or command-line syntax is the "old" way of working and that Microsoft Management Console is the "new" way. As Microsoft discovered, to the delight of some in its employ and the dismay of others, using the command line as the fundamental basis for Exchange Server improved its usability and efficiency immensely. The graphical environment simply does not translate well -- or to be fairer, not effectively -- to the task of administration.

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On the Sprint Nextel earnings call Monday, CEO Dan Hesse said that attractive handset offerings are a hugely important factor in getting ordinary customers to stick with his company. A survey out late last week from IDC gives a clearer picture of what that means for the providers themselves. Hint: Think smartphones, try not to think about the economy, and don't expect leadership from the bigs.

According to Ryan Reith, a senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone sales may account for fully half of all handset sales for the biggest mobile providers such as Sprint Nextel. Smartphone sales climbed 4% year-to-year even while overall handset sales dropped a nasty 15.8%.

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They're clotting: Sprint Nextel's Q1 '09 earnings report reported a loss per share of 21 cents in its latest report released Monday, but the long struggle back from consumer service perdition seems to be paying off as subscriber losses diminished remarkably for the Kansas-based mobile provider.

The company reports a net loss of $594 million, which compares year-over-year to a loss of $505 million. It's got a cash balance of $4.5 billion and total liquidity of $5.9 billion -- not bad, points out CEO Dan Hesse, considering the economy, especially since the company just paid off all its 2009 debt maturities. Sprint generated $796 million in free cash flow during the quarter.

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In the boldest statement yet from European government leaders on the need for globalization of Internet authority, Commissioner Viviane Reding called specifically upon President Obama to allow the US' oversight of the world's domain name authority to lapse after this September, but then to allow the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to become a fully privatized entity. Such an entity, the Commissioner said, would be answerable mainly to the global community of users, represented -- as she foresees it -- by an international tribunal.

"To continue reaping the benefits of the online world, the Internet must evolve on a solid and democratic base," stated Comm. Reding in her weekly address (PDF of full transcript available here). "ICANN is a private not-for profit corporation established in California. Since it was created more than 10 years ago, ICANN has been working under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. At the moment, the US government is the only body exercising some oversight over ICANN. I believe that the US, so far, done this in a reasonable manner. However, I also believe that the Clinton administration's decision to progressively privatize the internet's domain name and addressing system is the right one. In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an Internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world."

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The mobile enterprise sector has got its newest supergroup. Today, HP and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion announced their alliance and that their first collaborative efforts are ready to be shown to the public: HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, and HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

CloudPrint is a product of HP Labs, which, in short, is a cloud-based print server. It allows Internet-connected mobile devices to print e-mail attachments, Web pages, photos, and documents, and has been in various stages of development since 2007. Through its partnership with RIM, HP will make the service available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers.

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NPD's smartphone market research ranked Research in Motion's BlackBerry Curve (8300 series) as the best-selling smartphone for the first quarter of 2009. The device outsold Apple's iPhone 3G, thanks in part to its equal availability on all four major United States carriers and aggressive promotion from the Canadian smartphone company.

RIM has also been careful to offer exclusive devices to each carrier, such as the Verizon-exclusive BlackBerry Storm, which was also the third place best seller in the first quarter of the year, according to NPD. T-Mobile's exclusive BlackBerry, the Curve 8900, will be showing up on AT&T over the summer, the phone company said this weekend.

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American television programming is controlled by approximately ten major companies (give or take a few depending on the interpretation of "major") which include: Time Warner, News Corp., GE, CBS, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst, NBC Universal, Scripps, and Liberty Media. These companies are as deeply intertwined as their histories are long.

John Malone's Liberty Media is responsible for the networks under the Starz Entertainment and QVC brands, and has a controlling stake in the United States' largest satellite television provider DirecTV. Liberty Media holds a 48% stake in the US' largest satellite television provider, which it obtained through a stock swap with News Corp, in which Liberty sold back its shares of News Corp. in exchange for News Corp.'s shares of The DirecTV Group.

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Since Microsoft's acquisition of SoftGrid application virtualization two years ago, the company's engineers have known that this technology could present an attractive and even preferable shortcut to the perennial problem of downward compatibility. If you set aside the problem of affordability for a moment, the other key reason businesses remain hesitant to adopt Windows Vista at present is because of the uncertainty that existing business applications will be seamlessly portable into the new environment.

This is much more of a problem for businesses than consumers, although a lot of the excitement around what Microsoft's calling "XP mode" in Windows 7 (whose first and probably only Release Candidate should be available to the general public tomorrow) came from everyday users who perceived the company's move as a nod toward the efficiencies of the past, as opposed to the planned obsolescence of the future. The fact is, businesses continue to invest in software up front with the expectation that it will pay off in the long term, depreciating it like an asset rather than supporting and nurturing it like a resource. And it is for those businesses that Microsoft must ensure that it facilitates and ensures the same general infrastructure over time.

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The multiplatform video downloader-and-viewer combo formerly known as Democracy Player is taking a cue from Sally Struthers and offering you, the Windows or Mac or Linux viewer at home, the opportunity to adopt a line of code in their software. "If enough of our users adopt lines of Miro code," says co-founder Nicholas Reville, "we can create an organization that is funded from the bottom-up and not dependent on the top-down."

Miro's parent organization, the Participatory Culture Foundation, has received grants for its work over the years from the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Application Foundation (Mitch Kapor's project), the Knight foundation, and similar celebrants of open source and open democracy. Times being what they are, the funding's not what it once was, and so in the wake of its recent Miro 2.0 release (which, according to Reville, tripled the product's user base) the PCF is thinking creatively about funding its creativity.

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