The British ISP is set to throw down the gauntlet on those who download music by disconnecting those who fail to heed warnings.

Trade group British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is working with Virgin to implement a "three strikes" policy, which would initially deal with music downloads. However, film and television studios are also being invited to participate, meaning any illicit downloads could be penalized.

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According to at least one Dell official, despite recent debacles with SP1, the business client migration to Windows Vista continues undaunted. A new Dell Client Migration Solution, unveiled this week, includes services and tools designed to ease businesses' migration burden.

Although Windows Vista still isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea, Dell this week rolled out a new set of services and tools "optimized" for organizations moving to the OS that customers who've already made the shift either really like...or really don't.

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A typical lexical search engine creates a single, indexed repository of addressable content, which can get pretty cumbersome to search through unless your name is "Google." Now, Microsoft is shedding a little more light on an alternative.

One very seldom noted project at Microsoft is an offshoot of the old WinFS file system project, and which is slowly seeing the light of day, just through another route: It's the ability for one PC's local search engine database to access another PC's index. Imagine a kind of peer-to-peer distributed search environment rather than a centralized repository, a more "open" approach compared to the more organic, nuclear model that Microsoft attributes to Google.

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Game maker Electronic Arts today publicly announced that Madden NFL 09 will be released in North America on Tuesday, August 12, with a 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition also in the mix.

The most important aspect of the Collector's Edition is that it will come bundled with NFL Head Coach 09, which was originally supposed to be a stand-alone title. In fact, the game also had a full-fledged development team working on it, but EA decided to bundle it in the Collector's Edition rather than market a two-title bundle with a $30 higher price tag. The 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition will include Madden NFL 09, additional Madden NFL gameplay, and access to additional bonus videos otherwise unavailable to gamers.

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Well over a year after it announced it had wrested a major digital TV platform announcement away from Sprint, AT&T finally said this morning it would be debuting MediaFLO service in the US next month.

More information about the upcoming service -- for instance, what it will be named, which exclusive channels it will supply -- will be announced at CTIA in Las Vegas. In the meantime, we do know AT&T's launch devices will include LG's Vu and Samsung's Access.

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One key to driving healthier economies in the countries of Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Soviet republics, could be significant investments in Web 2.0 development. Could Eastern Europe foster its own Silicon Valley?

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - The Soviet Union had its own technology capital once, though you might be surprised to learn it wasn't located in the Russian Republic.

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Technology from a company called Loopt will help Verizon Wireless create a new social network that allows friends to use GPS technology to locate other friends and share geo-tagged photos for a small fee per month.

Users of the Loopt service are able to create a network of mutual friends and relatives who can all be located via an on-screen map. They can then share their own location, along with geo-tagged photos, with people in their phone address book or AOL Instant Messenger buddy lists.

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The Armonk, N.Y. company's software is based on code from OpenOffice, and is being marketing as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Symphony is based on the Open Document Format standard, and includes tools for users to import Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF files into the suite. IBM says this would make it easier to integrate the suite into current deployments.

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EA's hostile takeover of Take-Two Interactive that began earlier this month has received an extension until the day before Grand Theft Auto IV is to be released.

This week, a defensive effort was adopted by Take-Two, which in the business vernacular is referred to as a "poison pill." Poison pills commonly take the form of stockholders' rights plans, which steer hostile takeover bids away from stockholders and back toward the board of directors.

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Apple could soon find itself the #5 PC producer in the US. Part of the cost of success is prolonged exposure to a more intense spotlight, and when more people are looking at your close-ups, they tend to notice your wrinkles.

It's unusual for Apple to be the one fighting a two-front battle for browser security. But today it's the one that feels like it's being pummeled with tomatoes normally reserved for Microsoft. Yesterday, the latest Safari running on a MacBook Air actually went down first in a public contest for security engineers, just days after an Argentine researcher discovered that a very old JavaScript page spoofing routine could direct Safari for Windows to just about any address.

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Texas computer manufacturer Dell said Friday that it will start shipping its Inspiron 1525 notebooks with the build-to-order option for a Blu-ray drive.

Pricing with the Blu-ray drive added starts at $879. Users need to select the laptop with at least a 1.83GHz processor, and one of the 1525's non-Celeron processor models in order to add the drive.

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Apple's latest release of Aperture adds functionality that allows third-parties to extend the photo editing suite's functionality.

The move could be seen as a warning to Adobe, whose Photoshop application has long supported third-party plug-ins. It also signals that Apple is serious about Aperture providing an alternative to the popular program.

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A report released today by the British Prime Minister's office entitled "Safer Children in a Digital World," calls for reform not only by policy makers, but also schools, advertisers, parents, and "the industry."

The 215-page report by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron, entitled "Safer Children in a Digital World," calls for reform not only by policy makers, but also schools, advertisers, parents, and "the industry."

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Its highest-end CPUs will be stuck behind two big barricades -- a 2.6 GHz speed cap and a 65 nm barricade -- until at least the latter half of the year. So AMD now looks to ATI to help make up the difference, with an argument that just might work.

AMD's value proposition for its updated desktop processors is based on a return to the company's remaining strengths, and a hope that it can triangulate its positions in three corners of the PC component market -- CPUs, GPUs, and chipsets -- to eke out a price/performance claim that's stronger than any of its components viewed separately.

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India's "amazing" use of information technology outsourcing to jump-start its entire economy is a model that can also work elsewhere in the world, according to technologists from India, who spoke this week at a conference at the UN.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - "Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, and colleagues," said one of the speakers from India, Prahbat Sharma, addressing investors and other attendees at a conference called "United Nations Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs."

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