Cloud

Now that the latest chatter coming from the UK surmises that streaming music services such as Spotify are hot among teenagers, while p2p-based music sharing is not, Microsoft is reportedly about to debut its own contribution to Britain's music streaming boom.

The Telegraph reported today that Microsoft's UK Web portal MSN will be launching a streaming music service this month that is "similar in principle to Spotify."

This episode of Recovery is not brought to you by unfortunate war-and-revolution metaphors for what are, in the end, simply disagreements over operating systems, professional sports, reality television competitions, or other non-combat-related features of life in the developed world. May these be as close as these metaphors' creators ever get to enduring actual warfare.

Even if neither you nor I are ever apt to be invited to a TED gathering -- which brings together leaders from Technology, Entertainment, and Design -- the TED organization's Web site has a marvelous collection of video of presentations made at its conference over the years. It's a great way to spend ten minutes or so when YouTube's leaving you feel a little slimed and Hulu is... look, you cannot keep re-watching the Warehouse 13 premiere. They'll air another episode next week. Until then you will simply have to calm down, and I'm suggesting that you're better off with TED, and not least because it's... applicable.

Microsoft has known about 0-day vulnerability for months

Since spring 2008 • Really, Microsoft? All the work you've put into getting right with the security community, and this is the result? Computerworld's mighty Gregg Keizer leads the charge on the news that Redmond has known about the recently publicized DirectX vulnerability for years. Years.

Download Microsoft Silverlight 3 for Windows Final from Fileforum now.

A day earlier than expected, though not without precedent,

The only problem with Microsoft naming Steven Sinofsky president of the Windows division is the timing. He deserved this promotion long ago, and Microsoft has long needed someone in charge of the division.

Microsoft was wrong to wait until Sinofsky's team nearly finished Windows 7 to give out this badly needed promotion. The Client division is hemorrhaging profits, as Vista enthusiasm collapses and PC sales plummet.

July now has a third major independence day. Canada on the first. The United States on the fourth. Google on the seventh.

July 7 is the day Google declared independence from Microsoft dependence. It is the day one Google blog post fired the first shot heard at Lexington and Concord. The post might as well be the first paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence:

Download AOL Instant Messenger for Windows 7.0.5.30 Beta 2 from Fileforum now.

I feel old. Looking at AOL's new Lifestream service, which lets you see all your pals' Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed status updates in addition to whatever they're up to on AIM, I'm thinking, isn't this how we got those services in the first place, when we all decided that status messages were the most useful aspect of instant messaging clients?

Google goes for the OS gold chrome

9:37 pm PDT Tuesday, July 7, 2009 > Google's Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management) and Linus Upson (Engineering Director) posted an announcement that the search giant will be launching a Chrome OS, geared toward netbooks.

Online search engines have proven themselves a boon to topical research... and to sticky-note sales, when you finally hit the mother lode of great sites you want to remember without condemning them to the unfiltered pond that is your bookmarks list. Yahoo on Tuesday released Search Pad, a search companion meant to snip, store and annotate useful items; Google Labs last month unveiled Google Squared, which also aims to help parse and organize online information.

Yahoo Search Pad, a close spiritual relative to Yahoo's 2005-era "My Web" search-saving tool, entered beta back in February. It's designed to stand by while you search on that site and, when it detects that you're following a train of thought, to keep track of the sites you find.

The proprietors of online streaming radio, including Pandora's Tim Westergren, are finding themselves surprised today to be cheering an agreement with performance rights holders that has them paying as much as 25% of their revenue in royalties. But that's better than all of their revenue, which was a literal possibility in 2007, and better than 70% which Pandora and other services were paying at this time last year.

Under the new deal announced today, webcasters are being offered a so-called "alternative set of rates and terms" by SoundExchange, the organization responsible for managing performers' royalties in the US. Those that agree to SoundExchange's terms must adopt a new and more rigorous reporting schedule for reporting their revenues right down to the dollar -- the reporting system that SoundExchange insisted upon two years ago. It's an even more rigorous reporting system than what the US Copyright Royalty Board agreed to last January, when it made a reluctant U-turn in favor of revenue-based royalties accounting.

Today marks the beginning of ABC's arrival on Hulu. Last April, Disney's ABC Enterprises jumped aboard NBC Universal and News Corp's increasingly popular video syndication site, and this morning, the first ABC program was rolled out for streaming.

The first ABC show available on Hulu is the drama "Grey's Anatomy," of which five episodes have been posted. For the next two weeks, more content will be added, including episodes of the network's biggest hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs." A month before Disney and ABC arrived at a deal with Hulu, the network agreed to first bring its content to YouTube, where it would supply clips of popular shows and short-form episodic content equipped with "different monetization options" than standard YouTube videos.

Drenched with "Purple Ra1n," iPhone users caught eating "redsn0w"

Afternoon of Sunday, July 5, 2009 • If you're a Mac user and you're wondering where those fruit-punch-looking stains on your keyboard are coming from, well, it must be an outbreak of "Purple Ra1n." Last Friday, independent developer GeoHot gave iPhone 3G S users a shower of sorts with his pwnage tool for Windows, enabling iPhone users to install their own apps outside of AT&T's control. Yesterday collaborator Ari Weinstein ported that tool to the Mac, although he also acknowledged that for the "full freedom experience," users should turn to the Dev-Team's "redsn0w" tool, for unlocking their 3G S units from the AT&T network.

After months of availability to users willing to seek it out, Internet Explorer 8 will be rolled into Windows Server Update Services starting August 25. The change will affect those versions of Windows currently relying on WSUS -- in other words, not Windows 7 RC.

Microsoft's IEBlog has the details for those administrators who use WSUS but prefer not to make the IE8 switch just yet, or wish to make that switch on their own calendar.

The first of the month always brings a bountiful harvest from Google's blogging troops, and two posts yesterday pointed us to some nifty changes to Gmail's labels features and passed along some cheerful numbers concerning spam levels as measured by the company's Postini group.

With one notable exception, those who rely even moderately on Gmail's labels ought to like where things are going. The section is finally positioned above the chat area, for starters, and your labels can be easily grouped and rearranged for your convenience rather than only in alpha order. (Gmail attempts to help you out by picking a few to put at the top of the list, hiding the rest, but we found that it didn't guess well at all; fortunately, sorting it out was drag-and-drop simple.)

Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter, and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)

Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier