Cloud

We'll have more on this story later today, but be advised that the Swedish court has returned with four guilty verdicts in the Pirate Bay trial. Founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have been sentenced to a year each in jail and millions of dollars in damages.

The BBC has an early report, and Sunde, who was made aware of the verdict several hours before its official announcement, tweeted the results and noted that "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media." Needless to say, an appeal is in the works, as is a press conference by TPB.

After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.

In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met."

You know those composite picture mosaics, where thousands of individual photographs are combined into a single, large image? National Geographic Digital Media has debuted a photo community tool that creates an infinitely zoomable loop of that sort called Infinite Photograph.

The application takes between 200 and 500 user-uploaded photographs from the My Shot public database and turns them into the finished mosaic which can be endlessly zoomed through. Eventually, National Geographic says the tool will be turned over to users to let them build an infinite photograph out of solely their own photos.

Billboard magazine today said that sales of newly-priced iTunes tracks are trending downward as a result of last week's price increase. The publication's figures pertain to tracks that were formerly 99¢ and are now $1.29. A price increase of roughly 30% correlated to a 12.5% drop in sales. Meanwhile, tracks that were unchanged in price actually sold 10% more than the previous week, and sales were up 3% overall.

It is a path that labels do not want sales to follow. Before the changes went into effect, a major label executive who wished to remain anonymous, told Reuters, "If we can gain traction with $1.29 that will be good for greater margin."

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered last night at Carnegie Hall to play an original Tan Dun piece composed specifically for the global competition that brought the group together. It's lovely. But I'm willing to bet that instead you were listening to a heretofore obscure singer absolutely flatten a roomful of doubters with a show tune.

Like a lot of us, I've been watching the Susan Boyle video repeatedly this week, trying to get at what it means for the Internet to have taken to heart, as the Britain's Got Talent audience took to heart, a middle-aged Scotswoman with ungroomed eyebrows and a frumpy Best Dress and a voice that seems to have broken something that needed breaking in hearts around the world.

Download Trillian Astra beta from Fileforum now.

What next, Duke Nukem Forever? All right, that may be a cheap shot -- we've only been waiting three years for the release of Trillian Astra, the update of the IM software that once owned the multi-service chat realm. The software moved from alpha to beta late last week.

For a great many Internet users -- perhaps a majority -- who believe they're already paying monthly fees for content, the thought of paying a subscription fee for online news may be akin to yet another "tax." Certainly the purveyors of the news-is-by-nature-free argument may elect to characterize such a fee as a "tax." But challenging and defeating the new conventional lack-of-wisdom is just one of the challenges facing a group of businessmen at the nucleus of a new online news coalition.

Perhaps if there were just one fee that pertains to a whole portfolio of news providers, enough readers would see enough value in their product as a collective, to subsidize it through a single subscription fee. That's the bet being placed today by Journalism Online, LLC, the latest venture from business innovator and Court TV founder Steven Brill, venture capitalist and former TCI CEO Leo Hindery, and former Dow Jones executive vice president and The Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz.

Another day, another arbitrarily-named video service.

Though Vevo is a name that could very easily be lost among the likes of Veoh and TiVo, the soon-to-be launched music video site has backers that are far from forgettable: Google and Vivendi, or, more specifically, YouTube and Universal Music Group.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left -- and, sometimes, two rights make a wrong. Take, for instance, Google's Street View function, well-liked by the uncertain motorist. Take, also, the idea of focused concentration on the road, a very good idea for drivers. Unfortunately, those two good ideas didn't combine so well for a Street View photo van in Pittsburgh.

As noted by Gawker and displayed by Google, a recent pass by the vehicle not too far from the baseball stadium was going well -- sunny day, everything's A-OK -- until the pole-borne camera attempted to occupy the same space as a low bridge overhead. The aftermath is visible online; not so useful for mapping purposes, but a nice warning as to how not to go about the journey.

If one of your friends or business contacts on Windows Live Messenger has a different handle now than he did a few days ago, the reason may be because he received a message from Microsoft telling her she needed to do so, on account of a "recent system enhancement."

A blog post on Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger site yesterday explained that an unknown number of Messenger users may have received this alert in the center of their desktops. But the blog post apologized, saying the message was sent in error. "You will be able to continue to use your current e-mail address," the post read, "and there is no reason to make any changes."

We still haven't received a verdict in Sweden's Pirate Bay trial, but the proprietors of that search service aren't twiddling their thumbs while they wait. On Wednesday, they're expected to switch on their paid iPREDator anonymizing service.

Savvy observers of the European political scene will recognize the name's genesis right away -- they're aiming at iPRED, the EU's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, a Swedish version of which went into effect on April 1. Pirate Party chair Rikard Falkvinge memorably described that legislation as "written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility."

Slate this week is belatedly celebrating Gmail's fifth anniversary (April 1) in exactly the proper fashion, asking what the heck beta status even means when it's applied to a service with over 100,000,000 users. The Explainer column gives a safe-for-civilians overview of what "beta" has meant in the past, and dips a toe into more recent philosophical debates ("Beta bad!" "No! Beta good!"). It'll be interesting, of course, to hear the thoughts of our more techish readership: Is years-long beta a subversion of the concept? And are we all relieved that Flickr's "gamma" schtick didn't catch on?

It's shorter even than most YouTube clips, and we don't see any Oscars in its future, but a 29-second snippet from the voluminous Library of Congress archive has the honor of being one of the oldest known videos still extant.

The silent clip, embedded below or downloadable from the LoC, shows a young man swinging a set of Indian clubs. The event was filmed sometime during the spring of 1891 on an Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera, using 3/4-inch wide film.

One part momentum, two parts hype, one part fascination with Rainn Wilson's random thoughts and violent ailurophobia -- stir, and you've got a remarkable 76.8% unique-visitor growth rate for Twitter in March, as noted by a Social Times blogger who had a bit of fun with Compete.com this morning. And the warming trend extends past the trendy microblogging service and its 14 million users.

Facebook's up 23.4% to over 91 million users, and even shaky MySpace, which has seen declines of about 11% over the past year, got a 4% bump to 55.6 million users, and standoffish LinkedIn is up 13.1% to 12.7 million users. And the URL-shortening services crucial to microblogging are showing great gains too; tinyurl.com, is.gd and bit.ly are all up by double digits (21.6%, 21.8% and 48.8% respectively), with wee is.gd showing 3721% growth over the last twelve months. (Rainn Wilson photo courtesy of Stacy D of Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons.)

For a number of reasons, some of them indeterminate, despite all the evolutionary pressure to move it to the next level of its evolution, instant messaging hasn't evolved as an application. One reason I've always suspected is that it's difficult for developers to find the impetus to devote the amount of effort required to evoke revolutionary change, on a platform that's offered to most customers for free. The counter-argument to that is that SMS isn't free, and yet it's stuck even further in the Stone Age.

If IM does resemble one ongoing revolution in application architecture, it's "the cloud" -- the nebulous, always-on service built to respond to user requests from wherever. Whereas at the beginning of the decade, services like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN used their respective IM platforms as weapons against one another, today's strategies -- which now includes Google -- have them opening up those platforms for generally unencumbered use by others. That hasn't exactly made Trillian for Windows and other multi-protocol IM clients the most perfect of applications just yet, but week after week, those of us who work in widely-dispersed offices do manage to get by somehow.