After The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. announced that its member companies have filed suit against individuals operating servers that index millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs used on computer networks such as BitTorrent, many BitTorrent sites went dark and cloed down.

But after several days where more and more sites went down the largest site of all stayed online, until today.

Today Suprnova.org closed down. In a message posted on the web site it says

Greetings everybody,
As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!
But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.
We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.
Thank you all that helped us, by donating mirrors or something else, by uploading and seeding files, by helping people out on IRC and on forum, by spreading the word about SuprNova.org.
It is a sad day for all of us!
Please visit SuprNova.org every once in a while to get the latest news on what is happening and if there is anything new to report on.
As we wish to maintain the nice comunity that we created, we are keppig forums and irc servers open.
Thank you all and Goodbye!
sloncek & the rest of the SuprNova Team

A federal judge has awarded an Internet service provider more than $1 billion in what is believed to be the largest judgment ever against spammers.

Robert Kramer, whose company provides e-mail service for about 5,000 subscribers in eastern Iowa, filed suit against 300 spammers after his inbound mail servers received up to 10 million spam e-mails a day in 2000, according to court documents.

U.S. District Judge Charles R. Wolle filed default judgments Friday against three of the defendants under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the Iowa Ongoing Criminal Conduct Act.

AMP Dollar Savings Inc. of Mesa, Ariz., was ordered to pay $720 million and Cash Link Systems Inc. of Miami, Fla., was ordered to pay $360 million. The third company, Florida-based TEI Marketing Group, was ordered to pay $140,000.

(more…)

Source: AP

Ever since Microsoft release Windows XP Service Pack 2, the company keeps emphasize the fact that you should enable Automatic Updates on your computer.

Automatic updates are usually a good thing but there is a serious problem with it.

Sometimes updates need to restart the computer to finish the installation. Until SP2 Automatic Updates would not restart your computer automatically. But this is not the case with SP2.

Once you scheduled Automatic Updates to be installed (by default at 03:00 AM), if the update requires restart Windows will notify you that it needs to restart. If you are not logged in and do not restart within 5 minutes, Windows will automatically restart your computer.

This behavior can cause a lot of problems. Documents you left open and did not save will be lost, downloads you started that have not finished will be terminated, and even hard disk maintenance like defrag that is working will get terminated, which might cause lost of data.

Unfortunately Windows XP Home users can not do much to change this behavior, except saving all the data before going to sleep or disabling the automatic updates.

On the other hand Windows XP Pro users can tell Windows never to restart the computer automatically. In order to do that follow these steps.

• In the Start Menu go to Run type “gpedit.msc” and press Enter
• Now a Group Policy editor will open. In this window navigate to: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
• Double click on No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations
• In the settings window Choose Enabled and click OK
• Close Group Policy Editor

The next time Windows updates your system it will not restart the computer automatically, but will notify you that restart is needed in order to finish the installation.

Update
Home users can try the following:

Go to registry editor and navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Policies \Microsoft\Windows \WindowsUpdate\AU

Change the “NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers” DWord value to the required number.

0 = False (Allow auto-reboot)
1 = True (Disallow auto-reboot)

Cerulean Studios released today its new instant massager software that allows you to connect to all the major IM networks.
Trillian version 3 is packed with new features that will definitely make it one of the best IM software in the market today.

Trillian 3 is available in both basic and pro versions

Job seeking is a daunting taks. There are many job seeking web sites, such as Monster, Hot Jobs, Dice and many more.

People who are looking for new jobs have to go on each site and search for their dream job. The problem is that there are so many job sites, one can’t know them all, and visiting each and every one of the major sites every day, or even several times a day can take a long time.

Recently a new web site has come to aid those who are seeking for jobs. Indeed.com is a search engine for jobs. It enables you to search millions of jobs across all career fields – jobs that are listed on job boards, newspaper sites, and niche sites. In one simple search, you can find the very latest job listings throughout the web.

You may save your searches and have jobs delivered to you by email alert, MyYahoo, or other RSS feed readers.

“Indeed aims to change the way people look for jobs, making the job search process much faster and more accurate”, said Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed. “In one simple search on http://www.indeed.com, you can find the very latest jobs throughout the web that fit your interests.”

Unlike other job searching sites that simply executing each job site’s search engine and displaying the results. Indeed.com collects all the job postings from all the web sites and provide you with a very quick result, grouping multiple postings from multiple web sites in to one easy to read entry, and link you directly to the job description page where you can apply for that position.

Not long after a highly critical flaw has been discovered and fixed, yet another vulnerability had been identified in the popular media player Winamp.

Winamp is reported prone to a remote denial of service vulnerability. The issue is reported to present itself when certain ‘.mp4′ and ‘.m4a’ files are processed.

This flaw exists in all Winamp’s versions 2.x, 3.x, 5.x including the latest version 5.0 7

It is not known at this point whether this vulnerability may be exploited to any means other than a denial of service.

Microsoft Corp. has quietly released a “critical” Windows XP Service Pack 2 update to fix a serious flaw in the Windows Firewall utility.

“After you set up Microsoft Windows Firewall in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), you may discover that your computer can be accessed by anyone on the Internet when you use a dial-up connection to connect to the Internet,” the company said in a knowledge base article.

The update was not included—or mentioned—in the five “important” advisories Microsoft released earlier this week. Two of those bulletins applied to XP SP2, but the severity rating was reduced to “moderate” for those customers.

Microsoft officials could not be reached to discuss why the SP2 update was left out of the scheduled monthly advisories.

According to the article, the Windows Firewall bug affects Windows XP Home Edition SP2, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 and Windows XP Media Center Edition SP2.

Source: eWeek

Google Inc. is combining online reviews into its Froogle shopping-search service, but rather than eliciting new opinions it is aggregating reviews and ratings from around the Web.

The Mountain View, Calif., company announced on Wednesday a beta of Froogle Product Reviews, which so far is limited to electronics products such as MP3 players and computers.

Google also recently rolled out a feature within Froogle that is common on online shopping sites—the ability for users to store shopping lists and wish lists. By creating a log-in, users can add products found from searches onto their lists and make the wish lists accessible to friends and family, Google announced.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said that the product reviews will help users “make more informed decisions about what to buy.”

With the product reviews, Google is displaying links showing the average ratings and the number of available reviews below the images of products in its Froogle results page.

The links take users to a page with excerpts and links to the reviews for an undisclosed number of product-review sites. Users can search by keyword within the reviews and group them by their source.

Source: eWeek

Internet users may soon be required to pay an additional annual fee for each domain name they own, thanks to a virtually unnoticed requirement that will begin to take effect next year. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plans a new increase in fees for use of .net domains. ICANN recently imposed a similar fee on .com and other domains. When the fee takes effect with .net, domain name owners will pay an additional $4 million a year, a figure that would leap to more than $34 million if the fee is extended to .com and other popular top-level domains.
Read full story

A new kind of copy-protected music CD will likely hit U.S. shelves early next year, as record label SonyBMG experiments with a technology created by British developer First 4 Internet, according to sources familiar with the companies.

Several major music labels have already used a version of the British company’s technology on prerelease compact discs distributed for review and other early-listening purposes, including on recent albums from Eminem and U2.

The releases for the retail market, expected early in 2005, will be the first time the Sony music label issues copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market, although the company’s other divisions have done so in other regions. BMG, Sony’s new corporate sibling, has been more aggressive, with a handful of protected CDs released last year.

A SonyBMG representative declined to comment on the plans. First 4 Internet Chief Executive Officer Mathew Gilliat-Smith confirmed that his company plans to release a consumer version of its technology with one major label in the United States, but he declined to identify the label.

Source: News.com

Yahoo Inc. wants to make driving easier by merging traffic information into its online maps and driving directions.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced late Wednesday that it has added information about accidents and road conditions into its online maps for 70 metropolitan areas. For 20 of those local areas, it also is providing real-time data about the average driving speed of traffic.

Along with Yahoo Maps, the traffic reports also are available from Yahoo Local and Yahoo Search. Yahoo’s local-search service returns maps with business listings and now will overlay traffic information on the map.

Yahoo Search will return a link to a map with traffic reports when users enter relevant queries, such as “Atlanta traffic,” the company announced.

Yahoo is pulling information from public and private agencies using such instruments as road sensors, traffic cameras, police scanners and traffic helicopters to glean traffic and road conditions.

Levine said Yahoo is drawing an aggregated feed of that data and using its technology to repurpose the data for online maps.

The maps pinpoint traffic problems such as accidents in icons, which users can scroll over to view details of the road conditions. In the areas where speed information is available, the maps show color-coded roads that signify various ranges of average speeds.

By including traffic speed information for 20 metro areas, Yahoo is covering about half of the U.S. population, Levine said.

Source: eWeek

Yahoo is pushing one of the frontiers for search engines, with its new test site for searching video content on the Web.

The site, at video.search.yahoo.com, went up on Wednesday, and pits Yahoo against competitors such as Singingfish, which is owned by America Online.

The Yahoo video search service lets users narrow their query results by file formats–such as AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real–size, and duration. Users can also choose to filter results based on Internet top level domains, so only results from .com Web sites would be listed, for example. The service also lets users narrow the search to a specific Web site. Finally, users can choose to let Yahoo exclude content unsuitable for minors.

Yahoo is not the only major web site to focus on multimedia content search. Recent reports have said that search giant Google and Microsoft are also developing multimedia search engines.

Source: PC World