In a move to crack down on the illegal trade in personal information UK courts will soon start jailing people who trade in, or deliberately misuse, the personal data of others, according to the Department for Constitutional Affairs.

Today’s decision follows a public consultation on increasing penalties for deliberate and wilful misuse of personal data and is part of the Government’s strategy on data sharing to deliver better public services to individuals.

Source: Press Esc

Business Week reports Google Apps is becoming a paid service soon for companies who wish to use it for their domain. Disney and Pixar are reportedly thinking about switching to Google Apps innstead of using Microsoft Office.

Source: Slashdot

A recording industry group fired back Wednesday at Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs, suggesting his company should open up its anti-piracy technology to its rivals instead of urging major record labels to strip copying restrictions from music sold online.

Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the move would eliminate technology hurdles that now prevent fans from playing songs bought at Apple’s iTunes Music Store on devices other than the company’s iPod.

Source: AP

New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.

Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.

It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

Source: Reuters

There is an interesting vulnerability in the default behavior of Firefox built-in popup blocker. This vulnerability, coupled with an additional trick, allows the attacker to read arbitrary user-accessible files on the system, and thus steal some fairly sensitive information.

Source: SecuriTeam

New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine.

New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed “watch out” to no avail.

Kruger says he will introduce legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of gadgets such as Blackberry devices and video games while crossing the street.

Source: Reuters

Gmail is getting ready to open up to every one in th world to sign up for a Gmail email account. According to the Help center FAQ which was updated recently “Anyone in the world is now welcome to create a Gmail account at http://mail.google.com/mail/signup.“. However this is not the case at the moment. I guess it’ll open up in the next few hours once the update is propagated to all the servers.

Despite success in suing people who download music illegally and in reaching deals with personal networking sites like YouTube, the music industry is still bleeding millions of dollars in sales to online piracy.

It is a major issue for an industry that is desperately trying to boost revenue from legal downloads to make up for falling sales of Compact Discs, which declined 23 percent globally between 2000 to 2006.

Russ Crupnick, an analyst at consumer research group NPD, said the number of U.S. households engaged in P2P over the last year rose 7 percent, while the number of illegal downloads were up by 24 percent.

Source: Reuters

Facebook.com, the social networking Web site, said on Tuesday it is moving into television by teaming up with cable operator Comcast’s online video site Ziddio to produce a new series from users’ clips called ‘Facebook Diaries’.

The companies are enlisting Hollywood TV producer R.J. Cutler, to choose the best submissions and create ten half-hour episodes that will be streamed online and on Comcast On-Demand. The program will start in March. Terms were not disclosed.

Online video is one of the fastest growing sectors on the Web and major sites including Google Inc..’s YouTube and News Corp. MySpace are investing heavily in building their video capacity. Analysts say there is high demand for online video inventory from advertisers.

Source: Reuters

Amazon.com Inc. and TiVo Inc. have jumped into the digital download wars - with a twist. The new partners will beam movies and TV shows directly to their customers’ living rooms.

The companies said a test version of their new service, called Amazon Unbox on TiVo, will begin Wednesday with an unspecified number of TiVo customers.

The full service is expected to debut later this year, available for the 1.5 million TiVo digital video recorders with broadband Internet capability. Officials refused to give a target date for the service’s launch.

Thousands of movies from several major studios and TV shows from CBS and Fox will be available, said Bill Carr, Amazon.com’s vice president of digital media. Both companies expect agreements with more studios and networks in the future.

Source: AP