The music industry has launched a new crackdown on the servers that run the P2P network eDonkey. Seven major eDonkey servers were taken offline this last week after German courts gave the go-ahead by issuing injunctions against the server operators.

According to the IFPI, the music industry’s international trade group, the move is part of a campaign against the eDonkey network that has also led to server shutdowns in France and the Netherlands. All told, the shutdowns “represent a major disruption to one of the top three file-sharing networks,” according to the group.

Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.

ASU students received a questionnaire yesterday, screenshots of which were originally posted by a MacRumors forum member, that hinted strongly at Google’s plans. Specifically, the questionnaire intro says that students will be able to test a product that will be publicly launched later this year by a “major Internet company,” and the graphic makes reference to 3D modeling, video gaming, and avatars. It proceeds to ask questions about students’ involvement with social networks like MySpace and whether they have Gmail accounts. The social network referenced by the questionnaire is currently being dubbed “My World.”

Sharp Corp said it would launch a Blu-ray high-definition DVD recorder with a 1-terabyte hard disk drive (HDD), the world’s largest storage capacity on any Blu-ray recorder, as it competes with the HD DVD camp. Sharp, along with Sony Corp and Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, promotes Blu-ray optical disc technology, while Toshiba Corp and Microsoft Corp back the rival HD DVD format.

The 1-terabyte model, capable of recording 127 hours of digital high-definition programs, will go on sale on December 1 in Japan for about 300,000 yen ($2,616).

The latest version of Firefox — is nearing release. Gran Paradiso includes a form of malware protection that checks every URL against a known list of sites. It does so by sending each URL to Google. In other words, if people enable this feature, they get some malware protection, and Google gets a wealth of information about which sites are popular (or, for that matter, which sites should be checked for malware). Fair deal? Not to worry — the feature is disabled by default

Yesterday, we reported on an unholy trinity of Google vulnerabilities that put emails, private photos and website security at risk. Today came word of a new weakness that makes it easy for bad guys to silently put a backdoor in Gmail accounts.

The technique comes courtesy of Petko D. Petkov, a researcher at GNU Citizen, who writes in a blog post that the backdoor is installed simply by luring a victim to a specially crafted website while logged in to Gmail. The naughty site uses a slight of hand known as a multipart/form-data POST, which writes a filter to Gmail that causes all email with attachments to be forwarded to collect@evil.com.

Petkov didn’t provide a proof of concept or detailed documentation, but Ryan Naraine of the Zero Day blog writes here that the exploit was demonstrated for him. The bug “is particularly nasty because of the way the exploit works without any user action and the fact that it’s difficult for the average Gmail user to know that emails are being stolen,” he writes.

Users aren’t likely to notice a filter has been added unless they think to check the “Filters” section of their Gmail Settings.

A Google spokesman said company bug hunters were looking into the report.

The Smithsonian Institution’s museum dedicated to black history and culture launches this week with an interactive Web site - long before its building opens for visitors on the National Mall.

Social-networking technology donated by IBM Corp. will allow visitors to help produce content for future exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Almost anything is fair game - long essays, short vignettes of memories or recorded oral histories. The museum plans to add video capabilities in the future.

The museum planned to announce the site’s debut Wednesday.

Top-level employees of publicly listed companies are being targeted by cybercriminals using malware-infected RTF documents disguised as recruitment letters.

Security company MessageLabs reported that 1,100 e-mails containing malware-infected RTF (rich text file) attachments were recorded over a 16-hour period this month. Four separate waves appeared between September 13 and 14, the company said.

“All (the e-mails) were going after (top-level) management. The e-mails included the company name in the subject field, purporting to be a recruitment company. What it had in the attachment is an executable RTF file,” a MessageLabs representative said.

Similar e-mails were noticed in June, the representative said.

The e-mail, which contains no body text, includes a .scr screen-saver dummy file within an executable RTF file, the representative said. When recipients attempt to open the file, a message is displayed stating: “Microsoft has encountered an error and had to close.” The recipient is then advised: “To view this, double click on the message.”

Once activated, the RTF file starts a chain of downloads that establish a secure connection between the attacker’s server and the infected computer.

The top-level nature of the targets clearly indicates that the attackers are after information, the MessageLabs representative said, but the greater concern is the social-engineering technique used to spread the Trojan-harboring e-mail.

The Pirate Bay has filed a criminal complaint against entertainment firms over alleged attacks against the controversial file sharing tracker site.

A police complaint against the Swedish subsidiaries of music and movie studios follows a leak of embarassing emails from MediaDefender, the firm allegedly hired by media moguls to disrupt Pirate Bay’s operations.

These attacks included “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking, and spamming”, Pirate Bay alleges.

Internal mails from MediaDefender detailing, among others, plans to pollute file sharing networks and to set up fake file sharing sites in a bid to infect users with spyware, ironically appeared on file sharing networks earlier this month.

Amazon.com Inc launched an early version of its highly anticipated digital music download store, which is seen as a potential rival to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes system.

Amazon’s store, named “Amazon MP3,” allows users to buy music without copy protection technology, so that the songs can play on a variety of devices including Apple’s iPod.

Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than half of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents, the online retailer said in a statement.

Setting the stage for a possible bidding battle, Microsoft Corp. is mulling an investment in Facebook Inc. that would value the rapidly growing online hangout at $10 billion or more, according to a report published Monday.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said Microsoft is holding preliminary discussions that could culminate in a $300 million to $500 million investment in Facebook, a Palo Alto social-networking site founded just 3 1/2 years ago.

In exchange for the money, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft would receive up to a 5 percent stake in privately held Facebook, which has previously raised nearly $41 million from venture capitalists and other individual investors.

A pro-business think tank in Europe has recommended unbundling Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system from sales of new PCs in order to give customers more choice when buying a new computer.

A report from the Globalisation Institute in Brussels urges the European Commission to require that PCs and operating systems be sold separately in Europe to break Microsoft’s monopoly in the desktop OS market.

“Microsoft’s dominant position is not in the public interest. It limits the market and has slowed technical development to the prejudice of consumers,” said the report.

The report is gaining attention partly because the Globalisation Institute usually advocates a hands-off approach to business regulation. It researches and develops policy options that are sometimes championed by politicians

In what must be one of the speediest copyright-infringement cases on record, Monsoon Multimedia has admitted to violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is entering settlement negotiations.

On September 20, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced it was suing Monsoon on behalf of the BusyBox project — the first U.S. suit involving GPL version 2. The suit claimed that Monsoon had violated the GPL by including BusyBox’s software in its product, release under a proprietary license.

The company said it will comply with the open-source requirements and make its modifications to the BusyBox source code available on its Web site within several weeks.

“Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open-source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved,” Graham Radstone, chairman and COO at Monsoon Multimedia, said in a statement.