Promises of Hollywood fame and fortune persuaded a young hacker to betray former associates in the BitTorrent scene to Tinseltown’s anti-piracy lobby, according to the hacker.

In an exclusive interview with Wired News, gun-for-hire hacker Robert Anderson tells for the first time how the Motion Picture Association of America promised him money and power if he provided confidential information on TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search site.

Microsoft is slashing Xbox 360 prices in Japan by about 13 percent as the price war among video game consoles heats up around the world ahead of the key year-end shopping season.

The Xbox 360 console will sell in Japan for 34,800 yen ($304) beginning Nov. 1, down from 39,795 yen ($348), the U.S. software maker’s Japan unit said Monday in a statement.

A more basic version of the machine now selling for 29,800 yen ($261) will go for 27,800 yen ($243), according to Microsoft Corp.

Last week, Sony Corp. cut the price of its PlayStation 3 game console in the U.S. It had already announced similar price cuts in Europe and Japan.

Flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. on Monday will debut an online video service and a USB flash drive that can carry television programs and videos from a computer for playback on TVs.

The Sansa TakeTV video player — an ensemble of an oversized USB drive, remote control and a small dock that connects to a TV — and its accompanying video service, Fanfare, marks the latest attempt by a company looking to bridge content between the PC and the television.

Similar to using a USB drive to store and move data files, users of TakeTV can drag-and-drop video files stored on their computer — Fanfare downloads, home videos or other unrestricted video content from the Web — onto the device. Users can then plug it into the cradle connected to a TV. A simple menu appears on the TV to scroll through the files for playback.

The TakeTV player is $99.99 for a 4 gigabyte model and $149.99 for an 8 GB one that can hold up to 10 hours of video. Fanfare, in a test stage, offers premium TV shows for $1.99 per download — roughly the same price as rival services, but SanDisk says it hopes to ultimately provide a broad mixture of free and ad-supported content as well as pay-per-download videos.

MySpaceTV, the video wing of the online community network, late on Sunday unveiled its first original Web series to give its users a television-like experience with the interactive benefits of the Internet.

“Roommates” will track the lives of four women in their 20s who have recently graduated from college and are living together in Los Angeles.

The Web show debuts on Monday, October 22, and runs through December 21 for a total of 45 episodes. A new, three-minute segment will play each day, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. EDT. Fans are expected to engage characters online and influence the plot.

“There is an opportunity to interact with a show in different ways than have been done before,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of MySpaceTV.

“Roommates” will utilize a real-time “polling tool” in which viewers’ opinions on characters and plot developments will be sought. Fans can chat online, as well as post comments on the characters’ individual Web profiles. The information will be scrutinized and the plot changed, accordingly.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the same sort of packet forging that the AP did (and that Broadband Reports readers did some time ago), and continued its testing to see if other applications are affected. The answer is a disturbing “yes.” The results of additional testing done by the EFF indicate Comcast is sending forged reset packets with some Gnutella traffic. When the EFF ran a Gnutella node on a Comcast connection, the forged reset packets disrupted communication between the nodes.

What’s particularly insidious about Comcast’s packet forging is that it’s transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they’ll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.

Even if you accept the argument that all P2P traffic is inherently evil, and that Comcast has the right to disrupt it in order to put a stop to copyright infringement, Comcast’s traffic-shaping efforts have apparently extended beyond the realm of P2P and into good old enterprise groupware. Kevin Kanarski, who works as a Lotus Notes messaging engineer, noticed some strange behavior with Lotus Notes when hooked up to a Comcast connection last month.

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast’s network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they’re greeted with the error message, “Remote system no longer responding.” Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast’s reset packets are the culprit. Instead of passing the legitimate e-mail through its network, Comcast’s traffic monitoring tool (likely Sandvine) is sitting in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server.

AT&T Inc. is making Napster Inc.’s entire music catalog of more than 5 million songs available for wireless download starting early next month.

The service, which AT&T is unveiling Monday, will expand the company’s over-the-air download offerings beyond the independent music it offered through eMusic.com and allow it to compete with offerings from rivals Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp.

San Antonio-based AT&T has not yet announced which devices will work with the new music service.

The new service will not work with Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which is tied to Apple’s iTunes service and allows users to load music only from their computers or when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, not through a cellular signal.