Nearly 60 people have been arrested in what Canadian police said on Thursday was the country’s largest investigation into child pornography on the Internet.

Arrests or searches were made in all 10 Canadian provinces and three territories. The charges including sexual assault, and possession and production of child pornography, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.

It looks like Netflix isn’t the only company that sees that streaming is the future of movie rental distribution. Blockbuster, which always seems to be playing catch-up with Netflix, will start making its on-demand rental and purchase content available on TiVo DVRs.

While streaming video to computers is nothing new, streaming video to TVs is still a nascent, but fast growing concept. TiVo, which initially started out just as a DVR platform, has evolved into a much more robust series of devices and services that offer a growing number of Internet streaming options, such as from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, CinemaNow (which includes titles from Walt Disney Studios), Rhapsody, YouTube, and now Blockbuster. TiVo owners who have Series2, Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL DVRs will have access to the Blockbuster OnDemand service. Additionally, TiVo DVRs will be available for sale in Blockbuster stores.

If you use Last.fm and don’t live in the US, UK, or Germany, you might need to get your wallet out. The online radio service has announced that users outside of those countries (their 3 most popular) will need to start paying €3.00 (about $4.40 USD) per month to continue streaming music on Last.fm.

Last.fm doesn’t offer much of a reason as to the change, other than writing on their blog that “There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio,” and the to-be-expected “In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month.”

The real reason is likely international licensing fees, which led PandoraPandora reviewsPandora reviews to pull the plug on international users back in 2007. It’s unfortunate for users outside of Last.fm’s top countries, but likely a necessary move to continue to provide sustainable service, even though the outfit is now owned by media conglomerate CBS.

Thomson, the company that licenses the MP3 patent, has released a new lossless MP3 format called mp3HD. It utilises both lossless and lossy audio contained inside a single .mp3 file, and the files will play on all existing MP3 players.

The idea is simple: lossless files on your desktop that can be transferred without conversion to iPods and MP3 players. The issue, it transpires, is that although the full lossless/lossy hybrid MP3 file is transferred to players, only the lossy element can be played back. A command line encoder can be found on Thomson’s Web site

IBM Corp. plans to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees in a new round of job cuts, the Associated Press has learned. The move reflects IBM’s aggressiveness in shifting labor to lower-cost regions like India and keeping its profits aloft at a time when other technology companies’ earnings are tumbling.

An IBM manager knowledgeable about the plans said the cuts will come from the services division and workers will be informed Thursday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because he was not authorized to discuss the plan publicly.

The layoffs were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The cuts will affect about 4 percent of IBM’s U.S.-based work force, which totaled 115,000 at the end of 2008. In a sign of how quickly IBM is staffing up in emerging markets, last year IBM had nearly as many workers in Brazil, China, India and Russia - 113,000 - as it did in the U.S.

IBM now has about 400,000 employees worldwide.

EBay unit Skype on Monday plans to announce a version of its Internet calling software that connects to corporate phone systems, the Wall Street Journal said.

The new software, called Skype for SIP, is expected to allow employees to make domestic and international calls with regular office telephones, instead of a headset plugged into a personal computer, the paper said.

Warner Bros on Monday became the first studio to open its film vault to “made-to-order” DVDs, as it sought new revenues in a slumping DVD market by making it possible for fans to buy decades-old films.

Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc, made an initial batch of 150 titles available for purchase online at www.WarnerArchive.com , including 1943 comedy-romance “Mr. Lucky” starring Cary Grant and the 1962 release “All Fall Down” with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint.

Sales are not expected to approach those of new releases on DVD, but the service gives Warner Bros another way to make money from a film archive it already exploits by selling titles for broadcast in the United States and internationally.

The Obama administration for the first time is weighing in on a Recording Industry Association of America file sharing lawsuit and is supporting hefty awards of as much as $150,000 per purloined music track.

The government said the damages range of $750 to $150,000 per violation of the Copyright Act was warranted.

A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week’s CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts.

The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player

Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market.

10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions.

Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes

The people who bring you the DroneBL DNS Blacklist services, while investigating an ongoing DDoS incident, have discovered a botnet composed of exploited DSL modems and routers.

OpenWRT/DD-WRT devices all appear to be vulnerable. What makes this worm impressive is the sophisticated nature of the bot, and the potential damage it can do not only to an unknowing end user, but to small businesses using non-commercial Internet connections, and to the unknowing public taking advantage of free Wi-Fi services.

The botnet is believed to have infected 100,000 hosts.” A followup to the article notes that the bot’s IRC control channel now claims that it has been shut down, though the ongoing DDoS attack on DroneBL suggests otherwise.

The service, which won’t go live until later this year, will use high-definition photos taken by members of the public, and overlay it on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping service. It could allow users to get a street-level view of almost anywhere in the world.

According to tech website PocketLint, the service will be called GeoSynth and will based on Microsoft’s existing PhotoSynth technology, which analyses digital photos to generate a three-dimensional model of the subject. It was famously used during Barack Obama’s inauguration to create a 3D representation of the moment the President took the oath of office by ’stitching’ together photos taken at a set time by members of the public standing in a variety of vantage points.

The Microsoft service will allow users to upload geo-tagged images into a central database, which will be combined to build a detailed, larger picture of an area or landmark.

“The system would take the best images from a location to create a single image of a specific landmark very much in the same way Microsoft did with the Obama inauguration”, Johannes Kebeck a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft, told PocketLint.