perfectknight's blog

I just came accross this at Reuters. Read on and check my comment at the end.  

 This is good news for those of you who subscribe to itunes. Those who don'y may just skip it. According to an article published by the Financial Times instead of shelling out $1 for each track, the iPod maker apparently is aiming for an upfront payment in exchange for access to a complete music library over a certain period of time. The idea is not entirely new.

This is the reason for all the new Blu ray rips hitting the torrent sites these days. The recent massive increasement in amount of Blu-Ray rips has an obvious reason: cracked protection BD+. A Caribbean firm called SlySoft claims to have broken the copy protection technology used on some Blu-ray discs designed to prevent video content from being copied and pirated. SlySoft has long sold a product called AnyDVD which is a utility that disables a DVD’s Content Scramble System (CSS) copy protection technology.

Trying to appease customers who ended up on the losing side of the recent high-definition movie format war, Best Buy on Wednesday said it would hand out $50 gift cards to buyers of HD DVD players. By surrendering to Sony-backed Blu-ray last month, Toshiba-led proponents of HD DVD left player owners holding devices reduced to playing standard DVDs. To make amends, Best Buy plans to distribute more than $10 million in gift cards to people who bought players from the retailer before Feb. 23. The cards should start arriving by mail by May 1.

Now that Windows Vista service pack 1 has been released, all eyes have shifted to Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s plans for Windows XP service pack 3, the final package of updates for the trusty OS. And, according to at least one source, Microsoft will roll out XP SP3 next Monday. As of Wednesday afternoon Pacific time, the BitTorrent search engine Mininova listed a 568.73 MB Windows XP Professional SP3 5503 file available for download. The file, which had 112 seeds and 417 leeches, had been downloaded 2083 times since it was posted Tuesday, according to the listing.