Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray. Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense. Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book. These ebooks are listed for sale -- often at 99 cents -- alongside more traditional books on Amazon's website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want.

Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word. This new phenomenon represents the dark side of an online revolution that's turning the traditional publishing industry on its head by giving authors new ways to access readers directly. In 2010, almost 2.8 million nontraditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million nontraditional books and 302,000 conventional books in 2009, according to Albert Greco, a publishing-industry expert at Fordham University's business school. In 2002, fewer than 33,000 nontraditional books were published, while over 215,000 traditional books came out in the United States, Greco noted.

"This is a staggering increase. It's mind boggling," Greco said. "On the positive side, this is helping an awful lot of people who wrote books and could not get them published in the traditional way through agents," Greco added. But Greco listed downsides. One problem is that authors must compete for readers with a lot more books -- many of which "probably never should have seen the light of day," he said. Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut "Sentence of Marriage" was on sale on Amazon under another author's name.

Source: Reuters

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Three suspected members of the Anonymous hacking group have been arrested in Spain. The trio are said to have been involved in co-ordinating the group’s activity in that country. The arrests were made simultaneously in three Spanish cities – Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria. Anonymous has claimed responsibility for attacks on Sony, Spanish banks and co-ordinated action in defence of whistle-blowing site Wikileaks. A statement from the Spanish national police force said that a computer seized in the home of one person it arrested was used in the hacks. The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began in October 2010. It involved Spanish cyber police combing through millions of lines of chat logs to identify who was behind the group’s activities.

Some of the attacks made by Anonymous members used a web-based tool called Loic to bombard target sites with data. The websites of PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon were all targeted using this tool. It seems that Loic did a poor job of hiding the identity of the people using it. It is believed that some police forces have already moved against the group based on this information. Arrests have been made in the US, UK and Holland of Anonymous members, prior to the raids in Spain. Anonymous grew out of the online picture sharing site 4Chan and describes itself as a group of concerned internet citizens. As well as attacking sites that it perceives as not supporting Wikileaks, the loosely organised collective has also attacked government sites in Tunisia and Egypt to aid popular protest movements.

Source: BBC

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Two of the Internet’s biggest adult entertainment BitTorrent trackers have today confirmed to TorrentFreak that they have permanently closed down. With comfortably more than 2.5 million members between them, the closure of Empornium and PureTNA leaves a sizeable number of porn fans both empty handed and with nowhere to put their seeds. For the last few days the huge BitTorrent porn trackers Empornium and PureTNA have been dark, with both sites routing to 127.0.0.1. Understandably, users of the sites have been pretty concerned since these pair of giants, which are connected by the same management, have massive memberships and are long-standing mainstays of the community. To give an idea of size, PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.

But for their users, speaking of the sites in the permanent past tense is the sad reality today. The management of both Empornium and PureTNA have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are “offline permanently”. Requests for elaboration were declined, but a comment obtained from Breeze, the manager of both sites, said simply: “Such is bittorrent life.” So considering that both sites had continued to grow, both in terms of torrents and membership, why suddenly close down? The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks. This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.

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Mozilla’s Firefox browser has overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the leader in Europe, the first time Microsoft’s browser has lost its top spot in a major market, a web analytics firm StatCounter said. In December, the open-source Firefox took 38.1 percent of European market share, while Internet Explorer’s share slipped to 37.5 percent. Google Chrome saw its share rising to 14.6 percent from just 5.1 percent a year earlier. “This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share,” Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter chief executive, said in a statement. “We are probably seeing the impact of the agreement between European Commission competition authorities and Microsoft, to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March last year,” Cullen said.

In December 2009, European Union regulators accepted Microsoft’s pledge to give consumers better access to rival browsers, ending a long antitrust dispute. Since the beginning of March, Microsoft offered Europeans the option to choose from among 12 browsers on the more than 100 million old and new PCs that use its Windows software. Globally, Internet Explorer’s share slipped to 46.9 percent in December, while Firefox was at 30.8 percent and Google was at 14.9 percent, StatCounter said. According to our stats, Firefox is also most popular browser among RLSLOG.net readers with 51%, followed surprisingly by Chrome with 19% and finally Internet Explorer accounting only for 14% share.

Source: Reuters

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Thunderclap in the world of computers and UNIX. Revelations made by former technical manager of a company indicate that the FBI would have integrated the code in the BSD project a number of backdoors, allowing those who knew how to find the spy business servers. History of a sensational revelation.

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Streaming is about to supplant the legal downloading of music? In 2010, sales of music increase only 0.1% compared to last year. Conversely, content streamed exploding, including YouTube and streaming website.

Legal downloading has stagnated in the United States. According to information provided by Nielsen SoundScan and quoted by free electrons, sales of music on the platforms have significantly slowed legal this year. In 2010, the sector grew 0.1% in volume for sales of shares to the unit while it had reached + 10% last year.

Music albums are better off, since the growth is still above the 10% mark, with 12%. But then again, music sales have disappointed. In November 2009, progress was nevertheless 17%, with a peak of 19% at the end of the year. Over the period, sales grew “only” 95 million shares, against 277 million last year.

One explanation that has been advanced to explain the discrepancy between 2009 and 2010 is the disappearance of Michael Jackson, who gave a sudden boost to the sector. In 2008, strong sales of North American artists such as Lil ‘Wayne with a million albums sold in the first week of marketing of’ Tha Carter III ‘, says Reuters.

The explosion of content streamed, such as videos, does not seem to have a tangible impact on music sales. However, the five major American record companies are weekly Internet users more than a billion videos viewed on YouTube. And this, even though the labels and YouTube are trying to push users to buy by placing sponsored links.

Eventually, erosion too strong sales of music could be a problem more for the music industry. Yet the legal platforms such as iTunes or Amazon, have driven prices of some news in the U.S.. Faced with content streaming, digital albums and singles would they be about to be exceeded?

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Launched on 7 December, the third expansion to World of Warcraft has sold 3.3 million copies in 24 hours. These sales pulverize the previous records set with the first two extensions of the MMORPG.

The domination of the Blizzard game universes massively multiplayer online role will not end immediately. In a press release issued Monday, the California studio has announced that the third expansion to World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has sold over 3.3 million copies worldwide in just 24 hours.

According to Blizzard, this new expansion has become “the PC game the fastest-selling of all time, eclipsing the previous record of more than 2.8 million copies sold in 24 hours, established in November 2008 by the second extension the game, “Wrath of the Lich King. The first expansion, Burning Crusade has gone on it at 2.4 million copies in 2007.

It is an undeniable success for Blizzard, who had set another record this fall, surpassing the milestone of 12 million subscribers worldwide. The game, launched in 2004 in North America and in Europe in 2005, is now present in many countries, like Russia, China, Mexico, South Korea and Latin America.

Also according to the American firm, “more than 10,000 stores worldwide opened their doors to players who wanted to be among the first to get their copy of the extension. More than 15,000 players have attended official events, were greeted by Blizzard and its retail partners “around the world, particularly in France at FNAC Champs Elysees.

For the record, the third expansion has begun to recast in depth the world of Azeroth. Players can now achieve a new level, level 85, and play new races (Worgen for the Alliance and the Horde Goblin). Unlike the two other extensions, no new continents and new world, but eight new regions, including five for levels 80 to 85.

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