BeLeMoiH

The world-conquering antipiracy organizations took strike to clear the mess also in wild (in terms of piracy) China now. All six members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) have filed copyright infringement suits in China against Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technology (Xunlei), a popular peer-to-peer file sharing network operator, the MPA said Friday. The companies are seeking damages and legal fees in excess of 7 million renminbi (US$975,000) in the cases. The MPA members are also seeking a public admission to the alleged copyright infringement and a pledge from Xunlei to refrain from future infringements. The civil complaints were filed in the Shanghai Pudong District Court.

Xunlei offers downloads of popular peer-to-peer file sharing software Thunder5 and WebThunder from its Web site. The names of the two downloads have been translated to English from Chinese. Xunlei means Thunder in Chinese. Early last year, the New York Times reported that Xunlei attracted a US$5 million investment from U.S. search giant Google, in return for a 4 percent stake in Xunlei. The MPA members allege Xunlei’s software is responsible for the unauthorized trading of hundreds of MPA member movie titles, and listed 32 titles on the complaint, including ‘Spiderman 3,’ ‘War of the Worlds’ and ‘Mia......

The US gaming industry ended 2007 with record retail sales of nearly $18 billion. This week, though, the NPD Group provided a sobering reminder that market growth is not guaranteed. Today, the industry-research firm released its US retail sales data for its January 2008 reporting period. While software sales for the month were up 11 percent to nearly $611 million for the month, hardware sales fell by a quarter to about $378 million. Combined with modestly declining accessory sales, the overall industry was down 6 percent for the month, posting $1.18 billion compared to January 2007’s $1.25 billion take.

Despite that, the month contained indications that the industry actually grew. That’s because NPD’s January 2007 reporting period was actually five weeks long as opposed to this January’s four-week span. NPD analyst Anita Frazier noted that the numbers are much rosier when that adjustment is taken into account. “At the top-line, on an average sales per week basis, January 2007 was actually up nearly 18 percent as compared to last year,” Frazier said. “And the big winner was console software which was up nearly 50 percent when compared on a level playing field to last year.” However, even on a week-by-week basis, hardware sales were still down 6 percent from last year. Frazier blamed that slide on price cuts made to the consoles, and speculated that hardware shortages in the wake of stellar December sales contributed to January’s slide. That assertion was backed up a statement from Microsoft saying the Xbox 360 was suffering from temporary shortages.

Source: Gamespot

Reports show that 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download TV-series, quite an impressive number. In total, over a billion TV-shows are downloaded every year, and this number continues to rise.

It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.

In January TorrentFreak published the list of “most downloaded TV-shows“, where we showed that the most popular episode of “Heroes” was downloaded 2.5 million times on Mininova alone. Even more impressive -across all BitTorrent sites- more than a billion episodes are downloaded every year worldwide.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded on Mininova over the last 2 years - over 40 percent are TV-shows. To support this, we analyzed a sample of 400,000 torrents earlier this year. That data indicated that approximately half of all the people using BitTorrent at any given point in time, were using it to download a TV-show.

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American citizens and their joy in lawsuing about everything is back and crazier than ever before. A Washington, D.C. woman has sued Best Buy for $54 million, claiming the consumer electronics retailer lost her computer and then tried to cover up the disappearance. Raelyn Campbell, 37, acknowledges that the money she wants is more than the price of the notebook and the inconvenience she has suffered. But she said the lawsuit, along with a blog she started to chronicle her legal battle with Best Buy, is necessary to make a point. “I have filed a lawsuit against Best Buy and launched this blog in an effort to bring attention to the reprehensible state of consumer property and privacy protection practices at America’s largest consumer electronics retailer,” Campbell wrote.

In her blog, Campbell provides a timeline of her contacts with Best Buy, starting May 25, 2007, when she left the broken notebook at the Tenleytown store for repair under a service contract. On Jan. 25 of this year, a Superior Court judge recommended that she and Best Buy try to settle the matter on their own. Campbell said she offered to drop the suit, if the company paid her for her expenses and time and addressed “the shortcomings in its property and privacy protection practices.” Best Buy hasn’t responded, according to Campbell, and the next court hearing is set for Feb. 22. The only compensation Campbell has received from Best Buy is $1,110.35 that was transferred into her credit card account in late October without her consent, the plaintiff said. She’s obviously not that busy when she invested a lot of time into writing longish blog posts…

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TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress gives you the freedom to take almost any video file and encode it to your desired file format including DivX 6 AVI, QuickTime, MPEG 4-ISO, H.264, DVD-Video, DVD-VR, HDV camcorder, and much more. This powerful software provides you with functions and features ranging from a simple cut-editor tool to multiple powerful video filtering and effects.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress gives you an easier way of encoding with 4 steps: Start, Input, Output, Encode, along with settings template so you don’t waste your time figuring out the spec settings. Now it doesn’t take a video guru to be able to encode video; with the simple user interface, workflow is a lot more enjoyable.

You can now open Windows XP Media Center files (DVR-MS) with TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. It also accepts DVD video files, DVD-VR, along with support for High Definition Camcorders such as JVC.
The new video generator blends the text into your video, and the new subtitle editor also provides numerous options and settings at your disposal.
TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress includes 19 unique......

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Links: Homepage, NFO
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Striking Hollywood writers will be back at their keyboards Wednesday after voting overwhelmingly to end a 100-day walkout that essentially shut down the entertainment industry. More than 92 percent of the Writers Guild of America members who cast ballots Tuesday in Los Angeles and New York voted to end their work stoppage over residuals for writing in the digital age, including new media and the Internet. The new deal is for three years. “The strike is over. Our membership has voted, and writers can go back to work,” said Patric Verrone, president of the WGA’s West chapter.

Michael Winship, president of WGA’s East guild, said, “The success of this strike is a significant achievement not only for ourselves but the entire creative community, now and in the future. It is not all that we hoped for, and it is not all we deserve,” Verrone said when a tentative deal was announced Saturday. But he added, “This is the best deal this guild has bargained for in 30 years.”Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp., told The Associated Press, “At the end of the day, everybody won. The vote meant that the Academy Awards ceremony on February 24 will be the usual scripted gala, the AP reported. I really look forward to see new episodes of my favourite shows…

Source: CNN

Mozilla has made the Firefox 3 Beta 3 available for download, but has warned that it is intended for ” testing purposes only” and is aimed at developers rather than “casual users”. New features include improved security in the form of better presentation of website identity, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages and antivirus integration in the download manager. Ease of use enhancements include improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, “resumable” downloading, full page zoom and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.

While Mozilla obviously will take its time, and stick to perfecting the fourth beta candidate, the third beta looks much more like a finished candidate than its prior brethren. The first beta focused on speed and leanness, and surprised testers with visibly faster page loads than the current generation Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Microsoft browsers. The next beta maintained this new speed while beefing up security with a number of key improvements and some minor user interface modifications. Mozilla is also aiming for “richer personalisation” by offering one-click book-marking, smart bookmark folders and better customisation of download actions for file types. Mozilla also announced live support via instant messaging. The full release of Firefox 3 is due later this year.

Source: Vnunet, Eweek, Cnet

The Valentine’s Day campaign that the bot-building Storm Trojan horse has been running for weeks is running at such volume that even the FBI issued a warning yesterday. “With the holiday approaching, be on the lookout for spam e-mails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software,” the FBI said in an alert posted to the home page of its Web site yesterday. The Storm Worm virus has capitalized on various holidays in the last year by sending millions of e-mails advertising an e-card link within the text of the spam e-mail. Valentine’s Day has been identified as the next target.

“This year’s version looks like a stripped-down version of last year’s,” Jamz Yaneza, research project manager at Trend Micro said in an interview last month about Storm’s one-year anniversary. “They’ve optimized the way [the bot is delivered] over the past months,” he said, citing an example of how this year’s Valentine’s Day campaign would differ from 2007’s. “They’ve learned that there’s no need to add an attachment.” Trend Micro senior antivirus researcher David Sancho spelled it out in a post to the company’s blog on Monday. “The spammed e-mail messages are just plain text, but contain links that lead to malicious......