The Fair Trade Commission on Thursday searched the offices of Japan's five major record companies and other firms suspected of monopolizing sales of hit songs as ring tones for mobile phones.

Among the 10 record companies under investigation are Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., Avex Inc., Victor Entertainment Inc., Toshiba EMI Ltd. and Universal Music K.K.

The companies are suspected of colluding to restrict sales of recordings by their contracted artists as ring tones to one company-Label Mobile-an act that could violate the Anti-Monopoly Law.

Electronic instrumental melodies derived from popular songs are often used as ring tones. While composers and lyricists earn royalties on such cover versions, the record companies do not.

But when a clip from the original hit recording including the vocals is used as a ring tone, record companies can control who has the right to distribute it. The companies also earn income for the use of the music.

On August 9th, 2004, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step toward mandating the creation and implementation of new Internet Protocol standards to make all Internet communications less safe and less secure. What is even worse, the FCC's ruling will force ISP's and others to pay what may amount to billions of dollars to ensure that IP traffic remains insecure.

The ruling, if it becomes final, may require such ISPs to create and deploy new and expensive technologies that would ensure that communications carried over broadband were deliberately insecure and capable of being intercepted, retransmitted, read, and understood by law enforcement.

The FCC's ruling goes well beyond the extensive subpoena authority of the grand jury and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and even the USA-PATRIOT Act. By making ISPs the electronic equivalent of the phone company, and therefore subject to CALEA, the FCC opens the door to mandating that all future TCP/IP technologies -- possibly even encrypted ones -- be designed at the outset to be tapable. After all, it would do the cops no good to receive a mass of encrypted packets.

The FBI had an answer when ISPs and phone companies complained about the cost. The Bureau suggested that the cost be defrayed by increasing the rates you and I pay. So much for the government's E-rate program to make broadband more affordable.

Apparently Ziff Davis is threatening pocketpctools.com with legal action for posting a snippet from and link to a Ziff Davis story. Is it just me, or is this sort of the IDEA of the internet? From pocketpctools.com: 'We are currently being threatened with legal action by a large organization that produces news stories (I am trying to find out if I am "allowed" to post the emails they have sent me).

Matthew Rothenberg of eWEEK writes with a clarification (below); it seems like this is just a tempest in a teapot, and linkers can breathe easy.

While I haven't gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!

We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.

My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We're investigating the situation now and will act accordingly.

DoubleClick Inc., the company that provides online advertising services for some of the nation's most popular Web sites, was the target of a sophisticated
attack today, the third time in two months that hackers have targeted a major player in the commercial Internet.

Among the sites hardest hit were those of Nortel Networks, Gateway Inc., MCI Inc., CNN.com and Schwab.com, according to Keynote. washingtonpost.com also was
loading slowly for several hours earlier today before the company blocked DoubleClick's ads from running on the site.

The attack on DoubleClick is another sign that attackers are beginning to target key Internet pressure points that -- when squeezed -- darken the Internet
for most users, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center.

The Google web site was disabled for much of Monday after a new virus flooded its servers with search requests for email addresses.

Like previous versions of the virus, MyDoom.o rifles through the email address book of an infected computer to find its next victims. But it also extracts domain names, for example newscientist.com or aol.com, and feeds these into search engines, in the hope of harvesting new email addresses from message boards or personal home pages.

Unlike many viruses, MyDoom.o does not exploit a software bug, but is spread when a user clicks on an email attachment. The virus also installs a "back door", allowing a virus writer to control the computer remotely.

Cunningly, the file is hidden in a message which appears to come from a system administrator, for example "the team at newscientist.com". The email warns the user that his machine is being used as a spam bot.

A row brewing on Google's Orkut communities about an invasion of Brazilians.

According to Reuters, the social networking site is apparently getting a little too full of people speaking Portuguese, which is what human beings speak in Brazil.

When a Canadian posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English, the Brazilians dubbed her a xenophobe.

Some whinge that when the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings they will see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities. He finds this frustrating since he thinks Orkut is not a Brazilian service.

In fact this is not quite true. According to Orkut, Brazilians dominate its membership roster and outnumber Americans. The site says it has more than 769,000 members, making it one of the largest on the Internet. About 23.5 per cent of the users are from the United States, while another 41.2 per cent are Brazilians. Americans are in a minority.

Increasingly, Web publishers, and in particular newspaper sites, are demanding that readers give up some of their personal information -- like e-mail addresses, gender and salaries -- in exchange for free access to their articles. The publishers say they need this information to make money from advertising.

BugMeNot.com is a site that generates login names and passwords for registration sites. The site is a boon to those who want to keep online anonymity or stamp out spam. According to the site's homepage, 14,000 websites have been "liberated" from registration bondage, and it's clear many people are doing whatever they can to avoid really logging in.

There's also Mailinator for those who want to register but don't want to use their real e-mail address. And there's spamgourmet for "eating" unwanted e-mails. There's also The New York Times link generator put together by an Illinois teen computer programmer, Aaron Swartz.

Time for another thorny legal question concerning this wonderful thing we know as hypertext and the web. Apparently, there's some video out there of well-known actress Cameron Diaz that she doesn't want people seeing (something involving stuff she did when she was young and would rather the world didn't know about).

However, the injunction went one step further, claiming, that the ruling applied to "all others having knowledge or notice of this order." So, along comes Nick Denton's set of bloggers, where the folks at Fleshbot, Defamer and Gawker all had a field day with the fact that this video existed, and proceeded to link to a site that sold the video, as well as posting a screen shot from the video. This quickly resulted in a fairly nasty cease and desist letter from Ms. Diaz' lawyers -- even though they did not host or sell the video themselves.

Like Barbara Streisand before her, it looks like Ms. Diaz is getting a quick lesson in how the internet works: if you try to ban something or take it down, it's very likely that it will only get much, much more attention.

We all profess to despise spam, but some Americans have a dirty little secret about junk e-mail: It works on them.

According to a Yahoo! Mail global survey of about 37,000 Internet users in 11 countries, 20 percent of U.S. residents admit buying products from spam purveyors. About 78 percent said they delete spam.

In Japan, by contrast, people deluged with junk e-mail are more active. Almost half of e-mail users said they send spammers angry replies to express their displeasure.

And, in a nod to how ubiquitous and popular e-mail has become, people around the world agreed that a loss of their e-mail would be more devastating for them than doing without radio or television.

According to NRG Maariv, Hotmail has been shutting down accounts on the basis of accusations of spam rather than any fact.

In fact all you have to do to get an enemy's email account shut down is to email Hotmail's abuse team, accuse him or her of spamming and the boys and girls at Microsoft will have their account closed no questions asked, the report said.

In two cases, spammers spoofed the sender's address so it looked like it was sent from a Hotmail account, while they were actually sent through an Israeli ISP. In both instances, the spoofed accounts were shut down.

Just to prove that the two other cases were not one off's, the hacks at NRG Maariv opened a new account with Hotmail and sent no email from it.

Then they filed a spam complaint, saying it came from the new Hotmail account. To make it look convincing they attached Internet headers from an old spam and inserted the new Hotmail address.

Within less than 24 hours, they received a message saying the new account had been shut down without appeal.