MySpace Music bought "certain assets" from imeem, and they do not include imeem's liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal.

One source with inside knowledge of the deal said MySpace Music's rushed purchase of imeem's assets forced it to "leave behind anything that either had explicit liability or potential liability," including Snocap and its debts to thousands of independent artists and bands.

As of Saturday, the balloons are up in the air. If you don't have a team yet, here are some places to report a sighting.

Both DARPABalloon.com and this MIT group are proposing to gather a huge number of participants, and rather than give each contributor a measly cut, the 40 grand will be donated to charity.

Audio connoisseurs' favourite Linn Products last week confirmed that it will stop designing and selling CD players from next year to focus on streamers, although its legendary turntables will continue.

CDs are dying - and I'm not suggesting it's a reversible decline - but its death has been far slower than anyone expected.

As pointed out by Mathew Ingram, just days after making the case for paying for news, The Times has been accused of publishing an article that it copied without permission from a blog.

Yes, just as Rupert Murdoch is calling aggregators (sites that simply summarize and link to stories) parasites (even as he owns a bunch of aggregators himself), one of his papers didn't aggregate, it flat out copied, without permission, a blog post that was written by Edgar Wright as a tribute to Edward Woodward, who recently passed away.

A complex HTML e-mail will in all likelihood still look very different when viewed in Outlook and Gmail. Images do not display properly, tables become larger or have unexpectedly thicker borders, hyperlinks in image maps are in the wrong location or missing entirely; quite frankly, it's embarrassing.

Although HTML 5 and Flash on mobile devices has some exciting potential for the future of e-mail, it's nice to know that you can always fall back on plain text to make sure e-mail does what it was designed to do: get your message delivered.

Businesses have decided to turn off tunes licensed by the record companies and play the music of artists that are not signed to major labels.

The fee changes would have resulted in businesses such as the Bendigo Club, which staff said yesterday had a bistro capacity of about 50, paying $3075.80 instead of the usual $62.04.

As part of the new scheme, local musicians will be given the opportunity to sell their music in clubs, while money earned from the sale of background music CDs will be used to establish a fund for talented Australian musicians.

For example, on the WSJ's tech news page if you scroll down, you'll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources -- without permission.

Okay, how about Fox News itself? Yup. It's got an aggregator as well. Here's its Politics Buzztracker that aggregates and links to stories from a variety of different publications, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.

The folks at AlarmClock remind us that Murdoch's News Corp. owns IGN, which has a variety of properties, including the ever popular RottenTomatoes movie review aggregation site.

The Beatles catalog, including dozens of the top pop songs ever recorded, has famously never been licensed for sale as digital downloads.

The entire catalog of stereo Beatles albums will soon be legitimately available in digital, albeit physical, form.

The complaint, which is not yet available through the court website, accuses the defendant of "copyright infringement and misappropriation of pre-1972 sound recordings."

It's quite a statement - especially the 24-bit depth of the lossless files, which allows more gradations between volume levels than standard 16-bit (CD-quality) audio files. The only catch - they cost $280.

Hundreds of people in Somalia have been forced to watch Islamist militants executing two people accused of spying.

The militants also ordered schools to close for the day as they were keen for children to watch the two men being shot dead by a firing squad.

The aim, said al-Shabaab, was to stop young men from wasting time, and to focus on important things like defending their territory and their religion.

Earlier this month, Joanna Rutkowska implemented the "evil maid" attack against TrueCrypt.

In the meantime, people who encrypt their hard drives, or partitions on their hard drives, have to realize that the encryption gives them less protection than they probably believe. It protects against someone confiscating or stealing their computer and then trying to get at the data. It does not protect against an attacker who has access to your computer over a period of time during which you use it, too.