Aaron Seigo gives the Keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event. Introduction given by Adriaan De Groot, Vice President of the KDE e.V.

Last.fm announced today that users in the US, UK, and Germany can now stream full length tracks as well as entire albums straight from the Last.fm social music service. They state they will be paying artists directly and have the support of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner as well as independent artists.

According to their announcement:

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

If this service does well it could help push the major labels into a new service model that serves the customers and the artists. Last.fm was acquired by CBS last spring.

Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we’re not announcing a Gphone. However, we think what we are announcing — the Open Handset Alliance and Android — is more significant and ambitious than a single phone. In fact, through the joint efforts of the members of the Open Handset Alliance, we hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.

This is the word from the Official Google Blog .

Bet you good money it won’t make my Sidekick3 any less crappy. At least I won’t have to change carriers. ;)

I feel it is a day of mourning with this news from ArsTechnica:

Back in the excitingly heady days of the dot-com bubble, the rivalry between Sun and Microsoft was one of the highlights. Sun’s famous motto “The Network is the Computer” threatened to make Microsoft’s desktop monopoly obsolete, and visions of a world of thin clients running Java backed up by expensive Sun servers were dancing in then-CEO Scott McNealy’s head. Much has changed since then, of course. McNealy resigned, lawsuits were settled, and these days Sun and Microsoft are fast friends. Now, in a rather stunning bit of news, Microsoft and Sun announced at a press conference that Sun has signed up to become a Windows Server Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), selling Sun x64-based servers that come bundled with Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Sun has released a chart showing which hardware will be ready for the Windows operating system, and the company is expected to ship the first bundled systems within 90 days.

Read the entire piece at ArsTechnica 

From Mobile Magazine comes this tasty little tidbit:

I think that the Apple iPhone was garnering more attention and creating more rumors than the Google Phone, but interest in the latter is really start to ramp up now that the former is already out in the marketplace (with a price drop too). Five fresh rumors have arisen surrounding the secretive Google Phone, but unfortunately none point toward a potential release date.

Finish reading all about it…

In response to the RIAA and MPAA’s campaign against file-sharing, the University of Kansas has announced a stringent policy for students found sharing copyrighted content on the university network. Students fingered for file-sharing would be kicked off of the residence hall network, although they would still be able to use campus computer labs.

A brief notice on the University of Kansas ResNet site explains the university’s new position very succinctly. “If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever,” reads the notice. “No second notices, no excuses, no refunds. One violation and your ResNet internet access is gone for as long as you reside on campus.” Presumably, the University is referring to illegally downloaded copyrighted material, as there is plenty of copyrighted material that can be downloaded legally.

Read the full article at Ars Technica

An article on Wired today caught my attention while scanning my feeds (FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats) however, it was the following paragraph that concerned me even more:

“Under a ruling this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, such surveillance — which does not capture the content of the communications — can be conducted without a wiretap warrant, because internet users have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the data when using the internet.”

Digging around in this ruling, I find information regarding IP addresses and routing info in email address headers. According to the “secret spyware” story.

“Sanders wrote that the spyware program gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL. “

Now I am left asking, how the heck does this apply to installing software on a person’s computer and tracking information such as programs used and users logged in? This is like looking through someone’s underwear drawer when your warrant says the closet.

You will notice that I put the word Internet in parenthesis because once you are snooping around on the computer’s activities, it is no longer just the “Internet” user with the privacy issue. Monitoring offline applications is not the same as monitoring online activities nor is it monitoring visited URLs or the IP addresses found in an email header. I am left a tad bit confused as to how the ruling applies to the logic used by the FBI to install the “spyware” on the computer other than they are counting on the accused and the Courts lacking the technical information to see the difference. I lock down my system as much as possible, therefore I DO have a reasonable expectation of privacy for many of these items that this program reports on.

What do you think?