An Australian judge today ordered significant changes in the Kazaa network, ruling that its operators, Sharman Networks, authorized the widespread violation of copyrights. While the ruling did not entirely shut down Kazaa, its result did leave room for such action if drastic changes are not made in the near future. Sharman Networks stated that it was disappointed by the decision and would appeal, but would not make light of any other information until it reviewed the ruling in greater detail. The closely watched case against Sharman was filed last year by local subsidiaries of major music labels including Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

>> Sharman Networks

Foobar, the no-nonsense audio player for Windows got a new beta version. It supports Ogg Vorbis, mp3, mpc and aac. With plugins you can use more audio formats.

* Improved playlist management: all playlists are editable without being active, multiple playlists with the same name, Autoplaylists
* Field remappings in titleformat scripts: see Titleformat Introduction and Titleformat Reference for details
* Tag merging: combines information from multiple tag formats on the same file
* ID3v2 support with padding for fast tag updates
* Cleaned-up preferences
* On-line help system for preferences pages (uses the HA wiki)
* Playback queue (contents are currently not viewable)
* Instantaneous volume changes
* User interface selection: if a new user interface is detected at start-up, you can chose which one to use
* File type associations editor in preferences
* Ability to reset individual pages in preferences (if supported by the component that provides the page)
* Enhanced playlist generator syntax; also used in other components like Autoplaylist

>> Download Foobar 2000 0.9 beta 8

” Here comes the new EAC 0.95b3. There are several issues fixed, e.g. some CUE sheets could not been written to CD-R using CDRDAO and now it is possible to wait for external compressors to finish the job before powering down the computer. For some users with high ping times (like satellite internet users) there is a new command line option called -slowconnect which will wait longer for a connection to be established, hope that will work better. For the next version, I will finally implement the test & copy function for CD images, due to many requests. ”

>> Download EAC 0.95 beta 3

The well-known media player Winamp got a new update!

* New: CodingTechnologies AACPlus encoder!
* New: SHOUTcast Wire – A Media RSS Browser and Subscription Service
* New: Predixis Smart Playlist Generator
* New: AOL Radio featuring (((XM))) Free Sampler!
* New: CD Ripping now available at 8x in free version!
* New: Microsoft WMA encoder
* New: Over 200 new Milkdrop presets!
* Update: in_vorbis now returns bitrate in getextendedfileinfo
* Fixed: WMA stuttery playback
* Fixed: out_ds copy button on status tab now works all the time
* Fixed: Much improved ripping and playback with Sonic engine
* Fixed: Video window now resizable regardless of Sidecar
* Fixed: Length of long mp3′s now reported properly
* Fixed: Silent install switch now works properly
* Fixed: Simultaneous CD Playback and Ripping

>> Download Winamp 5.1 Full (no extra crap)

Directnic.com is one of the most popular domain name registrars. I’ve been using their services for a couple of years now for the six .com addresses I own and or / admin for friends, so I can really recommend them. Thursday night, one hour ago, I got a text message on my mobile phone from Siaz (the infamous John Terra play-backer) telling me his website, www.shadowanimals.com, is offline. Ten minutes later I’m at my computer, eagerly wanting to find out what’s the problem. Firefox opens, I type the address … and nothing happens, the site doesn’t show. I type the ‘real’ address of the site (shadowanimals.zzillezz.net), because the .com one is only redirecting to my server, and the site pops up as normally. So, the problem has nothing to see with my server. I type bliip.com, c-mikron.com, pompwerk.com … all hosted on my server, all redirected by Directnic.com … they don’t show. So, I go to directnic.com, and immediately the whole situation becomes clear. Directnic.com is situated in New Orleans, one of the cities that got severly hit by hurricane Katrina … They’re up and running on minimal resources at the moment, powered by diesel generators. But they’ve lost almost all of their connections to the internet, except one. That’s why they’re having problems, but I don’t blame them for anything. On the contrary, I wish them all the luck in this difficult situation, and hope the families of the employees are ok.

>> Read the official Directnic.com press release
>> Read the blog straight from the datacenter
>> See pictures of the streets and people around the datacenter