FrostWire is a free and open source Gnutella P2P application, based on the LimeWire source. There’s no “pro” version of FrostWire, you get all the goodies for free. FrostWire can run on Windows XP, MacOSX, Linux …
* Added: Intelligent Spam/Junk Filter to filter bad search results with various tweaks
* Added: New Theme
* Added: More Languages
* Added: Console tab for viewing FrostWire’s internal logs
* Added: Ability to publish files to the internet archive
* Tweaked: Use larger download buffer to reduce disk load
* Tweaked: Various fixes and changes to Win32 installer
* Fixed: Spanish translations
* Other various small bugfixes
>> http://www.frostwire.com
A measure to legalize P2P file sharing has passed through France’s lower house amidst a storm of protest from the country’s film, music, and audiovisual industries. If the measure passes through the government’s upper house, France would become the first nation to legalize P2P file sharing during a time in which most Western nations are attempting to reduce its widespread use.
Introduced as a pair of amendments to a bill aimed at toughening the country’s digital copyright laws, the vote passed by 30-28 at around midnight Wednesday night, with a vast majority of the National Assembly’s 577 members absent. The amendments recommend that internet users pay an $8.50 a month royalty fee for unlimited P2P downloading for private use.
France’s top artists and entertainers fervently oppose the bill, threatening to “march to the National Assembly if need be” to stop the bill from becoming a law, according to a spokesperson for audiovisual production union USPA.
I don’t get it, if the bill passes, and more people pay $8.50 dollar per month, the “industry” will gain more money than in the current situation where everyone downloads for free. So what’s the problem? Ah yes, the industry is greedy …
” Computer disk drive supplier Seagate Technology has agreed to buy rival Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion in stock, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The paper said the deal is expected to be unveiled later in the day, with Seagate planning to swap 0.37 of a Seagate share for each Maxtor share. Under the terms of the deal, as reported by the Journal, the transaction is worth about $7.25 a share for Maxtor investors, a 60 percent premium to its closing price on Tuesday. Both the Seagate and Maxtor boards have approved the deal, the paper reported, which will unit two big hard drive makers. The Journal, citing people familiar with the deal, said the companies are likely to argue to antitrust regulators that consumers would benefit because of cost efficiencies, among other things. ”
>> Read the official anouncement on Seagate.com
“I am not a cynic by nature, but years of experience in the IT world have compelled me to make sure that everything passes the smell test. As a result, I can often tell beforehand whether I am hearing marketspeak or the real deal. For instance, 5 minutes after I figured out what Larry Ellison’s network computer was, I knew it would never be successful. And so did Larry Ellison, given that Oracle never actually built any of them. So with that in mind, let’s revisit the top 10 overhyped, overmarketed, overbsed (if there is such a word) computer industry events of 2005.”
>> Fun reading 
The European parliament accepted a proposal ‘… on the retention of data processed in connection with the provision of public electronic communication services … ‘. Summarized: any data (internet connections, traffic, email, file sharing, SMS, phone calls) of 450 billion people of Europe has to be collected by telecommunication companies, to be used by governments in their fight against ‘crime and terrorism’ … oh, and child porn, of course. Arse, this doesn’t sound good. Say goodbye to our privacy?
>> Here’s a link to the official proposal
“The algorithm used by the Sober worm to ‘communicate’ with its author has been cracked. According to F-Secure, it can now calculate the exact URLs the worm would check on a particular day. Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, explained that the virus author has not used a constant URL because authorities would easily be able to block it. From the article: “Sober has been using an algorithm to create pseudorandom URLs which will change based on dates. Ninety nine percent of the URLs simply don’t exist…however, the virus author can precalculate the URL for any date, and when he wants to run something on all the infected machines, he just registers the right URL, uploads his program and BANG! It’s run globally on hundreds of thousands of machines,” Hyppönen said. Sober is expected to launch itself again on January 5, 2006.”
* New: [in_wm] Windows Media Video support (with DRM)
* New: [in_mp4] Support for HE-AAC MP4/M4A files
* Improved: lots of minor plugin improvements
* Improved: Visualization data calculations
* Improved: Significantly less playlist memory usage
* Improved: more multi-user improvements (almost there!)
* Improved: [installer] setup options, saved settings, codec downloading
* Improved: [gen_ff] optimized skinning engine
* Improved: [out_disk] new features
* Improved: [in_cdda] playback/ripping with sonic engine
* Fixed: freezing when cancelling cd burn
* Fixed: video scaling bug (with modern skin scaling < 100%)
* Fixed: minor installer bugs
* Fixed: freeze when loading classic skin with main window hidden
* Fixed: Visualizations for 24bit and 32bit songs
* Fixed: Advanced Title Formatting with Japanese, Chinese and Korean metadata (thanks mrym)
* Fixed: [in_mp3] raw AAC VBR file seeking and bitrate reporting
* Fixed: [in_mp4] unicode metadata writing
* Fixed: [in_wm/in_dshow] mms:// streaming video playback
* Fixed: [in_cdda] audio cd bitrate display
* Fixed: [in_cdda] Sonic engine on 64bit windows (thanks STanger)
* Fixed: lots of small bugs ...
* Updated: Sonic CD Engine 2.2.50
* Updated: libmp4v2 1.4.1
* Updated: Coding Technology AAC+ Decoder 7.2.0
>> Download Winamp 5.12
My wife Véronique was on Studio Brussel (national radio) this morning with three of her favourite music tracks of all time. She picked these:
LUC VAN ACKER - Zanna
BLACK CROWES - Remedy
EURYTHMICS - Love is a stranger
>> Listen to the music and the interview (13 mb, 14 min.)
>> Listen to the interview (2 mb, 2 min.)
Microsoft today publicly announced that the availability of an updated Internet Explorer 7 beta will not be until Q1 2006. In real terms this means that the next IE7 beta for Windows XP isn’t likely to ship until January/Feb. An educated guess may place Microsoft revealing WMP11 Beta for Windows XP and the next IE7 beta at CES 2006 which is due to commence on January 5th in Las Vegas. Microsoft’s Bill Gates is expected to open the keynote and attendees will be hoping that both IE7 and WMP11 will feature heavily alongside Microsoft’s vision for consumer devices in the coming years.
In Microsoft’s announcement the company has not made it clear whether this will be a pre-beta 2 release of IE7 or the much anticipated beta 2. Q1 of 2006 does co-incide with previous plans that the company is planning to release Windows Vista Beta 2 around this time.
Dean Hachamovitch (head of Internet Explorer at Microsoft) posted a blog entry to the Microsoft IE Team Blog today, “We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to try a pre-release version of IE7 and tell us how it works with their web sites, their applications, their add-ons, and how they use the web overall.”
>> View the IE7 blog
7-Zip is a free file compression / archive tool.
Changes in 7-Zip 4.31:
* Speed optimizations
* 64-bit Windows support
* LZH support
* CHM support
* Multivolume CAB support
* Drag and Drop improvements
>> Download 7-Zip 4.31