Crackdown on music piracy could further harm ailing industry

People who illegally download music from the internet

also spend more money on
music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published
today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an
average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they
never download music dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter
Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their
internet connections with a “three strikes and you’re out” rule
could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

With the redesign earlier this year, Facebook shifted to a far more real-time model of keeping up with your friends’ activities around the site. Some of the early criticism of the changes put “information overload” at the top of the list.

At the same time, Facebook introduced an awesome and powerful way to filter your news feed to improve that signal to noise ratio. But in our opinion they didn’t quite go the distance in terms of making sure users knew it was available and explaining how to use it. So in this feature we’ll take a look at a simple step-by-step walkthrough for setting up friend list filters.

Contacts and accounts

• Multiple accounts can be added to a device for email and contact
  synchronization, including Exchange accounts. (Handset manufacturers can
  choose whether to include Exchange support in their devices.)
• Developers can create sync adapters that provide synchronization with
  additional data sources.
• Quick Contact for Android provides instant access to
  a contact’s information and communication modes. For example, a user can tap a
  contact photo and select to call, SMS, or email the person. Other applications
  such as Email, Messaging, and Calendar can also reveal the Quick Contact widget
  when you touch a contact photo or status icon.

With over 300 million active users around the world, it’s a legitimate concern for social network Facebook to come up with a solution for what happens when members die. The company has now spelled out the process on its official blog (in a post that’s a little bit awkwardly close to Halloween, considering the sensitivity of the subject matter).

Google on Monday will begin giving users a new way to use their existing mobile phone number with parts of its Google Voice service.

No, it’s not a full number port, which the company still says is coming and will eventually allow things like call screening, conference calling, or listening into a call before picking up–all with your existing number. Instead, Google is taking advantage of conditional call forwarding to let users send unanswered calls to Google’s voice-mail service in place of the one provided by a user’s carrier.

Once sent to Google, those voice messages are transcribed, then made available for playback and review online, or as an SMS message. Users can also take advantage of Google Voice’s customized greeting service to give callers a different voice-mail greeting depending on what number they’re calling from.

If you have shot off emails to old girlfriends at 2 am after coming home from the bar or in a rage of anger to your boss, GMail Engineer Jon Perlow has developed the perfect drunk email filter at Google Labs with GMail Mail Goggles (which counteract the power of Beer Goggles). [No, this does not seem to be an April Fools joke.]

Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

You can set GMail Mail Goggles to work around your schedule, so if you find yourself shooting off non-coherent emails on Saturday nights, set Mail Goggles to work at those times. If only Facebook had Goggles

(CNN) — (CNN) — If you’re on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim.

Experts say cybercrooks are lurking just a mouse click away on popular social networking sites.

That’s because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

• The FBI reports nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases since 2006
• Online scam losses amounting to $264.6 million reported in 2008
• Facebook has automated systems that detect compromised accounts
• MySpace.com creates blacklists of phony accounts