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In what must surely be a sign that schools and universities are under-funded, a network security dude at the University of Georgia has just been arrested for shaking down multiple file-downloading students.

Two weeks ago he approached a female student and said he could make the “situation go away in exchange for money” — he was promising to keep the data private, rather than forward it to the university administrators. In this case, the student didn’t have any money and went straight to a university official to report the nefarious network nerd. He was promptly arrested by the police — job done! (If anyone’s wondering, this is the best way to get out of blackmail situations… don’t give in to their demands! Don’t deal with terrorists! Never eat yellow snow!)

There’s no hint of how much money the guy was trying to extract from the girl, nor any hint of whether he tried to obtain other forms of ‘payment’ instead. But still… maybe it’s not the RIAA or MPAA that you should be most worried about, students!

[via CNET]

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University of Georgia – Download Squad – Recording Industry Association of America – Student – Education

Can you image your soul laid bare, every sin and broken promise shown in grim detail to the one you love above all others? “You don’t know what it was like!” Dante screams, anguished, as his beloved witnesses a particularly heinous act from his past.

“Yes, she does,” Satan replies. “I have shown her.”

Dante’s Inferno is not for the faint of heart. It’s also not exactly true to the source material, using names and ideas more as a jumping off point than as straight inspiration. The story follows Dante, who fans of the original work may be amused to find is a powerful soldier, as he fights to save the soul of a woman. As he travels through the circles of hell, we witness the immoral acts he took part in during his time with the crusades, through both computer-generated and traditional animation. This is a beautiful game, both during gameplay and during the story sections, with a strong sense of both purpose and design.

Forget the last 10 years of post-Napster industry annihilation – Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is now seeing growing income from both music sales and music publishing – but only if you factor in overseas sales; the U.S. business is still in rewind…

—Music sales: October-to-December recorded-music income was 3.4 percent up from 2008 – but that’s because international sales, from where WMG gets most of its money, jumped 12.7 percent; U.S. sales are down 9.5 percent. Global digital income is up 10.3 percent from last year, “driven by continued strength in international download revenue”, and now makes up 22 percent of music sales (or 34.7 percent in the U.S.).

—Music publishing: Same picture: income from licensing tunes to services, games etc was up 4.4 percent from 2008’s period, but thanks to 9.2 percent international growth; U.S. publishing income is down 4.2 percent. Digital licensing income didn’t row at all over the year, but only due to timing of when WMG actually collected the royalties. It’s traditional media that are really helping – use of tunes in TV and movies helped synchronization revenue up 13.6 percent. Digital makes up only 10.6 percent of publishing income – perhaps reflecting the low rates that labels get from online services.

Across the board, the quarter’s digital revenue is up eight percent from the same period in 2008 to $184 million, though is unchanged compared with the previous three months in 2009; digital made up 20 percent of the company’s revenue.

Revenue was 3.5 percent up from 2008’s corresponding quarter to $918 million, but WMG swings to a $17 million net loss because the previous year included a one-off gain of $36 million from the sale of its Front Line Management stake.

WMG lost 8.8 percent of its total U.S. income over the year, but international sales jumped by 12.1 percent. “U.S. results were tempered by continued general economic pressures and the transition from physical sales to digital sales in the recorded music industry,” the release explains.

Release | Webcast | Figures

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Yesterday, the day after after Google aired its first national commercial on the Super Bowl, an exec at a rival Internet company marveled at what high favorable scores the “Parisian Love” advertisement got, adding that the possibilities of spoofs of it were also endless.

“I have a feeling that making fun of it will probably be a good thing for Google,” sighed the exec, who would dearly like such attention.

BoomTown doubts anyone at Google (GOOG) meant it that way. But, indeed, it did not take two seconds before the take-offs on the ad–a sentimental, but effective, ongoing story about love in Paris, using only Google’s iconic search box–appeared.

Sources at the search giant said the ad, which was actually launched many months ago, was an in-house favorite already and the massive marketing spending recently by both Yahoo (YHOO) and especially for Bing from Microsoft (MSFT)–clocking in at $100 million each–finally prompted the gauge-the-reaction move.

It seems to have gotten that, especially from those who like to poke fun.

And, both these videos below do it well–one by Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on a more problematic Paris romance and one on Tiger Woods’s search history frome Slate V. I also added the original Google ad below it:

Parisian Oops

Is Tiger Feeling Lucky Today?

Parisian Love

In an move to simplify storage of data in a web-based cloud, Nasuni is unveiling new storage technology, the Nasuni Filer.

It’s a complex solution, but it simplifies how mid-sized and small businesses can get additional storage. You can sign up to get a new account and start uploading data to the cloud storage in as little as 15 minutes. The Natick, Mass., company says it effectively creates a “storage as a service” business.

Businesses can use Nasuni not just for backup; it’s fast enough for primary storage, said Andres Rodriguez, chief executive. That’s because Nasuni allows for a combination of local and cloud storage. The user keeps about 100 gigabytes of data on local disks inside the business. That storage is backed up to the cloud, but it is also accessible. The user can access that data at high speeds.

“We want to knock down the barriers that keep ordinary users away from taking advantage of cloud storage,” he said.

The Nasuni Filer is a virtual NAS (network attached storage) file server that runs on VMware virtualization software. It is targeted at the mid-market of companies that don’t want to buy their own giant storage systems from companies such as EMC or NetApp at high capital costs.

The Nasuni solution lets a business add storage on an incremental basis, adding it or deleting it as needed. Capacity in web-connected data centers, or the cloud, is unlimited. Companies using Nasuni pay for only what they need, as they need it. That lets companies avoid infrastructure expenses, said Laura DuBois, research director at market analyst IDC in its storage software division.

The service has features that are important to businesses such as advanced caching, snapshot, and deduplication technologies. The system lets a company administrator easily manage the storage capacity, without needing to buy and install actual hardware. The Nasuni Filer is available now for download for free during the beta testing period.

Nasuni has backup for its data center for disaster protection, and it has built-in file protection for better security. Nasuni captures the entire file system on an hourly basis and saves snapshots to the cloud. The files themselves are not visible to Nasuni itself or the cloud vendors.

Essentially, Nasuni provides the software for virtualized storage. It lets users pick which cloud service they want to use, such as Iron Mountain or Amazon S3 storage. More partners will be available later. After the beta test is done, Nasuni will charge $200 per storage filer per month, on top of the cloud vendor fees, which it passes through without markup for the user to pay.

The company was founded by storage industry veterans Rodriguez and Robert Mason in 2009 and has 25 employees. Competitors include Twinstrata and Cirtas. Nasuni raised $8 million in a first round in March, 2009, from Sigma Venture Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

IAC (NSDQ: IACI) bit an accounting bullet in Q4, taking a $991 million impairment charge for its search & media business—including Ask and excluding Citysearch. Without that after-tax charge and an unrelated write down for $12.2 million, IAC would have turned in earnings per share of $.20, an 88 percent drop from the same quarter last year but still beating estimates.(Q408 net last year was affected by a one-time pre-tax gain.) With those, IAC lost just over $1 billion, or $7.94 per share. Not to worry, it still has that $1.7 billion of cash waiting for just the right occasion.

Those are the eye-popping numbers—and we’ll have more about the reasons when Chairman and CEO Barry Diller meets with analysts later this morning. But that’s not the whole story for Q4. Revenue was up five percent to $367 million, while operating income before amortization rose 47 percent to $41.4 million on cost savings for the sales or shutdowns of businesses and better results from the Search and Match segments. More to come.

Earnings release | Webcast (11 a.m.)

We already know that Windows 7 is growing faster than Vista was when it was released, but how fast are gamers adopting it? Pretty darn quickly, according to January 2010 data from Steam, the leader of the digital distribution market. Last month, the percentage of users on Windows 7 eclipsed the number of users on Windows Vista. Windows XP is still leading the pack, but it is under the 50 percent mark:

Data source: Steam

It’s also worth noting that Windows 7 is the first version of Windows where gamers are adopting 64-bit faster than 32-bit. In fact, there are more users on Windows 7 64-bit than any other flavor of Windows, except for Windows XP 32-bit. Overall, XP dropped 2.63 percent from the previous month, Vista dropped 2.8 percent, and Windows 7 gained 5.47 percent. At this rate, we would expect Windows 7 to take the crown before the end of the year.

Each month, Steam collects and compiles data about the hardware and software its customers are using so that game developers can ensure they are making good decisions about what technology should take priority in their support plans. If you’re wondering, Intel is still beating AMD and NVIDIA is still beating ATI. To check out more details and the rest of the statistics, which are primarily hardware-based, head over to the link below.

New data from comScore shows Google’s Android doubled its US marketshare from September to December, and is now closing in on Palm.

According to comScore, Google has 5.2% of the smartphone platform share, while Palm has just 6.1%. Google finally found its way onto Verizon in the fourth quarter of last year, which helped boost its share. Palm just arrived at Verizon, so it might be able to fend off Google’s advance this coming quarter.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Dominates Smartphone Growth In Q4
• Nokia Delivers A Surprise With Growth In Smartphone Share
• CHART OF THE DAY: iPhone Has 30% Of Smartphone Market

From time to time, we look at how Enterprise 2.0 practices are reaching into companies.

A recent post by Michael Idinopulos demonstrates how the premises for finding Enterprise 2.0 champions is often flawed. Too often the search is for the right personality. Instead, the focus of the search should really be for the people who are “exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization.”

Sponsor

Idinopulos compares it to how The Godfather’s Don Corleone would approach the issue when choosing the right people for the job: “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.” In other words, people are chosen for their role in the organization not for who they are as people.

Let’s just say the “Godfather,” process is still not widely used. Often, managers look for the “it” factor. Here are a few of the more common things Idinopulos has heard managers say they are looking for:

• The Young and Hip: “Jimmy’s only 28. He grew up on Facebook!”
• The Tech-Savvy: “Mary’s always got the latest gadget. She’s a natural for this!”
• The Connectors: “Martin knows everybody. He’s the ideal social networker!”
• The Visionaries: “Isabel is so visionary. She’ll totally get what we’re trying to do!”

Idinopulos makes the point that these psychological attributes don’t work for a few reasons:

• The premise that just a few have such talents is repudiated by the fact that it gets adopted by any number of people who don’t fit into any one category
• They re not actionable. How can you scale this across an organization of 5,000 to 10,000 employees?
• The signal does not transmit. Do you know the lonely social media evangelist? The one who finally just gives up and says people “just don’t get it.” The enthusiasm has to transfer to the organization.

It’s evident a methodology is emerging for how to make Enterprise 2.0 a deep institutional focus. Companies like the Dachis Group and Pragmatic Enterprise are pioneering new methods to help clients institute technologies and practices that fit with the social enterprise.

Dion Hinchcliffe and Michael Krigsman of Pragmatic Enterprise take a holistic approach. They look at the political, technical and business issues that come with any social Web initiative. They look for executive champions who want to use social technologies to solve a business problem. Once the problem is identified, a process begins that seeks out the spectrum of opinions about the
project and the use of Enterprise 2.0 practices for the group.

The business world is developing its own methods for how it makes social technologies a part of the business process. At times it may be surprising how the technologies get adopted. Idinopulos points to a marketing manager who turned out to be responsible for attracting thousands to a Socialtext environment that Idinopulos and his group had implemented for the company:

“Because the Marketing Manager’s commitment to social media wasn’t a personal thing, it transferred quickly to other parts of the business. Other Marketing groups got wind of the project, and started posting their own content, creating their own workspaces, starting their own conversations. Then it started to spread beyond Marketing, to Sales and Product groups that had initially participated as consumers of Marketing content. Marketing’s cross-silo reach positioned them to involve different parts of the organization, which then went on to do their own thing. That would not have happened if Marketing’s success had been a function of one person’s passion.”

The example is proof that the enthusiasm comes from how the social technologies help people in their work so the business can prosper. As the Godfather would say:

“It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

Discuss

Last week, an Australian federal judge issued a major ruling—the first of its kind worldwide—saying that ISPs aren’t required to take action against subscribers after receiving letters alleging copyright infringement. But lost in most of the discussion of the ruling is another hot topic, net neutrality. If you want a good look at what a non-neutral ‘Net looks like, take a gander at Australia.

The judge’s ruling discussed the business practices of Australia’s third-largest ISP, iiNet, and in doing so reminded non-Aussie readers about a defining feature of Internet life Down Under: bandwidth caps. Such caps are common around the world, but Australian ISPs take the idea one step further by setting up partnerships with entertainment services and music download companies. Any data usage directed at one of these favored services doesn’t count against the monthly bandwidth cap.

South Africa’s Naspers and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies (DST) are in talks to pool their Polish social networks Gadu-Gadu and Nasza-klasa.pl, according to Russian business daily Kommersant, citing “a source close to the deal”.

Naspers, which owns Gadu-Gadu outright, is reportedly doing due diligence on Forticom, the DST-owned social network operator that bought its 75 percent stake in Nasza-Klasa.pl for $92 million in 2008. We’ve got queries in with both sides – DST tells us: “We do not comment on any market speculation”

Shareholdings in Russia and eastern Europe are a piecemeal patchwork – partial stakes change hands with ease…

Naspers and DST already co-own Russia’s top portal Mail.ru, together with Tiger Global. And DST’s Forticom holds 25 percent in Russia’s top social network Odnoklassniki.ru, as well as its own social net One in its native Lithuania and Latvia. But Kommersant says this deal would include only both companies’ Polish assets.

Like Odnoklassniki.ru and Facebook, Nasza-Klasa.pl (Poland’s leading social net, with 27 million registered users) started as a classmates’ network, but Gadu-Gadu is an ICQ-like chat service, claiming seven million users. Combined, they would command a third of Polish daily interview views, according to an analyst quoted by Kommersant. The deal will mean both companies can better control advertising on the Polish sites, which command important expatriate audiences in Russia and the UK, as well as at home.

Naspers’ internet arm MIH has transformed the company from merely a South African broadcaster in to a global internet player through acquisitions in developing markets. As well as the important Mail.ru stake, it now owns a string of properties including China’s QQ instant messager and Holland’s NumBuzz social net gateway.

Digital Sky Technologies is the lynchpin in a Russian digital media investment landscape that’s fast becoming as important overseas as it is at home. It paid $200 million for 1.96 percent of Facebook last year.

Forticom itself is bullish – CEO Yasar Nasin told December’s Noah conference in London it would be “Europe’s biggest internet company” by this year. It currently has revenue in the “triple-digit million dollars” and “middle double digit million” in income, he said.

It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad – not only will the former will run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different.

So publishers who have already found a degree of incremental revenue from iPhone are now looking for another increment from its bigger brother…

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, whose newspaper shifted 70,000 downloads of its £2.39 iPhone app in its first month despite the company opposing web paywalls in principle, tells Reuters…

“That’s not a transformative thing, but it is a signal that people are prepared to pay on mobile. It’s perfectly possible that the iPad, if we get the right functionality and design, could produce interesting, significant revenue streams.”

“If we can make people pay on mobile, then we should – what I’m against is a universal paywall that puts all your content behind.”

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.