Internet & Media

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun asking questions about Apple's role in the recent scaling back of special music discounts and promotions at Amazon, according to two high level music industry sources.

The sources said investigators have begun speaking to a number of digital music retailers and top record labels about Apple's response to the "MP3 Daily Deal," an Amazon promotion that involved slashing prices on specific titles and pushing them heavily the day they were released. Amazon sometimes negotiated with the labels to get exclusive access to the music for a day, and … Read more

It is hard to understand why some enterprising TV company hasn't already created a game show called "Breach of Privacy." This would entail people telling their stories of the most egregious ways in which their privacy was removed from them, with viewers voting for the winners.

Stephen Conroy, Australia's Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, would surely be a worthy contestant. In a senate committee that was set up to discuss Internet filtering, Conroy reportedly became so fired up that he was unable to keep his views about Google to himself.

According to the Telegraph, … Read more

Technology has made it possible for more of us to not only read the news but also write it via blogs and social-media sites. But do stories on the blogosphere differ from those in traditional media, and if so, how?

To peek behind the world of new media versus old media, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) spent about a year looking at the top news stories covered on blogs and social-media pages. It also kept tabs on seven months' worth of tweets on Twitter and a year's worth of news-related videos courtesy of … Read more

NEW YORK--AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wasn't yet at the company when it paid $850 million for social network Bebo two years ago, a purchase that's now considered to be one of the biggest tech industry M&A blunders of the past decade. On Tuesday, onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Armstrong said, "I don't know whether or not I would have bought Bebo. Looking backward, the answer's no, but in that time period with what was going on, maybe."

Indeed, at the time, would-be Facebook rival Bebo was extremely popular with teenagers in … Read more

Justin Bieber is everywhere. And if you're like so many others over the age of 15, you've seen enough. Luckily, a new Firefox add-on lets you remove all mentions of Bieber from the Web in one fell swoop.

The tool, dubbed Shaved Bieber, evaluates any page a person is browsing and censors all mentions of the teen idol. It works on every site, from Twitter to Google to Wikipedia. People can even go to his personal home page and watch as every mention of Bieber is blocked out.

Shaved Bieber is available in two versions: an add-on, which … Read more

Though Yahoo may have wanted to buy Foursquare, the company has found another way to hook into the world of location-based social networking.

Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has bought Koprol, a social network for mobile users. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, Koprol lets people make friends, share photos, and find popular nearby locations all on the go. The news comes a day after Yahoo and Nokia extended their 5-year-old partnership with an eye toward the rising interest in geo-location offerings, pledging to bring Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo, and Yahoo's e-mail and instant-messaging technology to Nokia's … Read more

Not long after Google acquired YouTube, the search engine offered nearly $600 million in guaranteed revenue if Viacom--the parent company of MTV Networks, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures--licensed its TV shows and films to YouTube, records show.

News of Google's offer was revealed in documents released on Friday by a Manhattan federal court and reviewed by CNET. In March 2007, Viacom filed a copyright lawsuit against Google and YouTube and it has become one of the most watched legal disputes in the tech sector.

In a deposition given by Google co-founder Larry Page on October 1, 2009, a Viacom … Read more

NEW YORK--When you ignore the map, sometimes you take a wrong turn. That's what Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz admitted her company did a few years ago when it stopped devoting significant engineering resources to its Yahoo Maps product.

Bartz held a press conference Monday with Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to announce a partnership that will bring Yahoo's e-mail and messenger services to Nokia's Ovi service and Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo. While the story on the surface is that Yahoo is gradually shedding its properties that have fallen behind, handing over the reins of its … Read more

Google, trying step by step to rebuild everything in the computing industry from Internet protocols to cloud-computing services, began a new project called WebM on Wednesday that seeks to begin a new chapter in Web video.

Even after Google's high-profile WebM announcement at its Google I/O conference, there's plenty of confusion, and some questions concerning the technology can't be answered yet. Here, however, is our attempt to demystify WebM and its effects.

WebM is a codec--but what's a codec? A codec is technology to encode and decode video or audio data. They're used … Read more