Craigslist to meet with state AGs over sex ads

Updated at 5:20 p.m. with Craigslist statement.

Three state attorneys general plan to meet with Craigslist representatives to begin negotiations toward eliminating advertisements from the site for prostitution and other suspected illegal sexual activities.

State attorneys general from Missouri, Illinois, and Connecticut will represent a group of state attorneys general in a meeting Tuesday in New York City with representatives of the Web site.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said his office found several ads offering and seeking prostitution on Craigslist pages for the Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbia/Jefferson City, and Springfield areas.

"Craigslist is allowing … Read more

Next up for Pirate Bay defendants: Italian trial?

Having just made it through a high-profile trial in their native Sweden, four men closely associated with The Pirate Bay may now have to face justice in Italy.

IDG is reporting that that country is now considering initiating its own prosecution of Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström for alleged violations of Italy's copyright law. This would be the first criminal prosecution against the four Pirate Bay players outside their home nation.

On April 17, the four defendants were found guilty of having made copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the … Read more

Facebook shuts down KKK group

The Isle of Man is, perhaps, one of the lesser-known parts of the world.

Perched in the Irish Sea, slightly to the left of some of the more miserable parts of England, it is most famous for a motorcycle race in which someone always seems to get killed.

Now the Isle, whose strange three-legged flag looks like something the Masons might appreciate, is famous for something more: a Ku Klux Klan Facebook group.

It seems some wise and sensitive people decided to get together and "Keep the Isle of Man white and free from foreigners." They dubbed themselves … Read more

Conservation groups say eBay should ban trophy hunt sales

Conservation groups praised eBay for banning the sale of ivory products in December, but on Friday they criticized the online auction site for allowing the sale of trophy hunts of lions, leopards, bears, wolves, and other animals.

Raincoast Conservation and Big Wildlife urged eBay in February to stop posting guided hunts of large predators on the auction site, arguing that trophy hunting of carnivores puts species at risk. Under guided hunts, hunters typically seek thousands of dollars up front to pay for a hunting trip and then get the remainder of the fee after an animal has been killed.

On … Read more

Lime Wire tells Congress its P2P software is safe now

In response to the reopening of an investigation into inadvertent file sharing with peer-to-peer software, an executive for Lime Wire told Congress in a letter on Friday that the new version of the program is "the most secure file-sharing software available."

The main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives reopened a probe of Lime Wire and other peer-to-peer file-sharing companies last week, citing data breaches blamed on the technology.

In February, a security firm alleged that information about President Obama's helicopter was breached via P2P. There have also been reports of inadvertent exposure of … Read more

Week in review: RealDVD takes the stand

The question of whether consumers will be given a legal means to make copies of DVDs inched closer to an answer this week as a preliminary hearing got under way in the movie studios' case against RealNetwork's DVD-ripping software.

The case before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel--the same judge who ruled against Napster--was filed last year by the Motion Picture Association of America in an attempt to stop the sale of RealNetwork's RealDVD software. RealDVD lets users copy DVDs to their computer hard drive. The case is being watched closely as it has the potential to lead … Read more

iPhone's killer app: E-books?

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica took a look (slides below) at the developers behind the most successful applications on the iPhone and found that electronic books may be the killer app, simply because there is a such of wealth of offerings.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Apple's App Store features about 40,000 different apps. Based on recent data, game developers have on average, 2.3 apps in the store while typical e-book vendors have 18 apps, which obviously stacks the odds in their favor.

What's interesting about this is that this news suggests that the iPhone really is a … Read more

Will 'Wolverine' benefit from (Bit)Torrent of publicity?

Outfitted with a skeleton forged from a super alloy, the comic book hero Wolverine is supposed to be indestructible.

After a raw version of the movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" leaked to the Web last month, 20th Century Fox is hoping the action pic, which debuts Friday, is nearly as durable.

Hollywood has been in a near frenzy since April 1, when someone--who has yet to be identified--leaked a copy of "Wolverine" to the Web. The fear was that the unauthorized copy would hurt ticket sales. "Wolverine" cost more than $100 million to make.

Some … Read more

IAC in talks to buy Yahoo Personals

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

InterActiveCorp chief Barry Diller said the company is in talks to buy Yahoo Personals to augment its Match.com business.

The comments were made on IAC's first quarter conference call this week (Techmeme). Here's what Diller said:

We are very interested. We'd love to have Yahoo! Personals and I think there is some initial discussions about that, whether they're going away or not is of course enormously speculative. But I think, Yahoo! has said that it's not an absolute core asset their future and it … Read more