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The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.

It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of … Read more

The next installment of MySpace.com and MTV's "presidential dialogue" series will take place at 10:30 a.m. PDT Monday, October 29, at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The featured candidate will be Democratic contender Barack Obama, a U.S. Senator from Illinois. Moderators will be MTV News correspondents Gideon Yago and Sway Calloway, along with Chris Cillizza, a reporter for The Washington Post's online branch.

The Obama dialogue will be streamed live on MySpace's Election 2008 page, on MTV's Choose or Lose election site, and to cell phone customers who have … Read more

Recently, rumors have been flying over whether or not MySpace would use this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco as a venue for announcing a developer platform akin to Facebook's. Well, now we have a final answer: sort of.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took the stage at Web 2.0 and confirmed that the company is working on a platform that will launch "within a couple of months." But when no date's given, expect delays: considering how long we ultimately waited for Windows Vista (and now, Apple'… Read more

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform "within a couple of months."

After the platform opens to developers, it will open to a subset of users, about two million, to see if the "sandbox" that keeps that platform safe is reliable.

Before we all get MySpace apps, we'll get a catalog of widgets that we can add to your pages. Widgets aren't apps, though. … Read more

At a recent conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of space travel, scientists predicted that the next 50 years will uncover that we're not alone in the universe.

Some researchers believe that time may be sooner than later.

Scientists at the Geneva Observatory of Switzerland have reportedly discovered a "second Earth," a planet that's circling a star 20 light-years away. According to an article from the Guardian in the United Kingdom, the scientists said the planet's warm and rocky conditions are most like Earth's, meaning that it could likely support water and life.

"We … Read more

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link their profiles to Skype accounts, and will be able to place voice chat calls through the MySpaceIM client or the Skype client to both Skype and MySpace members--but if your MySpace profile is set to "private," you will be exempt from calls from people who aren't on … Read more

The days of bringing a wad of wrinkly $5 bills to space are over. Finally, a form of currency built for space travellers by National Space Centre scientists is here.

According to this BBC News story, the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (Quid for short) are coins custom-built for purchasing goods and services in space. The currency was designed by the U.K.'s National Space Centre and the University of Leicester for foreign exchange service Travelex.

The rounded, disc-shaped coins look a bit like skipping stones. Thanks to being made from the same polymer as nonstick pans, they will not … Read more

Tech gossip blog Valleywag is attempting to counter the TechCrunch-spawned rumor that MySpace.com will be following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up its site to developers.

Sources in touch with the Gawker Media-owned blog allegedly said that MySpace is indeed brewing a developer platform strategy and that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be making an announcement at next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco--but the two are unrelated.

The announcement, according to Valleywag blogger Megan McCarthy (no relation), will instead deal with MySpace's instant messaging client. Additionally, she wrote, MySpace will … Read more

I came across a very disturbing social networking site last week called Yuwie. It's another site that's decided that for some reason, using a free, and highly functional social service populated by your friends (like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.) is worth ditching for something built with very little ease of use or original design, but created to help you make ludicrous amounts of money by selling out your friends.

It works like this: you get a share of money for every page view on the service (the site makes its money by selling ads). Also, the more people visit your page, the more page views you get a percentage of. Yuwie then takes it a step further with referrals, letting you get a percentage of money from the activity of any friends you've invited to the service, along with their friends, and people who their friends have invited. This goes on for 10 "levels," so you could theoretically have close to 100,000 referrals if your friends and their invitees continue to invite others who use the service beyond the one-month probation period.

Does this idea sound familiar? It's a pyramid scheme. The problem with this, economically, is that it's unsustainable. The people at the top can't possibly pay out the promised amount, and the people stuck at the bottom aren't getting the same benefits as those who have spammed referrals to their friends higher up in the chain. Speaking of spam, even if you're on there with your friends, you're bound to get an intolerable amount of spam from people you don't know as the service grows. The second most popular group on the service at the moment has been specifically designed as a place to add random groups of other folks to beef up your bonus money. Is this the kind of network you want to be a part of? At least the site isn't asking for a sign-up fee--if it did, it'd be illegal. And it ought to be.

The worst part is that Yuwie is pretty much a carbon copy of MySpace, circa two years ago, with nearly identical profile features--meaning you're not really getting anything more than you would with a mainstream social network.… Read more