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NewsGator converted its popular RSS feed aggregation clients to freeware in January 2008, and now that seed has borne fruit: recommended fruit, to be precise.

NewsGator's new Recommended Stories filter introduces users to stories and feeds they aren't already subscribed to, but might like.

(Credit: NewsGator)

Partnering with SenseArray, a collaborative filter from Uprizer Labs, NewsGator now offers live RSS feed recommendations from feeds that the user hasn't already subscribed to. Currently available only on the online NewsGator client, the filter pulls information from NewsGator as well as its sibling desktop clients, FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac so that users who synchronize their RSS data will be contributing to the list of recommendations.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator's vice president of products, compared the process to more common Web-based ratings systems. "It takes attention from the client or online site, just like your rating on Amazon, but you're rating it with attention." That attention, he said, comes from marking a post as read--essentially telling the filter that you like it. If enough people do that and the post matches your interest, it might be suggested to you as news you'd like but haven't seen yet.

Kellner said that NewsGator will be making two kinds of recommendations. The first, a general news category, is "wide-open," as he puts it, but limited to posts from the past two days. The second is narrowed down to categories, such as entertainment or sports, and more heavily utilizes the SenseArray filters. These more specific recommendations are limited to not more than a week old, and should be adjustable to the tastes of the user.

The challenge, Kellner added, was how to recommend current stories that users aren't already getting. "We pull in six million events per week that we think are relevant." But the system won't be perfect initially. "Over time, we'll see what adjustments we need to make."

NewsGator does have plans to push the recommendations feature out to its desktop clients, but there isn't a timeline for that, yet.

Belkin FlyWire: A wireless HDMI product that's due later in 2008.

(Credit: Belkin)

HDMI has certainly had its growing pains, but the connection is finally beginning to deliver on its original promise: a single-cable solution for delivering high-bandwidth, all-digital HD video and multichannel audio. HDMI is nearly universal in the home video market, present on all current HDTVs and Blu-ray players, as well as nearly all HD-capable cable and satellite set-top boxes; DVRs; game consoles; AV receivers; upscaling DVD players and recorders; and network video streamers such as the Apple TV. In fact, you realize just how convenient HDMI is when you come across a product without it--I'm looking at you, Nintendo Wii--and then have five cables (three component video wires plus two-channel stereo) instead of one crowding the back of your home entertainment system.

But one aspect of the HDMI promise remains unfulfilled: wireless HDMI. It's an attractive idea, especially for anybody with a wall-mounted flat-panel TV or a ceiling-mounted projector: have all of your HDMI-capable gear running into an AV receiver or HDMI switcher with a wireless HDMI transmitter, and have the TV equipped with a matching receiver--thus allowing you to have all your AV sources across the room from the actual display. We've been hearing about it for years, but to date, there are few--if any--products that you can actually buy. Here's a quick update on the wireless HDMI products we've heard about to date--including when (or whether) we can expect to see them:

Cover of Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold As Love

Before the emergence of digital music, album covers were an integral part of music buying.

As people thumbed through record racks, eye-catching album art could prove to be a deciding factor on whether people bought. The cover could convey something about the music inside or whether the act was creative or cool.

Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold as Love, Led Zepplin's Houses of the Holy, Peter Gabriel 3, The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are just a few classic works.

But in the digital age, people hunt for music on computer screens, and an album cover is often reduced to a thumbnail print if it even accompanies the music at all. Wired.com has a couple of stories on how designers are trying to keep up with the changing times.

"We've been looking at a few technologies (for digital album art) and have been trying to bring these to Apple, to encourage them to bring that level of experience to the iPod," George White, Warner Music Group's senior VP of strategy and product development told Wired. "A very simple demonstration that we've done takes the Gnarls Barkley liner notes and does a fly-through (using Adobe Flash Lite). You're actually moving through the lyrics and artwork...It's really cool-looking on an iPod."

Those crazy guys behind the LimeWire file-sharing application have set up a DRM-free music store--LimeWire Store--where users can choose from 500,000 MP3s, taken from the catalogs of absolutely no major labels. Alternatively, users can download free, lossless versions of millions of songs from every major label using the usual LimeWire "technique." Which, RIAA lawyers would likely argue, is illegal.

If skepticism were a flavor of ice cream, we'd be sitting here with the world's most excruciating brain freeze. Napster managed to redeem itself by having its name bought by another company, having its P2P application vanquished and by offering titles from major labels. LimeWire, however, still operates its hated-by-the-entertainment-industry network of downloaders, and we don't expect Sony or Warner Music to sign any distribution deals until its roster of artists are blocked from the controversial network.

To be fair, LimeWire's new service (which is currently in beta) could be a great place to go looking for new bands and underground artists. In contrast to eMusic's subscription model, LimeWire offers pay-per-track pricing, so you can quickly pick and choose your downloads without committing yourself to recurring monthly charges.

Downloads go for anything between 30 cents (15 pence) and 99 cents (50 pence), with subscriptions varying between $10 (5 pounds) a month for 25 songs, and $20 (10 pounds) a month for 75 songs. eMusic offers plans from 8.99 pounds for 30 songs a month, to 14.99 pounds for 75 songs a month, but it backs those with a library of three million songs. The LimeWire Store is also only available in the U.S., but we couldn't find a single song we'd want to buy for 15 pence anyway.

As a purely Web-based service at the moment, the site is at least attractive, with music reviews written by LimeWire's "real live music-loving employees, drawing upon their years of music industry experience." Terrific.

Maybe those people pirating FLAC files of Amy Whinehouse or Peter Andrex from LimeWire's usual service will have more love than we do. We think you'd be better off watching Encoded.

(Source: Crave UK)

A Seattle man has been sentenced to more than four years in prison in what prosecutors say was the first federal case against someone using file-sharing software to steal identities.

Gregory Kopiloff, 35, was sentenced Monday to 51 months in prison, according to a report in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Kopiloff pleaded guilty in November to mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud. Kopiloff used programs such as LimeWire to gain access to personal information in tax returns, credit reports, bank statements, and student financial-aid applications of more than 50 people, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office. He then used the information to buy and resell more than $73,000 in merchandise, the release said.

While music and movie piracy cases are common, the Justice Department called Kopiloff's prosecution its first case against someone accused of using peer-to-peer programs to commit identity theft.

What's more worrisome than a public MySpace page? A page that the user only thinks is private. I was just alerted to several stories by Kevin Poulsen of Wired News that publicize recent security breaches on MySpace.

Poulsen reported on January 17 about a MySpace Bug that leaks "private" teen photos to voyeurs. He wrote, "A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles--including those under 16--despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months."

These message boards include self-described groups of "pedos" who hacked into underage-girls' private MySpace profiles. According to Poulsen, one poster reported successfully pilfering photos from a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl, "It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts."

On January 18, Poulsen updated the story to say that the next day, MySpace quietly fixed that back-door bug, without publicly acknowledging the problem, even though users' profiles had been vulnerable for months.

Recently I was fortunate to interview Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and the keynote speaker for the Open Source Think Tank, coming up February 7-9 in Napa Valley, Calif. Given Chris' views, I think he's an ideal person to headline an event whose theme is "The Future of Commercial Open Source." (While attendance is by invitation only, you can still apply for admittance.)

Everyone has heard about Chris Anderson's article, book, and blog, The Long Tail. If you haven't, you don't live on this planet (not that there's anything wrong with that). Anderson's theory--that there is big opportunity in lots of little markets--resonates in a world whose technology increasingly permits, encourages, and even requires that we move beyond mass market product development to cater to individual tastes.

As Chris put it in his original Wired article:

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching--a market response to inefficient distribution.

Free products (or, at least, their discovery) from the physical world, however, and the economics of consumption change. Dramatically.

I spent some time talking with Chris to see how his theory applies to open source. His ideas pushed me to re-examine my own, as my thoughts on how the Long Tail would apply to open source turned out to be a bit naive...

A lab at the University of Ghent has come up with electric, elastic wires.

Electric elastic wires-- it sounds like a band Peter Max would have hung out with in the late 60s, doesn?t it? Actually, these are electric interconnects that give consumer electronic devices a greater range of motion, according to the story in EE Times, which always does an admirable job of covering overseas trends. Thus, a manufacturer could build flexible displays or e-paper with greater reliability.

The group embedded 4-micron gold wires in a silicone film. The wire itself is horseshoe shaped, or in other words, longer than it would ordinarily be to connect two points. To further increase strechiness, the wire is divided into four parallel tracks.

A few companies have come out with thin, paper-like displays, but component breakthroughs like this could help them move toward the mainstream. Among some of the more active companies in this area are Universal Display (OLED screens), LiquaVista (a spin-off from Philips) and E-Ink (out of research at MIT.)

In what federal prosecutors are calling the first case of its kind, a Seattle man on Thursday was arrested for allegedly using the popular Lime Wire peer-to-peer file-sharing software to get access to tax returns, credit reports, bank statements and student financial-aid applications housed on hundreds of computers across the United States.

The scheme allegedly undertaken by 35-year-old Gregory Kopiloff worked something like this, according to the U.S. Department of Justice: He'd use identity information gleaned from those documents to open credit accounts over the Internet, buy goods over the Internet, ship them to various mailboxes in the Puget Sound area and resell the merchandise for about half its retail price. Investigators said his scheme had nabbed 80 victims and racked up more than $70,000.

A screen shot of Lime Wire software

(Credit: download.com)

"Law enforcement has known for some time that criminals are exploiting peer-to-peer file sharing to secretly gain remote access to victims' computers to search for personal information," Jeffrey Sullivan, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, said in a statement.

If the charges of mail fraud and "accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud" hold up, Kopiloff could face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. If convicted on an "aggravated identity theft" charge, his prison sentence would be increased by two years.

From the outside looking in, it seems likely that the alleged thefts occurred because the "victims" in question--or perhaps users who shared their computers--accidentally configured their software in a way that exposed directories containing the sensitive items.

CNET News.com readers may recall that Lime Wire's CEO caught an earful from Congress earlier this summer at a hearing in which politicians claimed peer-to-peer networks pose a threat to national security because of the possibility of such "inadvertent" file sharing. Lime Wire at the time vigorously defended itself, maintaining that its product offers its users ample warnings designed to ensure they don't select vulnerable folders for sharing with others.

But one has to wonder if the criminal allegations revealed Thursday will inflame those earlier arguments that the peer-to-peer software maker hasn't made it clear enough how to close off certain directories to outside snooping. Lime Wire, for its part, has some tips on how to make sure the software is set up to your liking.