From a New York Times report about goings-on at the MIDEM music industry conference:

Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

Source: Boing Boing: Big record labels contemplate switch to DRM-free MP3s?

NEWARK – Computer users in New Jersey can expect that personal information they give their Internet service providers will be treated as private, a state appellate court decided yesterday in the first such case considered in the state.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

Many home PC users may have been infected after a large-scale sustained Trojan horse attack that took place over the weekend.

Source: ‘Storm Worm’ Trojan horse surges on

An anonymous reader writes “At a recent talk at the Computer History Museum Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, warned against net neutrality legislation that could hinder experimentation and innovation. Calling ‘net neutrality’ a slogan, Khan also cautioned against ‘dogmatic views of network architecture.’ A video of the talk is also available.”

Source: Father of Internet Warns Against Net Neutrality

EggsAndSausage writes “Microsoft has granted, in a roundabout way, that Vista has ‘high impact issues.’ It has put out an email call for technical users to participate in testing Service Pack 1, due out later this year, which will address ‘regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP, security, deployment blockers and other high impact issues.’ It’s hard to know whether to be reassured that Service Pack 1 is coming in the second half of 2007, and thus that there is a timeframe for considering deployment of Vista within businesses, or to be alarmed that Microsoft is unleashing an OS on the world with ‘high impact issues’ still remaining.” In other news, one blogger believes that Vista is the first Microsoft OS since Windows 3.1 to have regressed in usability from its predecessor (he kindly forgives and dismisses Windows ME). And there’s a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get Vista or not to get Vista.

Source: Microsoft Admits Vista Has “High Impact Issues”

Want to add a couple of cool features to your Web site without delving into the world of Web programing? In this case, you might want to give GreyBox a try. It’s a tiny (only 22KB) JavaScript-based tool, released under the LGPL, that allows you to add page-in-a-page and gallery features using just a few easy-to-understand lines of code (check GreyBox’ Web site for some examples).

Source: GreyBox: Jazz up your Web site in 10 minutes

Hello, After a rather long break I am in the process of starting IT Admins (www.itadmins.net) back up. At the moment is content at a minimum, however, as soon as I start getting articles in I will be…

Source: IT Admins is back!

Centeris released on Tuesday a product that lets network administrators manage multiple environments on the same computer. Likewise Identify 3.0 is a cross-platform application that joins Linux and Unix machines to a Windows Active Directory. This major upgrade extends directories to all of the structures on a network with one password, Centeris officials said. The Bellevue, Wash.-based Centeris develops Windows and Linux server management tools for mid-market and enterprise operations.

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Source: New Centeris Application Unifies Linux, Unix, Windows

Last year we witnessed the rise of consumer mashups on the Web, with hundreds of individual mashup-based Web applications being released in 2006 alone. I covered this phenomenon in detail in my year-end mashup wrap-up, but now this innovation in software development is gearing up to move inside the enterprise as a raft of tools get ready to provide the tools to make it possible. What will this mean for IT departments and end-users? Let’s take a look.

The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant.In decades past, the new ideas in computing originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the consumer world later on (things like databases, computer networks, file servers, and so on). However in the Web 2.0 era, for reasons too complex to go into here, new ideas and approaches are germinating more on the consumer Web than from the enterprise space.Mashups are example of this kind of hacker-style creation that emerged from the laboratory of the Web; new high-value applications created out of the raw pieces of other high-value apps. The technique of using the browser itself as the location for rapid, on-the-fly integration of functionality (widgets) and services showed how easy integration could be done on at the point of consumption with simple Web technologies like XML, Ajax, and Javascript snippets. From an enterprise perspective, it gave a lot of people pause to see how easy it could be done (Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com being the original example), compared to the methods used by formal and costly enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture projects.

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PITTSBURGH — How much does your child know about cyber safety? How much do you know? According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 89 percent of children are using the Internet for social networking, but less than 34 percent of their parents are aware of this activity.

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I’m not surprised that only 34% or parents know what their children are doing online. Come on people, it’s a big scary cyber-world out there. We really need to know what’s going on!

Here’s a few links to get you started.

Information for Parents from the FBI web site.

Internet Safety from Wired Saftey

Internet Safety from Kids Health