News written by Matti Robinson (February, 2008)

Toshiba has officially announced that the company will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. After many unofficial announcements by different sources, the company has confirmed in a press release that the development of HD DVD has ended. Toshiba will be reducing the shipments of HD DVD players towards the cessation by the end of March 2008.

First reported by the Japanese public broadcaster NHK and after that by a source from Toshiba, Warner and couple of major retailers, such as Best Buy, Netflix and Wal-mart, dropping HD DVD was too much for the camp. Toshiba promises that it will still provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

Media and analysts have speculated the future of HD DVD frequently since Warner turned Blu. During the last couple of weeks the emphasis of speculations has been on when HD DVD will lose, rather than will it lose the war. The most recent turn-ups were when Netflix and Best Buy announced support for Blu-ray, and Toshiba's reply to those was considered by some to be the last breath.

According to Hollywood Reporter, "reliable industry sources" claim that Toshiba will be abandoning its high-definition format. Officially there is no decision yet, "Based on its technological advancements, we continue to believe HD DVD is the best format for consumers, given the value and consistent quality inherent in our player offerings," said the vice president of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, Jodi Sally.

Christian Riesen (aka Simon Moon), the admin of the late eDonkey link site, was found guilty of copyright infringement in Swiss district court of Frauenburg. Almost four years after Sharereactor.com was shut down by the local authorities, Riesen has been ordered to pay 4700 Swiss francs (approx. 4250 USD) in compensation.

Sharereactor.com was one of the most popular ED2K link sites and was visited daily by up to 250,000 visitors during its golden age in 2004. The admin didn't however make any kind of profit, more like the opposite. In an interview with "Moon" in October 2004 the admin claimed that he was paying around 5,000 dollars, more than the compensation the court seeks, a month just to keep up with the bandwidth demand of the popular website.

Sharereactor came back online in 2006 and at the same time Riesen told he had sold the domain. However, the comeback was brief, most likely due to the fact that many users had already switched to BitTorrent.

As this is written Sharereactor.com is maintained by Riesen, the domain is registered to Riesen Industries, which operates from Canada, but the site welcomes visitors with a "Host sharereactor.com is under construction" text.

As we recently reported, the end of analog TV in the U.S. is approaching and the fact that the government is sponsoring a fair share of the coupon-eligible box prices doesn't remove the need to compare these devices, quite the opposite.

Wal-Mart has decided to be one of the first to open an extensive sales with a pretty nice deal. Get your own Magnavox DTV converter for a mere $49.87. It is one of the approximately 30 boxes that are currently coupon-eligible, so after the $40 coupon it costs you around as much as a bag of sand.

The complete model name should be Magnavox TB100MW9 since there are no other coupon-eligible Magnavox converters on the NTIA's (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) official CECB (Coupon Eligible Converter Boxes) list.

You can apply for coupons online at http://www.dtv2009.gov/

All CECB certified DTV converters:
https://www.afterdawn.com/hardware/category.cfm/dtv_converters?feature_627=1

Nokia announced N96 multimedia phone or "computer" as they call it. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the Chief Executive Officer of Nokia, announced today N96 and three other phones at Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona. The earlier speculated N96 boasts an impressive list of features, including A-GPS, Wi-Fi, 2,8" display, 16GB of INTERNAL flash memory and a MicroSD slot.

The other N-series phone announced today was the N78, which will have "wireless music, photo and navigation features." You'll find a 3,2Mpix camera, A-GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, and an integrated FM trasmitter inside the N73 successor. Nokia also announced two a bit more traditional phones at MWC, the 6220 Classic and 6210 Navigator. The first one has a 5Mpix camera and A-GPS, and the latter has an integrated compass, an accelerometer and the new Nokia Maps 2.0 navigation software.

The upcoming substitute for the popular N95 and N95 8GB, Nokia N96, was leaked by the Nokia German site. According to IntoMobile.com the site didn't show any official pictures of the device, but most of the key features were captured.

In addition to the features found in both N95 and the 8GB model, such as Wi-Fi, 3G, 5Mpix camera and GPS, the N96 hosts Dual LED flash, DVB-H Class C, Symbian S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 with Flash Lite 3 support, 16GB INTERNAL memory (upgradeable with additional MicroSD cards or paying $80 for internal memory of 24GB) and microUSB capable of charging the device.

Looking at the current unofficial photos, the new N96 doesn't look much like its predecessors, the N95s, but more like the later released N81. And according to the leaked specs the phone is a tad longer and wider, and a bit thinner and lighter than the N95 8GB.

Finnish software house Joikusoft released today an application that allows Nokia smartphones to act as Wi-Fi hotspots. The simple piece of software turns your 3G phone into an access point which is able to share internet connection for multiple users simultaneously. The wireless Internet connection can be used with laptops, iPods, iPhones, and other Wi-Fi enabled devices.

The application goes by the name JoikuSpot Light, and is at the moment in beta Phase. To use the software you need a Nokia 3G phone (N95 8GB, N95, N93i, N91, N82, N80, E90, E70, E61i, E61 and E51 are listed as supported devices), the latest Firmware for your phone, and of course the application itself.

JoikuSpot is entirely free to download, but it doesn't feature any kind of security or encryption options, so be careful when sharing your 3G connection in a public location. You can observe the traffic and clients using your JoikuSpot access point from the application's user interface.

JoikuSoft is going to add encryption support for the final version, and the company is also considering a chargeable version of the application.

As Swedish government is suing and Danish Tele2 operator is blocking The Pirate Bay, Finland joins the Scandinavian group of anti-piracy pacesetters. The IFPI Finland is considering a civil action suit which would force ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.

The executive director of IFPI Finland, Arto Alaspää, stated that the operational model of the Tele2 will be tried out in Finland as well. "Similar block petitions are likely to be used in Finland," he said. The details of the suit are yet to be determined, but in Finland the site restriction would be a civil law police matter.

The site has an approximate of 100,000 Finnish users daily and simultaneous torrent downloads could rise up to five times the amount.

Still after three months since the police shut down OiNK, Alan Ellis, the admin of OiNK, is in custody. Today, for the second time, the bail date of Alan Ellis was extended, until May 6th. The investigations are still in ongoing and it's unclear what evidence the police are looking for.

OiNK was a private BitTorrent music Tracker, which had 180,000 members, hosted thousands of torrents and tracked over a million peers. It was considered to be one of the most popular private trackers, and even more popular than many public trackers.

After the police shut down the tracker, IFPI and BPI seized the OiNK.cd domain. They tried to scare off the users by claiming that there was an investigation into the users of the site. They also claimed that Alan Ellis made a fortune out of the service. However, the service was entirely free to use.

"If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now," said Nine Inch Nails artist Trent Reznor.

It remains to be seen whether the extended bail date turns into charges, or just another month of useless questioning.

The BitTorrent search engine isoHunt has received a couple of AMD's unreleased processors. According to a post at isoHunt.com forums, the site administration received two "pre-production engineering samples" of AMD Opteron 2352 CPUs. The 2,1GHz processors are used in the primary database servers, which will give them a great real-world test drive.

The to be released quad-core CPUs, found already in Yahoo store for $650 somehow, feature a 2MB L2 cache and apparently work flawlessly, unlike the previous Opteron 2350 with the infamous TLB bug.

It remains to be seen whether the antipiracy lobbyists target AMD because of this. isoHunt has been a target of several accusations by both MPAA and RIAA.

Finnish Christian Democratic Party wants preliminary inspection for video games. However, even though video games are not included in the Finnish law describing obligatory preliminary inspections, each of the games go through the PEGI (Pan European Game Information) classification. PEGI was designed in collaboration between game studios, child welfare, and other corresponding organizations.

In a recent winter assembly the Finnish CDP parliamentary faction brought up the necessity of censorship and preliminary inspection of video games. Not long after Finnish Games and Multimedia Association (FIGMA) responded that the inspections are already taken care of even though the law doesn't require it. The Christian Democrats also wish for more accurate and detailed descriptions about possible violence and erotic content in video game packaging.

FIGMA also added that another, a national, examination would "decrease the number of released games, cause delays in release schedules, and increase the price of video games." The association also mentions that this would most likely give consumers a reason to buy their games outside Finland, which would effectively remove the reason for national control.

Microsoft has announced today that they have made an offer to buy Yahoo. The long speculated acquisition now has a price tag on it, $44,6 billion, which is significantly more than the current market value of Yahoo. According to Microsoft the deal would improve the operational efficiency and increase value for advertisers, which would create a "more efficient" company.

The forty-five billion is approximately 20 billion more than the market value of Yahoo according to Nasdaq. The current value is $19,18 per share or around $25,6 billion for the whole company. If the deal becomes reality the share's value would be roughly $31.

Microsoft hopes to complete the deal during the second half of the year.