News written by Petteri Pyyny (June, 2005)

Two weeks ago we launched a new version of our weekly newsletter (so, yes, this is not technically "news" :-), but as we haven't received very much feedback on the new layout yet I thought I might request them here.

So all of those who subscribe to our weekly newsletter -- we'd like to hear about your thoughts on the new layout, and improvement ideas if you have any.

One thing that we are aware of, is the fact that Google's otherwise excellent email service GMail doesn't show the newsletter correctly. This is not exactly because of our newsletter, but rather due the fact that Google, for whatever reason, doesn't support stylesheets or most modern type of HTML in their service.

For those of you, who don't currently subscribe to our newsletter, you can preview the last week's edition here. If you're interested of subscribing to our newsletter, you can do so by creating an AfterDawn.com user account and selecting the newsletter from your personal options (for those of you who already have an user account, you can change your newsletter settings via My Account shown, after you've logged in, at the top of the page).

Microsoft said on ZDNet's interview that it is "considering" a subscription-based music service later this year. The plan is an obvious threat to other online music stores that embrace the monthly subscription model, most notably to Napster. Napster is also using Microsoft's WMA technology and DRM service in its music store, so Microsoft's plans could work against one of its largest technology licensees.

Microsoft launched its own per-song online music store back in September, 2004, but haven't managed to topple Apple's iTunes in terms of popularity and is also lagging behind Napster in terms of customers and revenue.

According to Microsoft, the new service would offer features like playlist-sharing and would provide additional "community features" that would allow users to interact with each others.

Microsoft's announcement sent Napster's shares down by 4 percent, while Apple's share price fell 4.9 percent after the report was published.

More information:

ZDNet
BBC

As most of our regular visitors know, we've had our "sister site", Dawnload.net, online for years now, serving as our more generic software site where you can find web browsers, office applications, etc. But as the site's name is slightly problematic (people tend to mix it with download.net or dawnload.com), we decided to rename the site and do a full facelift for it as well.

Now, our new software site is called simply Filepedia.com. Site's layout is much more "modern" than its predecessor's and it has also several new features and improvements that we thought were necessary to get the site dragged to the new millennium.

We'd love to hear thoughts, ideas and suggestions about Filepedia.com -- you can simply post them here or you can also use the site's feedback feature to send us some email.

Filepedia.com

It is officially summer in Finland now, as our site turns six today. Six years? In some ways a very short time, but in some ways, especially in the world of "dotcom", almost an eternity. It has been a journey that has been well worth it, even though there have been times when it has been quite hard to go on. But now, after six years, we can all look in the past and say "Yes, it's been a good experience".

We've gone through our site's history, original idea, background, etc in our past "birthday news", so there's nothing new in that for our regular users (but for those of you, who are still interested, take a look at our last year's article). When I began writing this article I realized that our sixth year was the first year ever that we haven't launched any new major site sections, new site layouts, or anything "dramatic" like that. Rather, it has been a "year of evolution", rather than "year of revolution" for us as a website.

During the last year we've managed to focus on things that are less obvious to our average user, but make our site perform better and our site to grow faster. We spent several months during last winter on upgrading our whole server cluster and switching our site to use a new application server platform. There were times during the December and January when our site was as reliable as a Soviet-era technical gizmo, but all those problems went away after we finally managed to get all the pieces in the server puzzle together in March. Since that, we haven't had a single blackout on our site. Additionally, I've spend quite a lot of time improving our site's user experience -- fixing those little things you never really notice until they start to annoy you :-)

Recent study in the United States by NPD Group found that more Americans used iTunes than most of the P2P tools to download music.

According to study, approximately 1.7 million American households used iTunes to download at least one song during March this year. In comparison, the second most popular P2P application for music downloads was LimeWire, used by 1.7 million American households. Only the most popular P2P tool in States during that period, WinMX, was used by more households to download music -- used by 2.1 million households. Other major legal music stores also made their way to the first-ever "combined P2P and legal music store" charts -- Napster was the 7th and Real's music store was 9th.

Obviously the chart is slightly misleading as it doesn't include data of how many tracks were downloaded by each household during the tracking period -- a ranking in which P2P tools would most likely win legal music stores hands down. But it is an interesting trend and shows that market is ready to use a legal service if it doesn't have too many restrictions, is easy to use and has large enough selection available. Obviously there are consumers who will consider using legal music stores only when the tracks come without DRM restrictions and cost far less than the current $0.99 per track.

Not really a good way to start a new week -- this just came in via our news submit (thanks Shoey):

Hello world,

I've got some good news and some bad news. Let's start with the good.... (tumble weed passes by)Ok, and now onto the bad: DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0 is the last version you'll ever see.We hoped this day would never come, but it has, and I can promise you, nobody is more gutted about it than I am.

What started as a bit of fun, putting a GUI around some existing code, turned into something that I can only describe as "part of me" – yes, I know that's sad ;-) As I've recently been made aware (by a letter, hand delivered to my door, last Tuesday), due to some law that was changed back in October 2003, circumventing copy protection isn't allowed.

Ok so it has taken a while (almost 2 years), but eventually "a certain company" has decided they don't like what I'm doing (circumventing their protection) and have come at me like a pack of wolves. I've no choice but to cease everything to do with DVD Decrypter. I realise this is going to be one of those "that sucks - fight them!" kinda things, but at the end of the day, it's my life and I'm not about to throw it all away (before it has even really started) attempting to fight a battle I can't possibly win.

Read more...

We had a small glitch on our site during the last night that made it impossible for new users to create accounts and existing users to login with their user accounts. The problem was caused by a simple typo in the code that was recently changed in login area of the site.

The problem lasted for about 9 hours and is now solved. Apologies for the inconvenience this might have caused.

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com