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A trade group representing movie theater operators - amusingly called NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) - ran a full page trade ad on June 16th attacking changes in the theatrical release window of movies as well as pressing studios not to adopt VOD distribution to compete with theaters.

Some cable companies and movie studios have thrown around some ideas to provide video-on-demand (VOD) access to films not long after their theatrical release and well before they land on DVD or Blu-ray. NATO warned studios that such services would undercut the value of a typical movie ticket, saying that a lot of people could view a VOD feature at the same time, with just one payment.

"Collapsing windows muddies the value proposition for the consumer, blurs distinctions between theatrical and ‘straight-to-video’ and undercuts one of the important selling points for theatrical exhibition — the timeliness of the exclusive event," NATO warned.

NATO also tapped the fears among Hollywood execs about the future of services such as Redbox, whose kiosks offer very-low-priced rentals of movies. Most Hollywood studios have enforced 28-day delays for kiosks (after DVD release) due to fears that they could hurt sales of brand new titles.

Swedish police have made three arrests in an Internet piracy case that targeted "scene" warez servers known as "Darkside". The action follows an investigation from anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån. The servers carried huge amounts of data, making them the biggest case so far in Sweden, and possibly even in Europe.

According to Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyrån, the three arrested maintained servers that housed 130 terabytes of Swedish and international films and other content. Searches were carried out by police in Stockholm and at two locations in Västerås. The servers were found at the locations.

"Dark Side has a huge capacity," Pontén said. "This is the biggest case we know of to date, certainly the biggest in Sweden, but possibly also in Europe." The investigation was handed over to police in February after Antipiratbyrån spent months gathering IP addresses and other usable information.

"Wednesday's police operation was yet another important step to stop organized piracy. This type of action has a direct and dramatic effect on the number of infringements," said Pontén in a statement.

Following their recent announcement of the Galaxy S Captivate, Samsung has leaked some specs of the Galaxy S Pro, the second phone in its "superphone" line.

The phone will have a full QWERTY keypad, along with a 4-inch touchscreen. It will use a 1GHz Samsung/Intrinsity ARM Cortex A8 processor.

As with all Galaxy S line phones, it will have a Super AMOLED screen, which are 20 percent brighter, with 80 percent less sunlight reflection and add 20 percent more battery life. Described by the source as "gorgeous."

The resolution, unconfirmed, is 400x800.

8.2GB of ROM and 512MB of RAM, but the ROM space may be moved to internal storage.

The Pro has a 5MP camera with 720p recording, and a front-facing camera for video conferencing, as is quickly becoming the standard.

While Apple's battles against iPhone hackers and modders have been well publicized, things have been much quieter on the Android side up until now. Even as hackers found ways to gain root access in devices and port otherwise-unavailable new builds of Android, Google and its hardware partners HTC, Motorola and Samsung, have kept quiet.

Now a website run by Android hacker Conflipper is in HTC's sights. The website, Shipped ROMs, provides ROM dumps of released and unreleased Android devices. HTC has fired off cease and desist letters to the site, alleging that its intellectual property was "illegally obtained by fraudulent means."

HTC even released a statement on the issue to clarify its problem with Shipped ROMs. "While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC," HTC's statement reads.

Google Inc.'s YouTube online video service, and Rumblefish are reportedly set to hold a joint press conference on June 29. The pair are likely to announce a new deal over the use of licensed music on YouTube videos uploaded by users.

An e-mail pitch seen by CNET indicates that Rumblefish chief executive Paul Anthony and a YouTube executive will hold the conference.

Rumblefish is a music-licensing firm that arranges deals with music companies and artists for the use of their music in marketing campaigns or products offered by third parties. YouTube enlisted Rumblefish' services back in 2008 to give video uploaders a legal option for using music in their content.

We hope the press conference means something good for the millions-strong YouTube community.

Graham Cluley of the Sophos security firm has written about a hidden change in Mac OS X 10.6.4 that is not mentioned in its release notes. Specifically, Apple included an update to the malware protection built into Mac OS X to protect against a backdoor Trojan the Cupertino-based Mac-maker identifies as "HellRTS".

Sophos has been tracking the same trojan since April as OSX/Pinhead-B. It is distributed by malicious sources as the iPhoto application. The malware can provide a attacker with full access to an infected Mac, allowing for the taking of screenshots, sending spam, reading the clipboard, accessing files and so on.

"Unfortunately, many Mac users seem oblivious to security threats which can run on their computers. And that isn't helped when Apple issues an anti-malware security update like this by stealth, rather than informing the public what it has done," Cluley wrote.

"You have to wonder whether their keeping quiet about an anti-malware security update like this was for marketing reasons. 'Shh! Don't tell folks that we have to protect against malware on Mac OS X!'"

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 earlier this month, one of the features most touted was the device's Retina Display screen. The screen, which uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology is also used with Apple's iPad tablet, and is also made by LG Display.

According to Ashok Kumar, managing director and senior technology analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, supply issues might become a problem for the new iPhone over the coming months. "Low yields on the IPS LCD panel from LG Display have dramatically impacted the production volumes for iPhone 4," Kumar wrote in his research note.

"Our supply chain checks indicate that our earlier monthly shipment estimate of 4 million units have been reset by about half." He said that demand is likely to be chasing supply through September. That is not good news when analysts also anticipate strong demand for the iPhone 4, as users of the older first generation iPhone to iPhone 3GS may opt to upgrade to get full feature support from iOS 4.

"The hope is that the LG transition to Gen 5 LCD capacity by late summer could help alleviate the production bottleneck. Meanwhile there is a non trivial risk in the September quarter whereby demand for the legacy 3GS iPhone drops off faster than production can ramp up for the iPhone 4," Kumar's note concluded.

YouTube is reaching out to San Francisco local media to test a new iteration of the YouTube Direct platform. Launched last November, YouTube Direct is intended to be used by publishers to locate and distribute video captured by amateurs and uploaded to the YouTube site, and it has been used well by bigger named in news such as NPR, or ABC's Good Morning America.

However, local news outlets have not embraced the YouTube Direct platform as a tool for enhancing their news coverage. For this reason, YouTube will reportedly use San Francisco as a sort-of showcase. YouTube staff are currently looking for local contributors in San Francisco to test out the YouTube Direct platform.

"We launched YouTube Direct in November, and it's been a great way for news organizations to easily leverage citizen reporting on YouTube," YouTube's comment on the matter reads, according to CNET. "We're currently experimenting with new ways to make the platform more useful, and we'll have more to announce on that front soon."

Logitech has added a product page to its website for its new Google TV box. The Logitech Revue is an external device that connects to a television via HDMI, and takes full advantage of everything that Google TV will have to offer. As well as supporting Google TV, the Revue has Logitech's Harmony technology built in to provide integration with a home-entertainment system.

Intel, Sony, and Logitech, together with Best Buy, DISH Network and Adobe, joined Google on stage at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco in May, to announce their support for Google TV. With Google TV, consumers will be able to search and watch an expanded universe of content available from a variety of sources including TV providers, the web, their personal content libraries, and mobile applications.

The Apple iPhone 4, which was so popular that it took down servers and websites when pre-orders began has begun shipping today, with early consumers guaranteed to get their devices on June 24th launch day.

Macrumors is reporting today that a number of their readers have already received shipment and tracking numbers for their devices, with some even seeing a "Delivers By" date of June 23rd.

The iPhone 4 has a 1GHz A4 processor, a 3.5-inch multi-touch screen, a 5MP camera, a smaller MP front-facing camera for video conferencing, a micro-SIM tray, large 960x640 resolution, and 720p video recording capabilities.

Additionally, the phone has 802.11n wireless networking and quad-band HSPDPA/HSUPA networking.

In April, rumors began that Barnes & Noble was all set to start shipping a Wi-Fi only version of their popular Nook e-reader, with the device dubbed the "Nook Lite."

The Lite would remove 3G support, but give consumers a way to buy the e-reader on the cheap.

Today, Engadget has been sent a screenshot of the internal database showing off a Nook Wi-Fi shipping on Wednesday with a price of just $150, cheaper than most expected.

Rival e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, Kobo and iPad sell for significantly higher, with the Kindle at $250 and the cheapest iPad at $500.

While the "Lite" is still unconfirmed by B&N, we should know if the screenshot is accurate on Wednesday.

In addition to its E-ink screen, the Nook has a 3.5-inch color touchscreen and the device runs the Android mobile operating system.

Kotaku, after seeing an internal marketing Q&A with Microsoft can confirm that the new, second slim Xbox 360, priced at $199 USD, will be available this 'fall.'

Additionally, Microsoft confirms Kinect as a standalone product and also as part of a bundle "with the newly designed Xbox 360 console."

Microsoft would not confirm pricing on the bundle, saying: "We have no additional details about pricing or retail strategy to share at this time."

GameStop, the largest video game retailer in the U.S. has posted the Kinect bundles at $299 (for the Arcade model) and $399 (for the Elite bundle) but those prices are still subject to change.

It is still unclear what will be stripped down in the $199 version, as the $299 model announced at E3 will have a 250GB HDD and built in wireless capabilities, including 802.11n support, the "fastest Wi-Fi in any console."

Many Turkish Internet users are very unhappy with the growing level of censorship online, particularly when it comes to the blocking of Google services. Earlier this month, services such as Google Translate, Google Docs and Google Books became inaccessible in Turkey following a request that Turkish ISPs block access to IP addresses associated with YouTube.

On Thursday, an Ankara Public Prosecutor asked Ankara's 1st Criminal Court of Peace to add 44 more IP addresses related to YouTube and Google, and after the court complied, users started complaining that Picasa and Google Maps had become impossible to use with more Google services malfunctioning.

As a response to the actions taken by Tuskish authorities, a group of hackers has been blamed for the inaccessibility of the websites of the Ministry of Transportation, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority and the Telecommunications Communication Presidency.

The group reportedly carried out a 10 hour denial of service attack on the websites of the three departments, all of which are responsible for Internet censorship actions. Such censorship is becoming more common in some countries, with YouTube being a constant target of such action because of user-uploaded content deemed "offensive" or dangerous by governments.

Google is encouraging developers to work on the next incarnation of its now-open sourced VP8 video codec, acquired from On2 technologies last year in a $124.6 million deal and an integral part of Google's WebM project.

"To maintain codec stability while also allowing for quality and performance improvements in VP8, we have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree," said Google codec engineering manager Jim Bankoski.

"The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream. At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, we will create a new version of the codec."

Mozilla and Opera have officially put their weight behind the WebM royalty-free format, while Microsoft has said Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM once a user installs VP8. Apple's Steve Jobs has hinted that Safari will stick to H.264 video content.

Microsoft Corp. is set to make improvements on the search results its Bing search engine displays for queries relating to music, television shows, movies and games. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business, is expected to give specific details at a press conference in West Hollywood California on Tuesday.

Television shows search results for example, will include local programming listings and for some shows, the ability to stream episodes from the search engine interface itself. Music searches will return extensive information about artists, concerts and tracks. A music player will let users play back some music content right from the search results too.

Movie queries will add information about local showtimes and critic reviews, while "specialized tools" to discover new games and other information will be provided for gaming enthusiasts. Some of the new search capabilities involve deals Microsoft has made with other companies.

The improvements are part of an effort by Microsoft to boost competition with Google and other search providers. The company will also be providing similar additional services for other popular areas such as Health, Travel and Shopping in the near future.