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According to the latest official blog, YouTube has now released an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player, giving users their "number one request" for new updates.

To join the beta, Google links to this page, as long as you have an HTML5-supportive browser: http://www.youtube.com/html5

The full post:

A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we're introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.

HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin.

Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer). We will be expanding the capabilities of the player in the future, so get ready for new and improved versions in the months to come.

Responding to complaints, Xbox group product manager Aaron Greenberg has said that the company does not want to mislead consumers with MS Points and will be looking to display actual currency prices next to the MS Points for all content.

"We never intended to mislead people," Greenberg said, via G4. "We want to be transparent about it, and so it is something that we're looking at."

"How can we be more transparent and let people see it in actual dollars? You've got to think that we have one service that we're offering around the world. The nice thing about Points is that no matter if you're on the JPY or the EUR or the USD – something that's 200 Points is 200 Points everywhere around the world. There's more technical complexities to being able to put local prices in. You have to do that for every product in every country and you then have to deal with currency fluctuations. So there's some challenges to that, but we absolutely did it with the Games On Demand, response has been good and absolutely it's something we're looking at doing," he concluded.

Kinney Lee Malone, son of former popular Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough and the record label Fat Possum Records have decided to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed in 2008, where Malone was seeking about $1 million and royalties.

U.S. District judge W. Allen Pepper said this week the case was closed as both sides agreed to dismiss it.

It is unclear whether there was any financial settlement between the two parties.

Kimbrough died in 1998 and had a few hit songs in his life. Malone sued FPR claiming they were using the songs without permission and were not paying royalties.

PreCentral has compared the older Palm Pre smartphone with the new Palm Pre Plus and it appears that the new handset, which features double the RAM and storage space, can run up to 50 apps simultaneously, whereas the original starts to hurt at around 13.

According to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, children ages 8-18 spend about nine and a half hours "glued" to screens, including TV, computers, MP3 players and phones.

The study, dubbed "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds," showed that kids are spending more time with media then sleeping. It appears that it may be affecting their school work as well.

"While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users -- those who consumed at least 16 hours a day -- had mostly Cs or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less," says the study.

Ericsson and 3 Scandinavia have unveiled plans to roll-out a worlds-first 84Mbps HSPA+ wireless network. The initial rollout will cover Denmark and four Swedish cities. HSPA+ networks that currently operate in Canada, for example, offer speeds of up to 21Mbps depending on conditions. In the United States, T-Mobile recently announced a similar planned network.

Real-world tests of the 21Mbps networks show the services achieving around 7Mbps speed. If a similar performance could be applied to the new Ericsson/3 network, it could result in speeds of roughly 28Mbps at realistic distances and network load. Of course, that is just speculation and the performance of such a high-speed network under heavy demand and in a variety of conditions could be much different than predicted.

Regardless, the availability of such a high-speed network will be good news for the near-future, especially for those in rural areas of some countries where broadband outside of a mobile network is impossible. Ericsson and 3 will also deploy 900MHz 3G networks in Sweden in a bid to boost coverage in remote areas, as existing higher frequency networks have left some users with poor performance.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Beijing to investigate the sophisticated hack of Google services during a wide-ranging speech about Internet freedoms and rights. Clinton brought up the issue of some governments attempt to erect "electronic walls" to block access to information to their Internet users. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century." she said.

She acknowledged that China and the U.S. had differing opinions on the matter, and said they would,"address those differences candidly and consistently." Clinton named China, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Vietnam as countries where there has recently been a spike in the threats to the "free flow of information". "They have expunged words, names and phrases from search engine results," Clinton said. "They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in nonviolent political speech."

Earlier on Thursday, a Chinese government official insisted that the Google hack issue should not effect relations between the United States and China. "The Google case should not be linked with relations between the two governments and countries; otherwise, it's an over-interpretation," the Xinhua News Agency reported Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei as saying.

The secrecy over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently being negotiated by countries from across the world has hit elected MPs in the UK, who cannot get access to any ACTA documents. Junior business minister David Lammy said documents related to ACTA will not be put in the House of Commons library, due to the desire for other countries to keep the negotiations secret.

"Although I am sympathetic to the view that ACTA negotiations should be more transparent and I have instructed my officials to press for more transparency, we are not in a position to place the drafts held by my Department in the Library," Lammy said. "Disclosure of any documents without the agreement of all our ACTA negotiating partners would damage the United Kingdom's international relations."

He continued: "This would harm our ability to protect, promote and secure an outcome in the UK's interest, and the premature release of documents that are not agreed and not fully developed may also have a negative effect on the Government's reputation."

The European Commission has approved Oracle's bid for hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems. The Commission granted Oracle an unconditional approval to take over Sun Microsystems, in a deal worth €5.17 billion ($7.75 billion), after previously being concerned about the proposition.

The takeover of Sun, which developers the popular Java programming language amongst other products, was approved the U.S. Department of Justice in July.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

Sun Microsystems shareholders had also given their blessing to the buyout. Following concessions by Oracle last month, such as the extension of the terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses for up to five years, the EU Commission came to the conclusion that the deal would not have a negative impact on the market within Europe.

Nokia Corp. has dealt something of a blow to navigation players including TomTom and Garmin by announcing plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps that includes high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost to the user. The move, which could potentially double the size of the mobile navigation market, will bring high-end car and pedestrian navigation features to Nokia smartphones, such as turn by turn voice instructions for 74 countries in 46 different languages.

The Nokia move is probably a response to Google's move to offer free navigation on Motorola's Droid smartphones in the North American market. Nokia's decision to offer the services for free will help it to stay firmly on top of the Smartphone market that it leads, where it has lost some group to Apple and RIM.

Verizon Communications has confirmed to CNET that it has suspended the accounts of several file sharers suspected of sharing copyrighted content illegally. The ISP is known for issuing warnings to its customers when they are found to be sharing illegally, but until this confirmation it was unclear whether Verizon would suspend a customers. "We've cut some people off," Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson told CNET.

"We do reserve the right to discontinue service. But we don't throttle bandwidth like Comcast was doing. Verizon does not have bandwidth caps." At the end of 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it would cease filing lawsuits against individual users and had instead come to an agreement with several major Internet Service Providers in the U.S. to take another approach.

Mozilla Corp. is set to release Firefox 3.6 later today, coming just a couple of days after Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 2 was made available for download. The newer version makes dozens of fixes over the previous Firefox 3.5 versions. The updated browser will have better add-on support, with a new page to check all user plug-ins, alert when an update is available and then link to download it. This should help users to maintain security and performance of the browser.

According to a Mozilla video, which showcases some of the changes in Firefox 3.6 (below), the new browser version is now 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5, which itself had dramatically increased speed over older versions of the software. HTML 5 is also more integrated in Firefox 3.6. Also added is support for Firefox Personas, a user-friendly way to change the entire theme of the Firefox browser.

Check out the Mozilla video on Firefox 3.6.

Virgin is planning to use packet sniffing software in order to measure the amount of illegal file sharing on its network. The software is called "CView", and it will be used to monitor traffic from about 40 percent of Virgin customers in the UK, none of whom will be notified prior to the test. However, the ISP stresses it is only measuring the amount of illegal sharing on the network, and it will not be collecting data that could identify an individual user.

The system uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to sniff files being shared through P2P networks, which can then be matched against a third-party database of music tracks to flag copyright violations. Customer's IP addresses will automatically be stripped from each packet of data and replaced with a randomly generated identifier instead. Virgin claims that the system will keep individual file sharers completely anonymous.

CView, the ISP claims, is being used simply to provide a statistical view of digital piracy on the network as opposed to becoming an anti-piracy tool aimed at identifying individual sharers for litigation. As for the law, Virgin Media does not consider the system to be in violation of UK or European legislation that protects Internet users' personal information because the system keeps each user anonymous.

Amazon has announced today that publishers and authors will receive a much larger royalty for books sold in the Kindle Digital format beginning on June 30th.

Currently, the royalty rate is 30 percent, but that will soon balloon to 70 percent.

The move is being seen as a chance for Amazon to preemptively attack Apple's upcoming tablet device, which is likely to have an e-book deal with HarperCollins right from launch.

Amazon will exclude delivery costs from the royalties paid, and each megabyte is 15 cents. To qualify for the higher royalty rate, your book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and be selling in the U.S. Public domain books from before 1923 do not qualify.

Physical books normally net authors about 7 to 15 percent of prices set by publishers and 25 percent for digital books, meaning Amazon's latest move should make authors very happy to have their works available digitally.

Adobe Systems has issued updates for Shockwave 11.5.2.602 and earlier on the Windows and Mac operating systems aimed at patching serious security bugs with the player. The bugs could potentially allow malicious code to be executed on computers that use the software. The integer overflow and buffer overflow flaws are fixed by an upgrade that Adobe is strongly urging all of its users to install.

It estimates that ShockWave has been installed on over 450 million Internet-enabled Desktops. In order to install a newer version of the Shockwave player however, users need to manually uninstall the older vulnerable version of the software, reboot and then install the newer version. Other Adobe products use automatic update utilities to get newer versions, which will ensure a much higher rate of patching then manual installation.

The update will install Shockwave v11.5.6.606.

More info: http://www.adobe.com/products/shockwaveplayer/