Music, movies more dangerous

There's a silver lining to the cloud hovering above online porn addicts: surfing for "Hot Babes", "Nude Lindsay Lohan" or other tantalising terms poses less danger for a run-in with computer damaging spyware and spam than searching for the latest movie and music downloads, says Post-gazette.

Four percent of all Web searches, some 276 million searches a month done via the likes of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, turn up Web sites riddled with unwanted ads or worse, according to a study released yesterday by software security firm McAfee.

A simple search for "digital music" has the greatest risk, as 19.1% of the results lead to sites loaded with spyware, viruses and other online maladies that threaten a person's privacy, financial information and their computer's health.

While gaming fanboys are usually busy concentrating on the game console war, another format battle is making headlines and could greatly affect the PlayStation 3's sales numbers, reports Shareit.

In an effort to increase the sales of Blu-ray players and movies, Sony has cut the price of its BDP-S300 Blu-ray player to $499, making it the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market.

While the cut might stimulate Blu-ray player sales, the PlayStation 3 stands to lose out.

Entrepreneurs behind Silicon Valley start-up Lala.com hope to transform the CD-swapping site into a music portal where members can download songs directly to their iPods, bypassing the computer hard drives where most music is stored, reports IHT.com.

The Palo Alto-based company has an agreement in principle to sell nearly 200 000 songs from Warner Music Group for 99c each. Members will also be able to play the Warner songs for free, and the company will pay Warner a penny each time someone listens to a song.

"This is a turning point for music companies and the entire industry," said co-founder Bill Nguyen, 36, who founded six previous start-ups, including several that went public and one that sold for $850 million. "I have no idea if it will work - this is a bet."

Many convicted sex offenders who had profiles on the popular MySpace Web site are on parole, and some may be sent back to prison for e-mailing minors, reports USAToday.

Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal says more than half of the 210 sex offenders from his state who used the social networking site are on parole. One was returned to state custody last week for using the Internet, a violation of a condition of his release.

MySpace's 180 million profiles make it the world's largest networking site. It's popular with teens. Two dozen states have taken legal action to get a list of MySpace users who are registered as sex offenders; 21 states have received names and e-mail addresses, says Michael Angus, MySpace's chief counsel.

A new IDC study found the growth in adoption of standalone open source software is accelerating and the total market will be worth $5.8 billion in 2011, says PCWorld.

The market reached $1.8 billion in 2006, and will grow 26% annually for the next four years, the firm predicted.

The study is a relatively unusual effort to treat the sprawling, quick-changing open source software market as a serious business, and indicates the growing business acceptance of open source software.