Luci Sandor’s blog

Today, Last.fm announced their upcoming music subscription service. One can head to their website right now and listen to a song for up to three times. The fourth play will be allowed some time in the future, when there will be a monthly fee arrangement. I am confused by two things. First, why is the press release called "Free the Music", when people are supposed to pay for it? And second, how is this service going to coexist with the Youtube-copy service that Last.fm offers? Why pay for music which I can see it for free on the same website? At least, before the video section was created, I had to use Youtube proper for free music.

According to Sentinel and Entreprise quoted by Associated Press, FBI eavesdropping operations took a break due to the fact that the American government organization failed to pay a series of bills from the phone companies. One can see the advantages of the new communication modalities: I am sure that FBI still affords to search keywords in federated Google-to-AOL or Yahoo!-to-MSN-Messenger chats. The American taxpayer can only hope that listening to Skype conversations is cheaper, and that convenient email warnings will remind FBI agents early enough when their Skype Voyeur Pro subscriptions need renewal. It is also expected that Jajah, the website which intermediates phone calls, will allow users to type, besides the caller and the callee phone numbers, the FBI phone number.