"Because this nation has not been serious about vigorously attacking pornography, some believe it is appropriate to view in public. Not only will the flight attendants be placed in a situation that could be considered sexual harassment, passengers who openly view porn where children can see it may be violating federal harmful-to-minor laws."

First, you don't need the internet to watch porn in your portable device. Then, fortunately, most of this nation is not stupid. In "this nation," and any other nation, individuals know how to behave in public and, if they don't, they would get their ass kicked by the crew or other passengers. Just like I can watch porn on my iPhone or laptop in any public place across the country but I don't because it's just wrong, the same will apply here, Mr. David Weiss.

American Airlines says they will not change their policy of unfiltered internet access, because that will jeopardize the access to legitimate web sites, leaving it to flight attendants to handle any possible problem, as it should be. And that's good. I'll keep flying them, but not for the porn.

OK, for the porn too. [Sky Talk]

• He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity. (In fairness, much of this is to prevent child pornography, but the tactic is apparently a little blunt.)

• Two Biden bills have been explicitly anti-encryption, because you know, encryption makes it hard for the FBI to read people's e-mails.

• He has expressed support for internet taxes and internet filtering in schools and libraries.

• The RIAA seems to be one of his best buddies: Biden sponsored a bill that would restrict recording of songs from satellite and net radio, and another one that would make it a felony to "trick" a computer into playing back unauthorized songs or running bootlegged videogames. That latter one died when Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay and Yahoo all argued against it.

• Biden was one of just four senators invited to attend a celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti and the RIAA's Hillary Rosen, two of American file-sharer's most wanted.

• When he was asked in 2006 about proposing net-neutrality laws, he said there was no need, since any bit-filtering violations would provoke such a huge public ruckus they'd have to hold congressional hearings anyway—and they'd be standing-room only. (Wonder if Biden reads Gizmodo.) [CNet]

Our own account looks fine—we were shipped something on Monday and Tuesday of this week—but that's just anecdotal. Our own call to Blockbuster communications to check on the situation went unanswered. How does yours look? Keep in mind that you not getting something shipped in a timely manner could also mean they're throttling your account, which is especially true if you've been shipping stuff in and out really fast lately. [Thanks Michael!]

Aveilan's Awesaba is a program that lets you create an online mannequin of yourself. To use it, you upload a photograph of yourself in a specific pose - face forward, standing straight, with your arms at your sides a little out from your body. You then have a virtual you to click and drag clothes onto.

The company sells Awesaba to online merchants, who then provide the service free to their customers. As with all things that would make my life a lot easier, it's Japan only right now. Maybe by the time they get version 2.0, complete with 3D modeling and a style adviser who'll tell you not to match that hat with those shoes, we'll have finally jumped on Awesaba in the U.S. [Popgadget]

The Apple patent at its core relates to improving the online shopping experience. While the company lauds online shopping in its filing, it also criticizes the medium's inability to offer consumers a truly interactive experience, calling it "sterile and isolating." (Uh, isn't the solitary, crowd-bypassing characteristic of online shopping part of its appeal?)

The Apple filing goes on to say that isolated, unhappy customers are more apt to be non-paying customers. However, if you provide them with "sunny" shopping experiences and virtual interactivity with Apple avatars, they might be more likely to come away with a positive impression of online shopping. Customers would also receive their own avatars, a la Second Life, and would be branded with letters to show their level of familiarity with Apple products. N is for New Users, or "newbies," and E is for Experts, or the entire Apple-loving Gizmodo staff.

There are still a lot of unknowns regarding the filing. Add to that the fact that most Apple patents never see the light of day. As MacNN expertly points out, this could also be a reincarnated eWorld, Apple's ill-fated online service launched—and then un-launched—in 2004 1994.

If the Apple Store does go virtual, however, our question for Steve this afternoon is pretty straightforward: How will the Genius Bar respond to a bouncing penis-filled griefer attack? [MacNN]

The hosting site, Darwin Online, went live 18 months ago, but largely held just the final product publications of Darwin's lifelong research interests. With the addition of the new material, people will now be able to read his notes, his notes on reference reading he'd done, interesting press clippings he kept and private communications with others.

There're some gems in there too: his first scribblings doubting the "stability" of the species, made on his voyage aboard Beagle; his first pencil outline of the species theory, all 61 pages of it (about half crossed-out as his writing progressed). There's even a memo written by his wife Emma, concerned about Charles' religious doubts.

Apparently the archive, stored as images of the texts, will be most useful to Darwin scholars, due to his notoriously scribbly handwriting. But if you're into cooking, then there's also some recipes for muffin pudding and other dishes from Emma, and instructions on how to boil rice from Charles himself. [Darwin Online, New Scientist and BBC News]

New York-based retailers have argued for years that the Amazon loophole gives out-of-state online shopping centers an unfair advantage. Technically, consumers are supposed to report purchases they make online on their tax returns, but virtually nobody does it and enforcement is impossible.

The bill still needs a signature from Governor David Paterson to officially become law, but he's widely expected to OK it. The state government expects the new requirement to generate about $50 million in revenue this fiscal year.

Meanwhile, as a resident of this fair city who uses Amazon like her life depends on it, I get to watch my wallet empty 8.375 percent faster - in the middle of a recession! Thanks, government! [Internet News]

The service even gives customers the first names of the workers who take their phone order and deliver their pizza, so slackers will have to shape up or ship out. Unfortunately, the tracker stops short of keeping tabs on the drivers when they are in route, so the time it takes for their beater car to sputter to your door may still be tense for impatient pizza lovers.

Interestingly enough, part of the ordering process involves an oath that asks you to "agree to use the Domino's Pizza Tracker to only track your own Domino's Pizza orders." So apparently it is possible to engage is some sort of shady pizza fraud scheme. At any rate, the system will go up today at 3,400 Domino's outlets and will be in all stores by June 30. The only question is, will the novelty of being able to know when your order is put in to the oven, boxed, and shipped be enough to get you to choke down one of their god-awful pizzas? [USAToday via Consumerist]

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Besides getting small games in the same arena as PS3's flow onto the PSP (not going to happen right now, but may come in the future), Eric also says it's a way to distribute PSOne titles without the PS3.

Looking in the future, stuff like iTunes-esque syncing of content when your PSP is docked is a possibility, more UMD titles available and lack of support for PSOne titles that use dual analog controls (because the PSP doesn't support it). Other than that, there's not much really fantastic stuff unless you count some handwaving about future Mac support, but head on over if you're really interested in downloading titles to your PSP via your PC. [MTV]

As Ars called it, Hulu is a "corporate sandbox" loaded with content from NBC, News Corp., Sony, MGM, as well as their various subsidiary channels like FX, Sci-Fi Channel and so forth, offering anything from full episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buffy to SNL Digital Shorts and an entire Russell Crowe flick, Master & Commander. It's Flash-based, it streams, just like YouTube, and it's ad-supported, with bumpers and "commercial breaks," just like the TV it's trying to ape. Despite the potential of being a corporate bomb, Hulu actually succeeds in a lot of ways. For one, the interface is pretty slick, the site itself not overwrought and easy enough to navigate, which is something of a miracle given how FUBAR productions of this sort typically turn out. The animations are smooth, with lots of scrollover popups and transparency, and buttons for all of the few things you can do with a video. Grays and blacks surround the video in a widescreen format, making it easier on your eyes.

Video and sound are clean, the 520x295 resolution for widescreen format clips definitely tolerable for the 42 minutes required to watch House or the like. More importantly, the streams have been exceptionally smooth. Bouncing around within vids is snappy, on few occasions taking longer than a second, and more often than not instantaneous. However, and it might be my imagination, video isn't quite as nice as it was on launch day a few days ago—a touch more pixellated—and seeking takes a bit longer. Still impressively small, more noticeable now.The potential deal killer here, the ads. (Also the best reason to wait for a review: I saw nary a frame of ads on launch night.) Their timing seems to be totally random. The initial three-second bumper is painless, promising "limited commercial interruption" thanks to X sponsor. But the in-show ad—so far in my experience no more than one 30-second clip per episode—could come at any time: within seconds of the bumper, halfway through, the first time you click ahead or so on. In that sense, it's maddening.

So why put up with ads? The content—and that's where Hulu's value and potential lies, but also its biggest shortcoming. Ars' problem with Hulu was the fact that it was a sandbox. I don't think that's necessarily bad, depending on what's in the sandbox and the playground rules—and what you expect to get out of it. I actually don't care to pull content out of Hulu's garden, beyond embedding clips on Gizmodo—I just want to be able to catch the Heroes ep I missed or peek a show I've heard about with a couple of clicks and no waiting.

Shortfall #1: It doesn't put shows up quickly enough after they air. It's still faster to grab a torrent right after Heroes airs on the East Coast than to wait for it to drop on Hulu (not that I've done that, lovely denizens of NBC's legal department). Solution? Air it on both simultaneously. It'll also help solve the tricky dilemma of measuring new vs. old, medium-shifting viewers.

Shortfall #2: It's an incomplete archive, with new episodes pushing off older ones. This is a balancing act because they don't want to cannibalize TV-on-DVD sales, but personally, if I haven't already bought a series on DVD I'm not going to. For instance, Buffy Season One is available in its entirety, but nothing beyond that, even though I wanna watch the musical episode. Heroes now only stretches back to the second ep of the current season.

The truly bold step to take in this little experiment is to throw open the content doors: Put up everything, and watch what happens. My guess is that it wouldn't adversely affect DVD sales—maybe iTunes, but according to NBC, they weren't making any money there anyway. Hell, throw in two thirty-second spots per clip, but bump the resolution. In other words: Make it more like TV.

Besides basically handing the online rental space over to Netflix, it leaves it the sole powerhouse movie rental company to remain profitable—Movie Gallery, the no. 2 B&M chain, is bankrupt—and therefore the undisputed heavyweight champion of the rental world. Make no mistake about it, folks, things are looking grim for the corner rental store.

It's not like Blockbuster was totally unaware of this. Moving into new distribution channels is increasingly looking like the only way to survive the video wars—hopefully Netflix doesn't stop following through on their bolder, more intuitive ideas, lest we write about it sinking with the physical media rental market altogether in several years. [Forbes via Consumerist, Flickr]

Fabrik Ultimate Backup is designed to run in the background, sensing when CPU usage is low, and using that time to upload data to their central server. Because the software isn't built into the drive, Fabrik Ultimate Backup onkly works when the computer is running. A variety of parameters, such as file types or specific folders, can be used to determine what gets backed up and Ultimate backup constantly scans for new updates. The files can be reverted to a saved state up to 30 days prior and can be accessed remotely from the web. But it should be noted that files can only be accessed from one computer.

Each Fabrik hard drive purchased comes with a lifetime allocation of 2 GB of online backup. Unlimited backup space is $4.95/month and is compatible with any hard drive, not just Fabrik models. But you do need a PC to run the software. The Pro line of hard drives range between 250GB-2TB of space and will cost between $100-$800.

On a fast 7Mbps broadband connection, Joost was running well this morning. Its interface is easy to learn, and the video plays back full screen and streams smoothly. The quality leaves something to be desired, though—it's not even at the level of standard definition, and certainly not high definition. There's also not quite enough content on hand, with offerings from a couple of big names such as CBS and CNN, but mostly second- and third-tier content sources.

Even though this beta 1.0 is still a bit rough around the edges, we could still see the tremendous potential of this format. It actually feels like television, but everything is streaming. If this network and others like it are completely built out to where they can actually stream near-HD quality video, we might be seeing people abandoning cable for it. But not yet. [Joost, via Ars Technica]

There are two million tunes available, from 180,000 artists, including tracks from EMI and Universal. Over half of the songs are priced at 89 cents, including the Top 100 tracks, and they're at 256 kbps resolution. Once you've installed the Amazon MP3 downloader you can pick off the tracks you want.

Good news: there's loads of Bowie, Stones, Daft Punk, Kanye. And the even better news is that the only Britney, Pussycat Dolls and Avril Lavigne you can find are karaoke versions, which means they'll be better than the originals. The bad news is that, despite a lot of big names, there's also a lot of filler: a gazillion different Willy Nelson compilations, both clean and dirty versions of Kanye and Fiddy, and hordes of unknowns, all which must eat into Amazon's two million tracks. [Amazon Earworm]

Press release:

Amazon.com Launches Public BETA of Amazon MP3, A Digital Music Store Offering Customers Earth's Biggest Selection of A La Carte DRM-Free MP3 Music Downloads

Amazon MP3 offers over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists and over 20,000 labels, including EMI Music and Universal Music Group

SEATTLE—September 25, 2007—Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today launched a public beta of "Amazon MP3," a new digital music download store with Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com's existing selection of over 1 million CDs to now offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

"Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. "This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we're excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service."

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs , iPods , Zunes , Zens , iPhones , RAZRs , and BlackBerrys ; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes or Windows Media Player ; and burn songs to CDs.

Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise.

Every song on Amazon MP3 is encoded at 256 kilobits per second, which gives customers high audio quality at a manageable file size.

Buying and downloading MP3s from Amazon MP3 is easy. Customers can purchase downloads using Amazon 1-Click shopping, and with the Amazon MP3 Downloader, seamlessly add their MP3s to their iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries.

Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists spanning every genre of music, including 50 Cent, Alison Krauss, Amy Winehouse, Ani DiFranco, Arcade Fire, Beastie Boys, Coldplay, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ella Fitzgerald, Feist, John Coltrane, KT Tunstall, Keith Urban, Koko Taylor, Lily Allen, Madeleine Peyroux, Maroon 5, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Morrissey, Nelly, Nickel Creek, Nirvana, Norah Jones, Paul McCartney, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd, Pixies, Radiohead, Ray Charles, Rod Stewart, Spoon, Stevie Wonder, The Chemical Brothers, The Decemberists, and The Rolling Stones.

"Well done Amazon for making so much music available to so many people," said KT Tunstall. "It's good to know, in the words of The King, you're taking care of business!"

Leading independent labels offering their catalog of music for the first time as DRM-free MP3s include Alligator Records, HighTone Records, Madacy Entertainment, Sanctuary Records, Rounder Records, Righteous Babe Records, Sugar Hill Records, and Trojan Records.

Sites such as eBay are more than happy to comply with NetEnforcer's demands. The company also goes after counterfeit merchandise, gray market goods, piracy and any other evil schemes that Corporate America is afraid of but reluctant to enforce with its own personnel.

Of course, NetEnforcers are only upholding the law, so we can't hold them accountable for laws that we may not like. Also, intellectual property rights are important. For example, there are a lot of sites that paste in Gizmodo content verbatim, even with our bylines attached, and then run ads next to it. Are we flattered by that wanton theft? Of course not. Maybe we should get NetEnforcers to help us.

On the other hand, there's something creepy about a self-appointed group of vigilantes who have taken it upon themselves to enforce laws that many of us don't like. A glance at the website shows a tough-looking cop (pictured above) who looks like he might have a billy club just out of sight, ready to bust you upside the head. Is vigilante justice the way to handle copyright law and piracy online? Anybody have any experience with NetEnforcer they'd like to share? [NetEnforcers]

This looks like a solid 1.0 product, but I'm holding out for the fully-functional 2.0 version with "explosive" heat.

Product Page [via coolestgadgets]

Blockbuster has been wanting to get online for awhile now, and although it's not official yet, they're entering with hopes of doing some damage to rival Netflix.

Meanwhile, Best Buy's jumping in on the online bandwagon hot on the heels of Walmart's recent moves, deeming online movie sales a necessity. Still no official word on when we can expect these stores to roll out, but it sounds like it could be any day. I wouldn't hold my breath though. The chances of either of them getting it right are pretty slim. – Louis Ramirez

Blockbuster, Best Buy to Launch Movie Download Services [Ars Technica]

How ABC.com Plans to Deliver HD Online [Multichannel News]

One of the beta's biggest features is the ability to run Slacker in "mini" mode (as opposed to running it from your browser). You also get higher resolution album artwork, the ability to create playlists from your music, and when Slacker starts offering their premium version, the app will let you listen to your favorite songs on-demand. (The app will also play a big role once the hardware comes out). It's worth checking out if you're a Slacker fan like myself, though my one nitpick is that there's no Mac love. – Louis Ramirez

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