According to information by NPD Research, Apple’s iTunes tied with P2P (peer-to-peer) service LimeWire as the second most popular digital music service in March of this year. Both iTunes and LimeWire were used by 1.7 million households. Topping both of these products for March was WinMX which was used by more than 2.1 million households to download music. Napster and Real Networks both placed in the top ten along with P2P services iMesh and Kazaa.
“One of the music industry’s questions has been when will paid download stores compete head-to-head with free P2P download services,” said Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group’s Music and Movies division. “That question has now been answered. iTunes is more popular than nearly any P2P service, and two other paid digital music offerings have also gained a level of critical mass. These digital download stores appear to have created a compelling and economically viable alternative to illegal file sharing.”
The study shows that users are willing to pay for music as much as they download it for free using P2P services. NPD reports that older users are more likely to be deterred by the recording industry’s anti-piracy litigation efforts and thus are more likely to pay for music.
The following list shows the top ten digital music services, based on the number of households acquiring a digital song in March 2005:
In related news, the RIAA is suing hundreds of students for distributing music across the school’s network. The RIAA is also suing 30 campus’s for distributing music across their Internet 2 network.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.