RSS has for it’s infancy been almost an internet utopia.  No adverts, no clutter, just the information you want at your finger tips.  It has long been predicted that as its popularity grew adverts would begin to creep in, and now it appears that the prophecies are coming true, I hope this doesn’t become the norm, but it appears that it likely will.

Banner ads beginning to appear

Bob

[Nick adds: Deep Thought readers need not worry; we have no plans to put ads in our RSS feeds, and ads on the site itself will remain no more obtrusive than what we have now..]

Neowin reports this morning that the creators of PyMusique, Cody Brocius and Jon Lech Johansen, have successfully cracked the Digital Rights Management technology used by Napster, and that a forthcoming version of PyMusique will allow Linux users to access the Napster service as well as iTunes.

However, in the process of making PyMusique work with Napster, the group have broken the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that the company uses. Unlike Apple’s iTunes, the DRM is applied ‘server-side’, making the decryption process a lot more complicated. The team have formulated a method for removing the DRM on WMA files allowing them to play on non-Windows systems.

Amazingly, Brocious says the DRM crack could be applied to other stores (MSN Music, Napster, Wall mart [sic]) using the WMA file format; “we would have to figure out how to get their license keys, which is a relatively trivial process”. The origins of the WMA DRM crack are Beale Screamer’s code which was released in late 2001.

Brocius says he plans to release a Napster-compatible version of PyMusique in the near future. 

Google on tuesday introduced a new feature to its flagship Web search service. The feature, dubbed “Google Q&A” will provide specific and factual answers to certain search queries. The answers appear above all other search results. For example, searching for ”United States Population” will yield the following answer (as of this writing):

United States
Population: 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2119.html

A small percentage of queries currently trigger these factual answers, but the service, called Google Q&A, is in its early stages, said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of search quality. Currently, Google Q&A is strong in areas such as geography, information about famous people and physical facts, such as the size of planets, he said. Google will continually work to broaden the service’s scope of topics and to improve its capability to deliver more complex answers, he said.

This follows Google’s recent introduction of Satellite imagery for its Google Maps service. The feature allows users to view a satellite photo of any address in the United States.

I just picked up a game called Lumines: Puzzle Fusion for the PSP. I’ve had it on my wish list for a while now, and thankfully, my anticipation of this game has been well met.

The game is a dropping-blocks puzzler, superficially similar to Tetris. It’s very easy to pick up and play (and subsequently get lost in.) The first time I played it in the store, I was so engrossed in it that my friends had to work hard to pry my attention away from it. It’s fast, frenetic, and oozes style out of every pore, thanks to the music and colorful skins it has.

All in all, if you have a PSP, I highly recommend you pick it up.

Google has announced that users of their Gmail service will be receiving free storage upgrades. Inititially, storage will be doubled from 1000MB to 2000MB, but Google plans to offer “as much space as they are able” on an ongoing basis, a storage limit which they’ve somewhat humorously dubbed “infinity +1”.

Speaking to CNET News.com, Georges Harik, Gmail’s product management director explained the change. Lifting predefined storage caps for Web-based e-mail could have broader ripple effects, Harik said, changing the way people think about quotas from something that is set in advance to something that grows with the user.

“We wanted to make sure we have a plan in place for when people reach their storage limit,” he explained. “We don’t want people to worry that they might run out.”

Gmail users logging in now will see the constantly-increasing storage limit at the bottom of their Gmail inbox page.