YouTube lifts music video block

YouTube has lifted a block on users viewing official music videos after the website reached an agreement with songwriters' group PRS for Music.

In March, the service blocked thousands of music videos to UK users after failing to reach agreement over fees.

YouTube, owned by Google, is paying an undisclosed lump sum to PRS, backdated until January and lasting until 2012.

Adam Shaw from PRS for Music told the BBC that he was pleased that an agreement had finally been reached.

"We have 60,000 song-writer and composer members and many of them don't earn very much money at all - 90% of them earn less than £5,000 a year," he said.

"The money we receive is really their living."

Sanctioned

YouTube's decision in March theoretically blocked all premium music video content - owned by record labels - in the UK.

However, many fan videos and official videos continued to be available on the site, including some sanctioned by the record labels themselves.


If content owners start to see the video site as just another useful platform rather than a threat, then everyone can start making money

Rory Cellan-Jones

BBC's technology correspondent


Read Rory's thoughts in full
For example, EMI-owned Parlophone recently became the site's most popular UK channel of the year, with 240 million hits, despite the ban.

However, YouTube said the "tens of thousands" of videos which had disappeared "will come back over the next few days".

"The music videos are an extremely popular part of YouTube and this deal doesn't only cover the music videos but also music included in TV programmes like the X Factor and also for the inclusion of music in user videos as well," YouTube's Patrick Walker told the BBC.

The deal will also mean that new material will appear on YouTube as the site signs partnerships with other record labels and guest editors introduce their favourite videos.


Pete Waterman says songwriters should get paid properly by YouTube
'Outraged'

In the UK, PRS for Music acts on behalf of member publishers as a collecting society for licensing fees relating to the use of music.

At the start of the row Mr Walker told the BBC that PRS was seeking a rise in fees "many, many factors" higher than the previous agreement.

He said the two were "so far apart" that YouTube had no choice but to remove content while negotiations continued.


HAVE YOUR SAY If the public can access videos for free, and the artist still gets paid then it sounds like everyone's a winner
Richard Hill, Birmingham
Send us your comments At the time, Steve Porter, head of PRS, said he was "outraged... shocked and disappointed" by the decision.

He said the move "punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent".

The Music Publishers Association (MPA) joined PRS in urging Google to rethink, while Lord Carter, who was the UK's minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, also waded into the debate.

Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee, the minister said he suspected a degree of "commercial posturing on the part of both parties" but said the row was indicative of a wider issue.

YouTube is the world's most popular online video site but has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by Google for $1.65bn (then £875m) in 2006.

Services such as Pandora.com, MySpace UK and Imeem have also had issues securing licensing deals in the UK in the past 12 months.

Reboot for UK's 'oldest' computer

Britain's oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order.

The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973.

When first built the 2.4m x 5m computer was state-of-the-art, although it was superseded by transistor-based systems.

The restoration project is expected to take a year.

The system was built and used by staff at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

Speaking to BBC News, Dick Barnes, who helped build the original Harwell computer, said the research was - officially at least - for civilian nuclear power projects.

"Officially it was to help with general background atomic theory and to assist in the development of civilian power," he said.

"Of course, it [the Atomic Energy Research Establishment] had connections to the nuclear weapons programme," he added.

Although not the first computer built in the UK, the Harwell had one of the longest service lives.

Built by a team of three people, the device was capable of doing the work of six to ten people and ran for seven years until the establishment obtained their first commercial computer.

"We didn't think we were doing anything pioneering at the time," said Mr Barnes.

"We knew the Manchester Baby and Cambridge's EDSAC were already up and running. Both these projects had large teams and we felt like a poor relation.

"Looking back, hardly any of us were computer literate and it's astonishing that we managed stored computing at all," he said.

The Harwell machine is recognisably modern in that unlike some of its predecessors such as Colossus it used a single memory to store data and programs.



The Harwell computer was still in use in 1973
Kevin Murrell, director of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, said it had some of the characteristics of contemporary machines.

"The machine was a relay-based computer using 900 Dekatron gas-filled tubes that could each hold a single digit in memory - similar to RAM in a modern computer - and paper tape for both input and program storage."

Time line

Retired from service at Harwell, the system was offered as a prize for colleges, with Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College (later Wolverhampton University) taking ownership and renaming it as the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell). It was used in computer education until 1973.

It then went on display at Birmingham Science Museum, before being put in storage at Birmingham City Council Museums' Collection Centre.

Now it is being sent to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, where a team are set to restore it to working order.

Mr Barnes said the prospect of seeing the Harwell computer up and running after more than 36 years was "very exciting".

"I still don't know how they managed to find so many spare parts, but I think they have a very good chance of getting it going again," he said.

There are several significant predecessors to the Harwell computer: The Ace (parts of which are on display in London's Science Museum), the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) which was broken up, and Manchester's Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) nicknamed Baby, which has been rebuilt but not using original parts.

Story by BBC.
TheTechForum

Tavis Ormandy and Julien Ninnes have discovered a severe security flaw in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernals since 2001 on all architectures. 'Since it leads to the kernal executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernal privelages.

Incorrect proto_ops initializations

RedHat official mitigation reccomendation: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=516949#c10

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Read this on TheTechForum at Local Privilege Escalation on all Linux Kernals

Windows 7 can run on just about anything!

I've always wanted to get a modern operating system to work on my graphing calculator. And we're about there, thanks to the efforts of a fellow (or strangly named lady) on The Windows Club forum. A user by the name of "hackerman1" has installed Windows 7 on his PC, which in itself is nothing to write home about. The catch here is that he's gotten a bootable, working installation on no less than a Pentium II system. No, that's not a typo--Pentium Two. The extreme...ly old machine consists of a 266 MHz CPU, a whopping 96 MB of memory, and a next-generation 4 MB graphics card.Like a stuntperson who just keeps tempting death by pushing the landing ramp farther and farther back, hackerman1 didn't just stop with that meager system loadout. He continued to alter the memory amount, achieving success with two of three setups: 128 MB and 96 MB. Unfortunately, Windows 7 didn't seem to enjoy only having 64 megabytes of memory to work with, marking hackerman's stopping point with that version of the experiment.That's not to say that he's planning on stopping for good, however. Next up? A Pentium I machine featuring a 166 MHz CPU paired with a 1 MB graphics card. After that, maybe hackerman1 can break inject some Aero graphics into his trusty abacus. Although he didn't say how long it took him to install or boot the operating system, other forum users have chimed in and timed the installation for a Pentium III-based system at a low 17 continuous hours. And the boot time? 17 minutes.





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