Last fall, 11 newspaper publishers agreed to let real estate upstart Zillow.com carry the real estate listings from their 282 papers. Now, the Zillow Newspaper Consortium, which includes Hearst and Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE), and the price-comparison site are launching a real estate ad network with the right to sell ads on each other's sites. The newspapers can sell Zillow, with national traffic averaging some 5 million uniques monthly, while VC-funded Zillow can target local real estate users and sell some additional national inventory across the newspaper sites. Other publishers involved include Media General (NYSE: MEG) , Inc.; MediaNews Group, Inc.; Morris Communications Company, Philadelphia Media Holdings; and The E.W. Scripps (NYSE: SSP) Company. Newspapers include The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Jose Mercury News. This is not to be confused with the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium, although many members are the same. Both efforts are among the many newspaper-web experiments as national sites try to go local and publishers look for online ad growth.

AP: "Newspapers hope they can charge more for online ads by connecting advertisers with the visitors most likely to buy their products. By forming networks, they are giving advertisers the type of one-stop service that is the specialty of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other Internet companies. ... Some newspapers, magazines and broadcasters also belong to graphical ad networks targeting parenting, lifestyles, finances and other topics, but those tend to either be smaller or involve partnerships with independent blogs."

Related

• Zillow.com Makes Deal With 11 Newspaper Chains To Carry Real Estate Ads

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Yesterday RDFa reached Proposed Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium, the final stage before becoming a W3C Recommendation. RDFa makes data in web pages rendered for humans readable in a meaningful way by computers. It's always been difficult to bring the Semantic Web to the World Wide Web, RDFa is crucial bridging them together.

More...

A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails, that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.

Over the years BitTorrent has attracted some shady figures. We’ve reported on malware ridden BitTorrent clients and media players, a BitTorrent site that infects its users with spyware, and several other scams.

Although most scams can be avoided easily when a few simple rules are followed, they still manage to trick thousands of novices every day - and this is not going to end anytime soon. Since BitTorrent has become more or less mainstream, with millions of users worldwide, it also proves an interesting target for email spammers.

The latest scam, unlike the others we have reported on before, is one that is sent by email. The email is disguised as a message from the anti-piracy company MediaDefender (using their logo etc.), and warns the recipient that his or her download behavior has been logged. The email has a report attached with more details about the infringed material, which turns out to be a virus.

Pirate Spam Email

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

We have attached a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you
downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any
future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can
expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C. §§ 512, 1201?1205, 1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. §
4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

To the more experienced and BitTorrent savvy users it is clear that the email is a scam. First of all, MediaDefender has never been involved in anti-piracy enforcement. The only thing they do is spoofing, flood BitTorrent sites with fake files, and the occasional DDoS attack on Revision3.

In addition, the email claims to have data on what the user searched for on the sites, which is irrelevant and practically impossible. It seems that the spammers should have done some more research on the topic. A good spammer would have included The Pirate Bay in the list of sites instead of Getinvites, which is a BitTorrent invite trading site, and not a search engine

A related scam email, sent out by the same group of people judging by the style and format, is also targeted at filesharers and threatens to suspend their Internet connection. The email claims to be sent by the Internet service provider consortium, and again includes an infected attachment with a report.

The email is a clever scam that shows how mainstream BitTorrent has become. The emails are sent out randomly, but many recipients, scared by be cut off by their ISP, or sued for downloading copyrighted material, might open the infected attachment without realizing that it is a scam.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Anti-Piracy Scam Emails Target BitTorrent Users

Sound-Rec-Ed provides simple GUIs to record and edit sound files, similar to operating a tape-deck. Buttons start and stop recording or break incoming audio into separate files. It can cut sections from audio files or join files. It saves files in WAV, OGG, or MP3 format. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Options were added to SoundRec for delaying the start of recording and for limiting the total duration of all recordings. Options were also added to automatically run user specified filter-programs or scripts on each recorded file, as well as to set file sequence numbers to specified ranges.

Sound-Rec-Ed provides simple GUIs to record and edit sound files, similar to operating a tape-deck. Buttons start and stop recording or break incoming audio into separate files. It can cut sections from audio files or join files. It saves files in WAV, OGG, or MP3 format. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Options were added to SoundRec for delaying the start of recording and for limiting the total duration of all recordings. Options were also added to automatically run user specified filter-programs or scripts on each recorded file, as well as to set file sequence numbers to specified ranges.

rst2pdf is a tool to convert Restructured Text to PDF without using any intermediate formats. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Type1 and True Type fonts are automatically embedded. A width attribute was added in styles to create narrow paragraphs and tables. Styles are supported for table headers and table cells. "Zebra" tables can be created. Improvements were made in the handling of overflowing literal blocks (code, for instance). Different modes were added to handle too-large literal blocks: overflow, truncate, shrink, or error. Real sidebars and "floating" elements are supported. Link style was fixed.

rst2pdf is a tool to convert Restructured Text to PDF without using any intermediate formats. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Type1 and True Type fonts are automatically embedded. A width attribute was added in styles to create narrow paragraphs and tables. Styles are supported for table headers and table cells. "Zebra" tables can be created. Improvements were made in the handling of overflowing literal blocks (code, for instance). Different modes were added to handle too-large literal blocks: overflow, truncate, shrink, or error. Real sidebars and "floating" elements are supported. Link style was fixed.

Votorola is software for hosting open, continuous elections in the public sphere. It implements a medium of assent that is independent of government and party electoral systems. It enables users to join with their neighbors in advancing leaders for the local community and candidates for public office. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Divisional schemes were introduced, enabling the administrator to define different methods of dividing a region into electoral districts, such as municipal versus federal. Navigation was overhauled in the Web interface. Short-cuts were added for navigating directly to specific elections and voters. A help page was added for posting user instructions. Configuration hooks were introduced to enable the customizing of page content and styling.

Votorola is software for hosting open, continuous elections in the public sphere. It implements a medium of assent that is independent of government and party electoral systems. It enables users to join with their neighbors in advancing leaders for the local community and candidates for public office. License: MIT/X Consortium License Changes:
Divisional schemes were introduced, enabling the administrator to define different methods of dividing a region into electoral districts, such as municipal versus federal. Navigation was overhauled in the Web interface. Short-cuts were added for navigating directly to specific elections and voters. A help page was added for posting user instructions. Configuration hooks were introduced to enable the customizing of page content and styling.