Viacom sued TWC last year after the cable operator said it planned to make available programming such as MTV’s “Jersey Shore” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” among others, available to subscribers on portable devices.

“That’s very good news for consumers,” Viacom’s Mark Jafar said on the media company’s blog.

The settlement involves in-home viewing on portable devices and does not include so-called TV Everywhere platforms that allow authenticated cable channel subscribers to watch repurposed programs on-demand on any CE device anywhere.

The issue, of course, involves monies paid by cable and satellite TV operators to media companies to broadcast programming. Pay-TV operators say ubiquitous access to content is key to luring and retaining subscribers from opting for lower-cost options such as SVOD services spearheaded by Netflix.

In reaching the settlement agreement, Time Warner Cable and Viacom were also able to resolve other unrelated business matters to their mutual satisfaction, according to a statement disclosed on the blog.  

“Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment,” the two companies said.

Viacom programming will be rolled out on TWC’s app throughout the next several weeks.

Last August, Viacom settled a similar dispute with Cablevision over the latter’s TV Everywhere app.

I have a soft spot for Anomalocaris. Of all the Cambrian oddballs, this segmented invertebrate was one of the strangest. The prehistoric creature’s stalked eyes, swim flaps, spiked grasping appendages, and plated mouth gave this predator an exceptionally alien appearance. Anomalocaris was so weird, in fact, that paleontologists only recently assembled a complete picture of what this animal looked like. For years, the various parts of Anomalocaris were believed to be parts of various other creatures. What was eventually recognized as the neo-predator’s mouth was especially perplexing.

The mouth of Anomalocaris started off as a jellyfish. That’s a historical quirk, not a biological one. A century ago, as he was cataloging 505-million-year-old fossils from the exceptional Burgess Shale site, paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott puzzled over what seemed to be a flattened ring. Walcott called the animal Peytoia, and suggested that it was a strange form of archaic jellyfish.

Walcott’s interpretation stayed in place for decades. When paleontologists Harry Whittington and Simon Conway Morris wrote an article about Cambrian life for Scientific American in 1979, they included the odd jelly in a reconstructed Burgess Shale habitat. As Stephen Jay Gould later commented in his book Wonderful Life, the artistically-reinvigorated Peytoia looked like “a kind of Frisbee cum flying saucer cum pineapple slice.”

Read more | Comments

Dish, which owns and operates Blockbuster LLC, is offering the streaming service, dubbed G-Movies, through a partnership with GMC TV. Subscribers can access programs such as the Bible-based animated series “Pahappahooey Island”; teen drama “Much Ado About Middle School,” starring Bill Cobbs, Lee Meriwether and Amanda Waters; and the “Left Behind” series of dramas, starring Kirk Cameron and based on bestselling books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

According to Simmons Research, 75 million people in the United States describe themselves as "active Christians," and 40.5 million adults ages 25 to 54 want faith-friendly and family-values programming. Additional research conducted for GMC by Barna Group showed that 70% of these faith-friendly consumers expressed positive interest toward the new G-Movies service.

“G-Movies provides the best titles for families searching for entertainment that upholds their faith and values and offers uplifting programs every member of the household can enjoy,” said Dave Shull, SVP of programming.

Dish's Heartland Package features seven family-entertainment networks, including GMC TV, Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movie Channel, PiXL, Baby TV, Rural TV and RFD TV. This $5 monthly package includes more than 3,000 streaming children's and family programs to the iPad using the Dish Remote Access app. Streaming programs are available from BabyFirstTV, Cookie Jar, Content Kids, Gaiam and GoDigital.

At $10 per month, the Blockbuster @Home service includes thousands of additional streaming programs from networks Encore, Epix, Starz and MoviePlex; features a disc-by-mail service for DVDs, Blu-rays and games; and has more than 20 additional programming channels available through the set top box.

Some years ago, soon after the original iPhone took firm hold of the public's imagination, an iPhone-using friend of mine went through a messy breakup. He was the instigator and his partner was, well, the breakup-ee. In the following weeks, my friend's ex kept sending him creepy messages with more knowledge about his activities than any ex should have. The ex also would show up, unannounced, in situations an ex shouldn't know anything about. And that was just the beginning.

Through his iPhone, this crazy ex had gained access to my friend's activities and communications. This wasn't possible in the old feature phone days, and my friend thought that not making his life public on social networks would keep him safe from stalkers. A few freaked out phone calls, a bunch of settings changes, and one restraining order later—we all learned otherwise.

I was reminded of this story again recently after seeing this reddit thread (the original contents of which have since been removed). The poster had been watching his ex-girlfriend's whereabouts on her iPhone—not with some agreed-upon permission in Find My Friends, but from within her own iCloud account using Find My iPhone. The poster also admitted to changing the names of contacts in his ex-girlfriend's address book so that numerous text messages from her would go to him instead of to her friends. He would also change other people's contacts to match his own number so he could text, masking himself as another friend. He had originally set up her iTunes password and so was able to access everything about her—as her.

Read more on Ars Technica…

But this data loss was not due to a server breach, or some complex phishing attack—instead, the Social Services office said that Hewlett Packard, which manages the data controlled by the office, notified the IHSS of the breach after a physical package containing microfiche with thousands of entries of payroll data went missing from a damaged package that HP had shipped by U.S. Postal Service to the State Compensation Insurance Fund in Riverside, CA.

As the package arrived damaged and incomplete, it’s unclear whether the information was lost or stolen, but the state has launched an internal investigation and notified law enforcement in the hopes of resolving the issue, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The possibly compromised information, dating from October to December 2011, for 375,000 workers included names, Social Security numbers and wages. For 326,000 recipients, state identification numbers may be at risk,” the LA Times reports. The In-Home Supportive Services office is also sending out hundreds of thousands of letters to potentially affected parties.

Read more on Ars Technica…

More than $87,000 worth of the virtual currency known as Bitcoin was stolen after online bandits penetrated servers belonging to Bitcoinica, prompting its operators to temporarily shutter the trading platform to contain the damage.

Friday's theft came after hackers accessed Bitcoinica's production servers and depleted its online wallet of 18,547 BTC, as individual Bitcoin units are called, company officials said in a blog post published on Friday. It said the heist affected only a small fraction of Bitcoinica's overall bitcoin deposits and that all withdrawal requests will be honored once the platform reopens.

It was at least the second time in 10 weeks Bitcoinica has been stung by a computer intrusion that has cost it dearly. In early March, a security lapse at cloud services provider Linode allowed hackers to make off with about $210,000 worth of bitcoin after they gained unauthorized access to bitcoin wallets stored by Bitcoinica and seven other customers. Last June, an anonymous person claimed to have lost $500,000 worth of bitcoin to online thieves, but the claims were never independently verified.

Read more on Ars Technica…

Total software sales (excluding new games) dropped 42% to $307.2 million, compared with $533.7 million last year. Despite the enduring appeal of Xbox 360, hardware sales dropped 32% to $189.7 million from $279.9 million last year.

The lone bright spot: Video game accessories spiked up 1% to $148.6 million from $147.8 million last year.

Top-ranked sellers included (in descending order): Prototype 2 (Activision Blizzard); Kinect Star Wars (Lucasarts); Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision Blizzard); Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 (Electronic Arts); NBA 2K12 (Take 2); The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings (Warner); Mario Party 9 (Nintendo); Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts); Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft); and MLB 12: The Show (Sony).

“This year, Easter fell very early in April, which means most Easter-related purchases may have fallen into March this year,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier. “We usually find that Easter-related purchases generate an extra 10% in revenue in the month they occur, so some of the softness compared to last April could be attributed to the shift in Easter timing.”

Five years ago, the social gaming company Zynga was cruising along with a fairly standard IT infrastructure. Servers were racked and stacked in a retail data center where Zynga rented space. Customer demand for games like Zynga Poker, launched in 2007, was being met.

Then along came FarmVille. After the game's 2009, 10 million users were hitting FarmVille servers within six weeks, and 25 million within five months.

Read the comments on this post