According to T-Mobile, the bandits made off with about $8.2 million worth of Sidekick messaging devices. T-Mobile is pursuing the thieves aggressively.

T-Mobile issued an internal memo to let employees in its sales channels know about the theft. This is what it says:

Wanted to let you all know that one of our warehouses was broken into over the weekend and some 36,000 phones were stolen (worth about 8.2 Million). The most significant phones stolen were the Sidekick phones. Please make sure you inform the dealers who like to purchase gray market handsets that we are aggressively working with law enforcement to prosecute anyone who has these handsets. We do know the IMEI’s of the stolen phones and once they end up on our network we will go to the dealer code that activated the phone. So if your dealers get a call about Sidekicks and the deal is too good to be true you will know why.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number is essentially a code that is unique to each and every GSM-based handset.

As with other serial numbers, it is printed inside the phone, usually under the battery. It is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices.

Since T-Mobile has the IMEI’s of the stolen devices in hand, it can use the numbers to find out if the stolen phones are activated on its network.

Once they are, it can use the IMEI to ban the phones from accessing the network, making them paperweights.

Even if someone purchases the stolen handsets from an authorized dealer, they can be out of luck if the dealer sells gray market or stolen phones.

The Sidekick devices are popular phones, so it’s no surprise that they were targeted in the raid. Hopefully T-Mobile will be able to recover its stolen property and prosecute the criminals.

Good! I guess the generally negative press and a big fat thumbs down from consumers in general had something to do with it. Or, maybe — maybe — it had at least provisionally planned to do something like this for a while and was just seeing what it could get away with first.

Either way, this is something of a milestone: Every single major record label in the United States is now delivering at least some of their catalog through a digital download system with no device restrictions at all.

Even a couple of years ago that would have been unthinkable, but I suspect it’s about the only way left to fly at this point. The reasons are pretty plain:

DRM causes more problems than it solves.

It’s not just that every implementation of it turns out to be something you can work around in some fashion; it’s that all too often it creates an impractical hassle for a perfectly legitimate consumer. Treating the consumer pre-emptively like a thief does nothing to endear them and slows the adoption of the very technologies you’re trying to sell.

The best anti-piracy strategy is a good pricing strategy.

A friend of mine had a discussion about this just the other day. With Amazon and eMusic and Napster and all the rest selling licensed, high-quality tracks for a buck a pop, there’s no earthly reason for a legit consumer to go onto a P2P network and trawl for someone else’s potentially dodgy rips.

There’s that much less money to spend in general, so it helps to be able to spend it that much more wisely.

It’s more economical to buy the one or two songs off an album that you know you actually want to hear, instead of dropping $12 or up on a CD that won’t get a full end-to-end workout. Unless you’re buying the CD used, of course.

Since used CD sales aren’t tracked very consistently, it’s hard to say what portion of total music sales is taken up by used CDs, but I’m guessing it’s been on the up-and-up since places like Amazon made it all the easier to get them in the first place.

There’s still some experimenting to be done, I think, with how to price things. Amazon’s pricing is around $8 to $9 an album (with a discount for a whole album’s worth of tracks); eMusic is a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of tracks regardless of length, with discounts as you spend more money upfront.

Both plans have their merits and either one is better in my mind than scratching around to see if maybe someone has the song you want in their shared directory.

I love hour the news anchor can barely hold it together. This couldn’t be more perfect if you planned it. Yay technical difficulties with video equipment.

Gannett’s stalwart publication has announced that it will be cutting 45 newsroom positions, amounting to roughly nine percent of its editorial staff.

After holding a staff meeting to break the news, editor Ken Paulson sent out the following memo:

It’s unfortunate that we have to take these steps, particularly when our newspaper circulation is growing and USATODAY.com has been named the top news website in the country by the Online News Association. Unfortunately, revenue has not kept pace and we’re now facing the same cutbacks that so many other news organizations have already experienced.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. Later on in the memo Paulson reveals that there’s a specific criteria in place the types of employees they’d like to cut:

The job eliminations will be done on a voluntary basis in the form of buyouts for staffers with 15 years or more of Gannett experience and less than five years of online experience. Departments will exclude certain key positions based on strategic needs in 2008. We hope to achieve all job reductions through voluntary buyouts, but job eliminations are possible if we don’t have enough applicants.

Vaguely mentioning “online experience” as a factor just seems odd. It will be interesting to see how this story flushes out over the coming days.

Source: Poynter Online

On Tuesday, the antitrust arm of the European Commission nixed approval on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, citing competitive concerns.

The EU also ordered an in-depth review into the acquisition.

The scale of the deal certainly raises eyebrows — $3.1 billion isn’t chopped liver — but by most estimates, Google grossly overpaid for the company.

DoubleClick’s annual revenue — which reportedly falls short of $200 million — hardly puts a dent in the overall Web ad market, which is estimated to be worth anywhere from $17 billion to $20 billion.

The bigger question is this: Why didn’t the European Commission pick on Yahoo for its $680 million purchase of RightMedia in July 2007?

And what about Microsoft’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive in August of this year?

CNet’s Chris Soghoian reports that because Comcast’s filtering technique uses forged TCP reset packets to disrupt traffic it is essentially impersonating its customers.

The forged headers allow Comcast to say it doesn’t block traffic — it doesn’t, the traffic continues to flow, it just gets altered into forged packets that constantly reset the peer connections.

But forging headers is hardly the “cutting edge technology,” Comcast claims it is and it may well be illegal. Assuming your identity and forging packets is roughly the same thing your friendly Nigerian e-mail scammer does to infiltrate your e-mail inbox.

As Soghoian points out, were Comcast to do to e-mail traffic what they do to BitTorrent traffic, they would be in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and libel for fines and jail time.

So why can they get away with doing it to BitTorrent, Gnutella and Lotus traffic?

The answer is simply that no one has challenged them yet, perhaps they can get away with it, perhaps they can’t, but we won’t know until someone brings a suit against Comcast.

Many states have laws already on the books that make impersonating someone an crime, especially when the impersonation is intended to benefit the person doing the impersonating.

In this case, because Comcast stands to gain from filtering BitTorrent traffic — less strain on the network and BitTorrent is increasingly being used to deliver movies (legally), which makes it a Comcast competitor — the company may soon find itself a sitting duck for consumer lawsuits.

From the Associated Press:

“We hope to take part in activities related to the International Space Station,” Li Xueyong, a vice minister of science and technology. “If I am not mistaken, this program has 16 countries currently involved and we hope to be the 17th partner.”

Given all the recent talk about war in space, not to mention the real thing on the ground, this seems like a no-brainer. The old cold war days are gone.

U.S. concerns about working with a communist dictatorship, as the AP puts it here, are laughable. Particularly given the severely tarnished democratic credentials of Russia, a primary partner in the International Space Station.

China is growing as a power in space, with the capability to launch manned missions, blast satellites out of orbit, and plans to launch a lunar mission soon.

Officials there are now saying that first lunar probe will launch later this month, putting it hard on the heels of Japan’s Kaguya orbiter.

It would be foolish to try to keep China isolated in space. Cooperation there may not be a perfect recipe for eternal peace, but it’s a whole lot better than the kind of saber (or laser?) rattling that’s led to space-war planning on both sides.

He had to serve his detention writing on the chalk board as usual.

We have exclusive never before seen footage here at iDunzo.com

Here’s the best part of this story. When asked why he was viewing iDunzo.com in class, Bart simply replied, “Eat my shorts, man.”