Last.fm debuts free music service (BBC NEWS)

Social music site Last.fm has launched what it describes as the world's biggest free music service. It is promising to pay unsigned artists royalties every time a user streams a track to their computer, and has done deals with the four major record companies as well as more than 150,000 independent labels to offer access to their catalogues.

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Airwaves Sale Is Payoff for Digital Move (Wired News)

So far, the decade-long transition to digital broadcasting has mostly been about pain. Beginning Thursday, the public will start to see the gain. That's when the government will begin auctioning off the airwaves that are being made available thanks to the transition, raising billions for the U.S. Treasury and freeing up badly needed space for emergency communications.

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WSO2 Releases Web Services Framework for Ruby (Application Development Trends )

Web developers who use the increasingly popular combo of the Ruby programming language with the Rails framework, better known as Ruby on Rails, now have an open source framework for providing and/or consuming Web services: WSO2's newly released Web Services Framework for Ruby (WSF/Ruby), the first Ruby extension to support the WS-* specifications.

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Sold at Auction: One Mainframe (Campus Technology)

Time to unplug the mainframe? Just what do you do with that big black box with all of its gear and software--especially if it's only three years old and still running in the data center? Why, if you have nerves of steel, you auction it off on eBay, of course.

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Parents crashing online party (CNN.com)

Chicago teen Scott Seigal gets text messages from his girlfriend's mother, his friends' parents leave greetings on his MySpace page and his grandmother instant messages him every day.Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.

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