The Register reports that “Nokia faces a crippling financial bill for its strategy of bundling free music with handsets, which will give users unlimited song downloads with Nokia phones.  The world’s biggest label, Universal Music, joined the ‘Comes With Music’ initiative at launch last December, and Sony BMG joined last week. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling – believed to be 35 songs per user.  Two key executives have paid the price, The Register understands. Ed Averdieck, formerly Managing Director of Nokia Music (and former MD of OD2, which Nokia acquired in 2006) left the company earlier this year. The other joint head of Nokia Music at the time CwM was announced, former shooting star Tommi Mustonen, former head of Nokia Multimedia, has been given a ‘punishment that fits the crime,’ insiders say: he has to negotiate the label deals personally.”

SFGate observes that “

[w]herever you go on the Web, it seems the riffraff are not far behind.  Consider Facebook, the social network started four years ago for Harvard students that has blossomed into a popular hangout for 70 million users.  Over the last month, some Facebook members have received messages inviting them to download free ring tones or buy male enhancement drugs.  These messages appeared to come from trusted friends, but the links led in one case to an affiliate ad network, Incentaclick, and in other cases to one of several sites offering drugs to improve sexual performance. None of the sites could be contacted for this story.  Other phishing and adware schemes have been reported recently by the TechCrunch blog, Wired.com and several security vendors – Sophos, Fortinet and Cloudmark, which said it’s been hired by a top social network that it can’t name to improve security and block spam.  The goal of many of these schemes is to collect users’ passwords so members’ profiles can be used as launch sites for spam delivery and hackers phishing for sensitive information.”

According to the New York Times, “STEVE JOBS, Apple’s chief executive and field general, has Napoleonic dreams of global conquest for his 10-month-old wonder gadget, the iPhone. So it may be fitting that he’s encountering his most serious resistance in a city called Waterloo.  That is where, 70 miles west of Toronto in Ontario, 19 nondescript, low-rise office buildings comprise the headquarters of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.  R.I.M. is the North American leader in building smartphones, those versatile handsets that operate more like computers than phones. But R.I.M. may have trouble dominating the market’s next phase. Once the exclusive domain of e-mail-obsessed professionals, smartphones are now prized by consumers who want easy access to the Web, digital music and video even more than an omnipresent connection to their in-boxes.”

Internetnews.com has an interesting article today on “disaster prep in the age of Web 2.0.”

In a different article Internetnews.com asks whether it’s right for hackers to fight fire with fire, revealing that “[r]esearchers from the University of Mannheim in Germany and the Institut Eurecom have reverse-infiltrated Storm by deliberately allowing the botnet to infect a series of honeypots, bait computers that were intended to be infected.  Those infected computers then sent out their own payload that had incorrect instructions so the bots on the network did not get the real instructions from the worm’s controllers. They documented it in this paper.  It all sounds very Independence Day (no word on whether Jeff Goldblum figured out how to do the hack) but it does raise a legal question: Is it right to fight the hackers using the same dirty tricks they use?”