The Recording Industry Association of America has dumped the company charged with gathering evidence for use against people accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

As part of its controversial antipiracy strategy, the RIAA had enlisted MediaSentry to search the Internet for evidence of people sharing large amounts of music. The trade group's campaign on behalf of the world's largest recording labels reportedly resulted in lawsuits against about 35,000 people.

However, MediaSentry was often criticized for its gathering techniques, often characterized as invasive and excessive.

Earlier this year, The Chronicle of Higher Education visited the RIAA offices and got a demonstration of how Media

It appears Apple is getting ready to expand its MacBook Pro lineup.

The Mac maker plans to unveil a 17-inch MacBook Pro, possibly as early as this week at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, according to a report on AppleInsider. Like the 13- and 15-inch models, the 17-incher is expected to sport a unibody construction. But unlike those smaller models, the new MacBook Pro will have a fixed internal battery, much like the MacBook Air's battery setup, according to the report.

The site also reported that we can expect a Mac Mini makeover that will include the same Nvidia chipsets that Apple introduced in October in new MacBooks, the MCP79 chipset. That chipset uses the Nvidia 9400M graphics processor, and would give the Mini a boost in graphics processing power over th

Daily market share in "All Categories" as measured by visits, based on daily usage.

Did we turn to Facebook for Christmas cheer, or to cheer up Christmas?

The social-networking site, which has been experiencing explosive growth in membership, saw record traffic on Christmas Eve. Facebook achieved its highest-ever traffic level, accounting for 2.18 percent compared with a 1.42 percent average for November, according to numbers gathered by Hitwise. That's a 54 percent increase compared with the November average and a 53 percent increase year over year.

That pattern was mirrored in the U.K., where visits to the social networking site had a market share of 4.65 percent, accounting for one in every 22

Autopack is a basic directory of Twitter users by group, with the capability to follow entire groups as once.

In explaining Twitter to people (something I seem to be a doing a lot lately), one of the questions I get the most is, "So who should I follow?" I've long wished for a tool, myself, that would let me bulk-add cool people to my network. Over the holidays I checked out two new tools designed to do that.

The first is AutoPack, an offshoot of wiki-based Twitter directory called Twitter Pack. AutoPack is a long list of Twitter user accounts broken into categories (such as Quotations, Lawyers, and Green Building). The directory itself is incomplete, but what's cool is that you can sign up for everyone in a category at once. This is the way s

Move over, Pandora. There's a new music service in town--well, in some towns anyway.

TorrentFreak has an in-depth write-up of a new music streaming service called Spotify, which shows an awful lot of promise--so much so that the music piracy-focused blog sees it as a viable alternative to downloading pirated songs for free.

Spotify is a lean, downloadable application that lets users stream music instantly from its library--a library built with the blessing of EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and some smaller record labels. That, of course, begs the question: how does it make money? Spotify offers two ways to use its service, a free service sponsored by ads, and a paid subscription service.

Once downloaded, the service allows users