Hitler

Adobe says it's taking its ball and getting off that dumb old Apple platform altogether. Apple says, hey, we super totally don't care because we're making bajillions of dollars and plan to continue doing so in the near future. But the ones who really suffer here are the children, who can't code on the iPad unless they're willing to suck it up and learn Objective C. Hey, that's what it was like when I was a kid.

Yes, Sony and Google have teamed up to offer 500,000 free e-books on the Sony Reader. Free is nice, and half a million is an impressive number, but lots of free and cheap e-books can wreak havoc on your database and best-seller lists--just ask Amazon.com, which found itself with Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" briefly sitting atop its best-seller list for legal thrillers in the Kindle Store, experienced earlier Thursday.

The Kindle Edition of "Mein Kampf" isn't free on Amazon. What's interesting is that there are actually two versions: one costs $1.58, and the other costs $1.60.

Both are fairly popular, but it's the cheaper version that captured the No. 1 spot on the legal-thriller list, then bizarrely disappeared within minutes of our capturing the screen grab. (Amazon, which updates its rankings hourly, had yet to respond to a request for a comment when we went to press, but we'll add any response we get when and if it comes).

Amazon also has some issues with competing Kindle best-seller lists. For instance, when you click on the Kindle Books link at the top of the page, you get a list of best-selling titles with stuff like Steve Harvey's "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" and "The Shack" listed at the top (they cost $9.99 and $8.24, respectively). Meanwhile, it appears that Robin Hobb's free "Assassin's Apprentice" is the true No. 1 book in the Kindle Store.… Read more

As The Guardian reports, Nobel Prize-winner Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio suggested during his acceptance speech:

Who knows, if the internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day.

Sounds great, until we consider that criticism and ridicule didn't keep the U.S. out of Iraq. It didn't stop Russia's Putin from going into Chechneya. Indeed, though the Internet has presumably made us far more globally aware, it seems that it has not made us any more intelligent or … Read more

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France, has a dream.

In a lecture Sunday to the Swedish Academy that awards this stunningly relevant prize, Le Clezio suggested that the Web, had it been around in those days, might have prevented World War II.

"Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded--ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said.

It is hard to find good fiction these days. And it seems even harder … Read more

YouTube can't guarantee that its new filtering system will catch every case of piracy. But one company says it can help plug the hole.

Web Sheriff, the British company hired by performers such as Prince and the Village People to protect their music from Web piracy, is now branching into a new service on the heels of Monday's announcement by YouTube.

The juggernaut video-sharing site owned by Google rolled out a long-awaited filtering technology that's designed to automatically detect whether a piece of digital video uploaded to the site is pirated or not.

Here's the rub: … Read more

Somebody combined the Village People's hit song, "YMCA," with footage of a dancing Adolf Hitler and posted the clip to YouTube. Now the company that owns the rights to the band's music is preparing to sue YouTube.

John Giacobbi, president of Web Sheriff, which hunts down pirated material on the Web and tries to get it removed, said his company has sent 500 "take-down" notices to YouTube. Each time the video is pulled, someone else uploads another copy. Giacobbi believes that YouTube has the ability to screen for copyright content in the same way … Read more