SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes this morning that popular "quasi-legal" MP3 download service AllofMP3.com went down over the weekend, and has not yet come back up. The company operates under the dubious aegis of outfits like the "Russian Multimedia and Internet Society" which, reports MP3.com, grant it the right "to sell any song in any format without having to obtain the permission of copyright holders." Operating in a legal gray area, the site has sold music for as little as 11 cents a song, prices which have driven enormous traffic. In the U.K. it is second only to iTunes.

Arrington suspects that the abrupt shutdown may be the work of the Kremlin, responding in its own no-nonsense way to increased Western pressure to reign in Russian intellectual property theft. Apparently no fan of iTunes, Arrington regrets the shutdown, arguing that the service is "disruptive to a broken business model." At least one of his readers, however, questions his logic: "I'm all for disrupting the RIAA's and MPAA' rather antiquated business model but I fail to see how "buying" music through a channel where none of the money goes to the artists themselves will do so."

Is that a Mac in your pocket?

Could iPods one day run Mac OS X? That's the speculation on the blogs ever since Apple dropped PortalPlayer as a chip supplier. Apple's move was a devastating blow for the company once known as the Intel (Research) of the iPod. So why did Apple (Research) drop PortalPlayer? One theory floating around the Web: Apple wants to turn the iPod into a portable computer. PortalPlayer's chips are good enough for just playing music, which is why Apple's keeping them in its low-end iPod Shuffle. But for its higher-end iPods, it's turning to Samsung for a chip that VC advisor Pete Field observes is powerful enough to run Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Former Goldman Sachs (Research) analyst Michael Parekh agrees, noting that he made a similar argument for the iPod as a miniature, portable Mac last August.

BBC interviews cabbie on Apple court case

Television networks have been known to put just about anyone on the air as an "expert." But the BBC elevated the practice to pure farce last week when, instead of interviewing NewsWireless.net editor Guy Kewney, they accidentally interviewed his cabbie instead. Kewney was supposed to go on air to discuss Apple Computer's victory in a trademark lawsuit filed by The Beatles' Apple Corp. over its use of the Apple logo in iTunes. But a producer grabbed the baffled cabbie, who was wearing a "Guy Kewney" name tag, and seated him in the studio. YouTube and other video-sharing websites featured the instant-classic clip, where the cabbie's look of horror was quickly replaced by a game face as he tried to answer BBC interviewer Karen Bowman's questions.

Brits turn surveillance into television

Depending on whom you ask, it's either a smart crime deterrent, or it's the next step towards our collective Orwellian future. Slashdot reports today that Shoreditch, a community in London's East End, has launched a television channel which consists entirely of live feeds from hundreds of surveillance cameras situated around the neighborhood. England has been in the throes of a closed-circuit television boom for some time, but the Shoreditch experiment appears to be the first time a "CCTV" network has effectively been turned into broadcast television.

Not surprisingly, privacy advocates are concerned, while those behind the new channel downplay their concerns. "This is not naming and shaming or spying," says James Morris, CEO of tech-provider Digital Bridge to The Telegraph. Most Slashdot readers are dubious, however, both about system's efficacy in fighting crime, and the notion that it is not an invasion of privacy. Comments one reader, "CCTV cameras are known to have a definite effect on crime: they displace it to camera-free areas." Says another: "The issue is not just whether you're monitored in real-time (that's bad enough) but that you are being recorded for all time! Worse, you're being watched by people with the power to have you arrested if they so choose."