Internet users in China have been complaining this week that they cannot access Apple’s iTunes Store. The start of the problems coincided with an announcement from an activist group which said that around 40 Olympic athletes had downloaded a pro-Tibet benefit album that was also carried on iTunes.

The IDG News Service reported Friday that the Amazon.com page for the “Songs for Tibet” album, which includes 20 songs from artists like Sting, Dave Matthews and Moby, could not be reached within China. Michael Wohl, executive director of the Art of Peace Foundation, which produced the album, cited comments on YouTube which said a video promoting the album might also be inaccessible in China.

View: The full story @ nytimes.com

Migration to the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) standard is virtually non-existent, according to a year-long study released this week by network security firm Arbor Networks. Experts and governments have been encouraging organisations to migrate to the new protocol because the current 20 year-old IPv4 is fast running out of available addresses.
IPv4 addresses could in fact run out as early as 2010, according to Scott Iekel-Johnson, principle software engineer at Arbor Networks. The firm used data from over 80 of its ISP partners and customers to determine the amount of IPv6 traffic on the internet. Arbor Networks found that the proportions of IPv6 and IPv4 traffic has stayed roughly the same over the past year. The report also found that IPv6 traffic is still a tiny percentage of overall internet traffic. There were 6Mbps of IPv6 traffic by the end of July compared to 4Tbps of IPv4 traffic.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Microsoft is about to unleash its $300 million Vista marketing campaign. Can negative perceptions be changed? That’s an answer that can only come from seeing the campaign. Marketing isn’t just enough. Microsoft has to do the right marketing.
According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the advertising campaign will be something like "Windows, Without Walls." Reverse is the situation now. A bunch of walls stand between potential customers and Vista adoption. Reasons are many, with negative perceptions being high among them. "Too many enterprise decision-makers are accepting out of hand all of the fear, uncertainty and doubt being proliferated on the Internet by those who do not know about which they speak," said C. Marc Wagner, a services development specialist at Indiana University in Bloomington.

View: The full story @ MS-Watch

Electronics maker Apple expects to sell 3.5 million iPhones in Russia in the next two years, according to market sources familiar with new deals being struck by Russian carriers. Despite no official availability, up to 600,000 of the popular mobile devices have already flooded into Russia through unauthorized sales; now, at least two carriers have signed an official framework agreement with the manufacturer and one more deal is expected next week.
Sources claim that Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), Russia’s largest carrier, has already agreed with Apple to sell iPhones, probably starting in October, and rivals Vimpelcom and MegaFon are in talks with Apple. "Total sales by the Big Three carriers will amount to 3.5 million iPhones within the next two years," said Eldar Murtazin, an analyst with Moscow-based Mobile Research Group, citing sources familiar with the negotiations.

View: Full Story at Reuters