MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp (NWS) executive–a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.

The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans.

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In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor.

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Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago–but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

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It had taken the better part of a decade, but Reed Hastings was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod–a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix (NFLX), believed its impact would be just as massive.

Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company’s regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix’s library directly to their television–at no extra charge.

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A Defense Department intelligence analyst hit with a federal computer hacking charge last week says he’s being made a scapegoat for a security slip-up that sent a password in a nationwide terrorism investigation to “tens of thousands” of analysts without the need-to-know.

“I think on one of the blogs, somebody said, how about this: I give you my username and password, you log into my account, and then I file criminal charges against you,” said Brian Keith Montgomery, in a telephone interview with Threat Level on Thursday. “That person hit it right on the head.”

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Can Hollywood improve on a Beatles classic? Director Robert Zemeckis and Disney evidently hope to do just that with a 3-D remake of Yellow Submarine. The 1968 cartoon featured McCartney-Lennon gems including “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” in a fantasy involving grumpy grownup types called Blue Meanies.

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Never heard of Jeremy Roenick? That’s okay. We don’t judge here. The hockey jocks at ESPN may think differently, though.

Writer Patrick Hruby calls the planned retirement San Jose Sharks player Jeremy Roenick a blow to videogame players the world over.

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The iTunes music store sells single songs at approximately the same price, with artist presented in more or less the same way. Apple’s (AAPL) App Store, however, is still somewhat like the wild west (at least as far as music goes), where the rules are being made up in real time.

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Kayak, the popular multi-airline airfare search engine, thinks Microsoft Bing’s new travel search engine looks so much like its own that it’s confusing Kayak users. The travel search company sent Microsoft (MSFT) a legal letter last week telling them to cut it out, Wired.com has learned.

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Imagine the odds: No sooner did Facebook swing open the doors to its fire sale of vanity URLs than a geeky frat party ensued, as members reserved prankish, clever and lewd names instead of maybe the digital alias their friends (and mothers) might have hoped for.

Mashable reports that 500,000 people got processed within 15 minutes of launch, which is impressive service, especially since there are virtually no reports of anything going wrong technically.

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Here’s Sony’s Jack Tretton, speaking to Chris Morris at CNBC, on leaks:

People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry. It’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.

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The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

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Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week.

The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council (HSAC).

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A new sci-fi news Web site is growing as a resource for conservatives who feel the rest of the pop culture world is in a political galaxy far, far away from them.

Republibot.com aggressively describes itself as “The Science Fiction Site for People Who Aren’t Drooling Kneejerk Liberals.”

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Now you can kick off your Star Trek shows, climb into Star Wars bed and read the fan fiction you stored on your Transformers flash drive–all thanks to the summer’s more creative movie-marketing merchandise.

The flashy, limited edition Star Trek shoes from Airwalk scream to the world: “Yup. I’m a meganerd. Deal with it.”

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