Japan’s biggest Internet forum, where anonymous netizens trade anything from cooking tips to death threats, has long been an anarchic zone of uninhibited free speech and a magnet for controversy.

This week the raw commentary on 2channel — which with 10 million visits a month is one of the world’s largest online bulletin boards — saw tempers flare anew.

A massive hacker attack from South Korea crippled the site in retaliation for users’ online slights against Olympic skater Kim Yu-Na, after she beat Japanese rival Mao Asada to take gold at the Vancouver Winter Games.

The site was attacked on Monday, the anniversary of a 1919 uprising in Korea against Japanese colonial rule, and shut down for two days.

Japanese web users counter-attacked by bombarding South Korean sites, including that of the presidential office, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, which called the tit-for-tat flaming “infantile”.

The Japanese site, www.2ch.net, does not ask for personal ID details and hosts unfiltered views, in contrast to most chat forums where registration and vetting have become the norm in a bid to keep discussion orderly.

“This is a vast group of bulletin boards on everything from hacking to porn,” the site tells users. It boasts about 1,000 topics, from politics to sport to manga comics.

“Sender information cannot be detected, so you can access it from your office, school or prison,” users are told. “Please write as you like.”

The site was launched in 1999 by a college student, Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has since written several books and is a regular on television shows.

Not counting online role-playing games, it is easily Japan’s biggest bulletin board by number of users and page views, according to research firm NetRatings Japan.

The site has given space for discussion on touchy subjects, including Japan’s royal family, and gay and lesbian life.

Companies and pollsters review the site to build marketing strategies and study the raw pulse of users and consumers.

At their best, the site’s postings have spawned books and movies, including a passionate chronicle by a shy man known as the Train Guy who dated a woman and sought advice from fellow 2channel users.

But no-holds-barred messages also voice sexist, nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, many targeting Chinese and Koreans.

South Koreans were furious recently when a writer said the mob killing of a Korean college student in February in Irkutsk was “Russia’s good deed”.

At times, users have threatened crimes on the site.

One of them was Tomohiro Kato, who sent messages from his cellphone shortly before he killed seven people in a stabbing frenzy in Tokyo’s neon-lit electronics district in 2008, Japan’s bloodiest crime in years.

Nishimura, who gave up control of the site last year but maintains interests in many Internet companies, is unabashed about the darker side of 2channel.

“Ten million people come to the site every month. There is no city in the world with a population of 10 million that has no crime,” he said.

Tsutomu Kanayama, professor of journalism and communications at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, said 2channel laid bare the pluses and minuses of the social media revolution.

“Mainly because of the anonymity system, it has gone too far and is now full of offensive and meaningless comments,” he said.

“But on the other hand, it’s a positive trial for a future cyber-forum where anyone can pose real opinions freely. It has both a light and a dark side.”

Japanese electronics giant Sony is developing a new lineup of handheld products to counter Apple’s stable of portable devices, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper, citing “people familiar with the matter,” said the products under development include a smartphone capable of downloading and playing PlayStation games being developed with Swedish cellphone partner Ericsson.

Another project is a portable device that the Journal said blurs the distinctions between a netbook computer, an electronic book reader and a PlayStation Portable, or PSP.

The multifunction device is reportedly designed to compete against Apple’s upcoming iPad.

The new smartphone and the multifunction device were expected to work with Sony’s online media platform due to launch this month in the United States offering movies, TV shows and music like Apple’s iTunes, the Journal said.

It said the new products were targeted for launch this year.

Sony Ericsson is to release its first smartphone, the Xperia X10, a device powered by Google’s Android operating system, in April.

Sony refused to confirm the report but stressed that the electronics giant is interested in networked portable products.

“Sony and Sony Ericsson have been strengthening their collaboration in the networked mobile space,” it said in a statement.

“However, it is not our strategy to discuss future products or business plans before we make a formal announcement. Any media report that suggests details of the product or business is based on speculation.”

Apple has sold more than 40 million iPhones. The iPhone and iPod Touch are competing with Sony’s PSP in the handheld gaming market. The iPad is expected to rival the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle in the e-reader market.

LONDON: Brit actress Kate Winslet has been named the best international actress at this year’s Bambi Awards in Germany.

Winslet, 34, had been awarded the prize for her role in The Reader, in which she had played a German woman with a secret Nazi past.

“Ever since we made The Reader I’m always trying to find ways to come back – it was special.

The actress struggled to hold up the solid bronze and 18-carat gold trophy she was presented with at the ceremony.

“This is very heavy, so I’m going to put this down,” she said laughing.

The annual Bambi Awards acknowledge achievement in film, television, music and sports, and the panel praised her as “actress who doesn’t just slip into her roles but rather puts herself into the soul of her roles”

Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a German woman in her thirties whose teenage lover is unaware of the dark secret in her past.

The awards, annually presented by Hubert Burda media, honor the best in international and national music, film, television, and sports.

MUMBAI : Kareena Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra can’t help get over their cat fight. This time the reason is their make-up man who is increasingly becoming a bone of contention between the two.

Latest reports reveal that Kareena and Priyanka are fighting over a make up man since the beauties are smitten by his make up genius. Such is his demand that Kareena and Priyanka right after signing their films make sure that the make-up artist named Pompy is part of their crew.

Now, that the fight for the man is on, we hope the two beauties will finally sort out their differences in an amicable way.

Amazon Kindle, Amazon announced late Tuesday that it was introducing a new version of its Kindle e-book reader that can wirelessly download books in the United States and more than 100 countries.

The new device, which is expected to ship on October 19, is physically similar to the previous Kindle with a six-inch display. However, the new e-reader will be capable of downloading books and periodicals via wireless networks belonging to AT&T and its international partners.

“We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books,” Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. “Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds.”

The online retailer also announced that it would cut the price of its U.S. Kindle by $40 to $259, bringing it more in line with Sony’s Reader Pocket Edition, which sells for $199. The price cut is the second for Amazon’s e-reader in four months: in July, the price of the Kindle 2 dropped from $359 to $299. Amazon also sells a larger version called the Kindle DX for $489.

The Seattle-based e-tailer said international customers will have access to about 220,000 book titles at its Kindle Store compared with the 350,000 titles available to U.S. customers. Publishers involved with the store include Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Harlequin, Penguin, Bloomsbury, and Hachette.

With the announcements, Amazon is attempting to position itself for a boom in e-reader sales that Forrester Research expects in the U.S. over the next few years. In a report to be released Wednesday, Forrester Research raised its 2009 forecast for e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester Research also expects Amazon’s Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony’s Reader.

“This holiday season, eReaders will be one category that’s a breakout success,” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said in the report. “Lower prices, more content, better distribution, and lots of media hype are contributing to faster-than-expected adoption of eReader devices in 2009.”

The buzz is that Brazilian model Jesus Luz wants to establish himself using Madonna’s name. It is said that Queen of pop Madonna came across model during her tour in South America.

A source reveals, “All the modeling agencies approached him, but he finalized Ford Models as Steven Klein had a talk with Katie Ford and convinced her that Jesus is very talented.”

According to former agent of Luz, Sergio Mattos, “Jesus has become very particular and he is looking for some attractive projects. He did not answer the calls and after meeting Madge, he is demanding more prices for his work.”

A source states, “Jesus Luz demanded 135,000 dollars a show while he did the same show last year just for 225 dollars. Many people have approached him but he has increased his prices, therefore they are changing their minds.”

If rumors are to be believed, it is said that Paris Hilton has made a new sex tape of herself. The footage shows Paris Hilton in a ’state of arousal in a New York Taxi’

Before this tape she has also two tapes- one with her boyfriend Rick Salomon in 2004 and one that showed her fooling around naked in a bath in 2007.

According to sources, “Mark Ebner who has written a book titled “Six Degrees of Paris Hilton” – claims some dude named Darnell Riley bought 14 hours of video from two “Russian kids” who had stolen it from Hilton’s home.”

Paris Hilton said, “People have seen ‘The Simple Life’ and they think that my image is as a ‘spoilt airhead’. News about my image as a ‘spoilt airhead’ is false and I am more serious and shy. I am a budding artist and I have a room in my house where I paint.”

WASHINGTON: Internet giant Google unveiled its “Fast Flip” online news reader on Monday, featuring stories from major media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Google, which launched Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, compared using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine “really fast without unnatural delays.”

Fast Flip allows users to quickly browse through news stories from the websites of Google’s three dozen partners.

A Web surfer can quickly jump from one article to the next using large arrows at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page.

“As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting,” Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, said in a blog post.

Other companies supplying content include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has had a strained relationship with some US publishers and Bharat said the Internet company would share advertising revenue from Fast Flip with its media partners.

The firm’s popular news aggregator website Google News has drawn fire from a number of US newspaper owners for linking to their articles without payment.

The Internet search and advertising heavyweight has dismissed the criticism and countered that it is providing newspapers a free service by driving traffic to their websites.

“Partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads” on Fast Flip, Bharat said. “This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content.”

The new feature, the Google engineer argued, will allow readers to scan articles faster, thus reading more of them and bringing more ad revenue to publishers.

“The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet,” he continued. “However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution.”

With print advertising revenue and circulation declining, US newspaper publishers have been actively searching for ways to earn more money from the Web, including possibly charging for content online.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by “most viewed,” “most popular” or even “recommended.”

It shows only the first page of a story and users who want to read more have to click through to the website of the host publication.

Through the feature, users can share content with friends or members of a social network and Google said it is offering a mobile version.

For the moment, Fast Flip is considered an experimental “Google Labs” product. It is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.