News written by Jari Ketola (May, 2006)

Congratulations to the Monstrous winners of the Eurovision Song Contest 2006. LORDI! Lordi won the contest with the highest score ever, 292 points.

And Finland goes ballistic! Before this year Finland had not once made it even to the top five in the contest. The nation has rejoiced if we didn't finish last.

Huge congratulations from the insane Finnish staff, and HUGE thanks to everyone who voted! Tomorrow pigs will fly, I'm sure.

You can hear (and see) the entire song at Youtube.com.

To celebrate this joyous occasion AfterDawn.com membership is free today! Well it is free every day, but even more free today! You can join at http://login.afterdawn.com/.





HARD ROCK HALLELUJAH!

The Lordi web site at Lorgi.org is overwhelmed by traffic at the time of writing. The link above might not work.

--AfterDawn.com

After a roughly five-month selection period, we have finally found our new staff writers at AfterDawn.com! As of today, Davedough (Washington DC, USA) and Lethal_B (London, UK) are members of the AfterDawn team. Welcome aboard, guys!

In total we received over one hundred job applications, most of which were very good indeed. We started the second round of the interviews in March, and finally got the final assignments evaluated last week.

After these two new recruitments, the AfterDawn staff consists of five writers (Dela, Ankle, Siggy, Davedough and Lethal_B), two software admins (waiski and krimu), two web developers (dRD and Pihlis), one web designer (teemu), one administrative assistant (Kata), and one all round techie (myself). That's twelve in total, if my math is right.

Huge thanks to everyone who applied for the position. It was definitely a challenge going through all the applications and finding the top candidates!

--AfterDawn.com

Free Peers Inc., the distributors of BearShare file sharing software, has agreed to pay the recording industry a sum of 30 million dollars to avoid potential copyright lawsuits. They also agreed to shut down their service and refrain from operating online music or film download services.

Free Peers was one of the seven P2P companies to receive a letter from the RIAA last year. The companies were warned that if they did not close down their services, they might be facing legal actions. i2Hub and WinMX shut down their services since then, and Grokster was sued and settled for $50m. Warez P2P, Limewire, eDonkey and SoulSeek haven't taken any action thus far.

Following the settlement with the recording industry, BearShare's assets, including the domain name and list of BearShare users, were sold to iMesh, which has had it's share of problems with RIAA in the past.

The Recording Industry Association of America praised the ruling made last year by the Supreme Court in the Grokster case. "The (Supreme) Court's decision helped pave the way for this exciting and ongoing transformation of the digital music marketplace," said RIAA's general counsel Steven Marks in a statement. "This is another important step in that evolution."