Amazon’s new digital music store just launched in the US. Major label music that plays anywhere on any device, for 89-99c per track. 2 of the majors are there at launch, 2 are yet to come, but we found the new Kanye West album and that’s all that matters.

Non-US customers will be pleased to know they can buy and download songs just fine with their Amazon.com account - even if their credit card is from another country. Just enter a non-US shipping address (if you’re not from the US, try ‘AL’ as your state and 36310 as your zip). Amazon will quickly ship a fat box of nothing to the non-existent address, and let you download your mp3s.

Linux users can download individual tracks, and albums are on the way soon. According to Amazon: ‘a Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases’. We’d prefer to fetch the album zipped via our browser, but the downloader offers a few more options that could be fun.

Breaking: Major US hosting company Layered Technologies have been hacked. Credentials for 5-6000 hosted accounts - and the data stored in them, including customer details in web stores - have been compromised.

The company has sent out the following (once) confidential email to all its customers - thanks to the VentureCake spies for sending it our way.

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Although Distrowatch may say your mate’s homemade Linux rules the world, we’ve always been Google Trends fans. When reconfirming that the big three - Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSE - are still the most popular Linux distros, we noticed that Ubuntu has reached another milestone entirely.

Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution to overtake Jesus in Google Trends, establishing a firm lead over the bearded one since the end of Q1 this year.

To help explain the results (and to help distinguish the two if you’re confused) we’ve produced following handy comparison chart.

Miro is a tool to discover, subscribe to, and watch high definition video feeds. We’ve been using it for a month, and today we realized we’ve been using it more than Firefox. If you use Linux, and want to be entertained, you want Miro. Here’s why.

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The new VirtualBox brings seamless virtualization to Linux. This puts Linux on par with the Mac - users can run their native desktop but still launch the odd Windows-only program when they need to. The VirtualBox manual doesn’t give much detail on the new feature, so here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of VirtualBox 1.5

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A year after Google released their account authentication system, why are sites still asking for passwords that most users don’t even give their loved ones?

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Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux.

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Techcrunch just reported on nofoodhere’s search concept, where users can see further search results added dynamically to their existing page by scrolling downwards, rather than having to click through endless pages of results.

TechCrunch find the concept ‘interesting.. the whole concept of clicking through page after page of search results is gone with NoFoodHere…it works very well‘.

While TC mention Google Reader has similar functionality, they seem to think the idea is new - or at least unimplemented by the major search engines.

Major search engines like, say, Live.com images - where, er, users can see further search results added dynamically to their existing page by scrolling downwards, rather than having to click through endless pages of results.

It’s worth pointing out that Microsoft’s implementation is for image search only. But it’s clear that the concept is already being explored by the majors.

^{Note to TechCrunch: we still love you.}

Amazon’s web services have been around for a while now. The Elastic Compute Cloud provides incredibly cheap Xen based virtualization, and Simple Storage Service provides terabytes of storage for around the cost of a cinema candy (and not the expensive cinema candy either).

They’re popular with a bunch of startups, including 37Signals’ Basecamp, but haven’t been suitable to run a full LAMP stack based server.

Until now.

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Despite all the noise made about improving the cross-platform image editing tool, people seem to have missed that GIMP’s own developers are planning on UI improvements.

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