Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA has posted a list of the most "notorious markets" for pirated digital goods outside of the U.S.

The list includes a number of torrent and warez sites that are well known, as well as file-hosting sites and newsgroups clients.

Bob Pisano, interim CEO and President of the MPAA, submitted the list in response to the Office of the US Trade Representative's request for a list of "notorious markets" outside of the U.S.

Pisano noted that 46 percent of revenue brought in by MPAA-member companies is from overseas.

"MPAA has a strong interest in the health and sustainability of these international markets and appreciates USTR's interest in identifying notorious markets that threaten legitimate commerce, impair legitimate markets' viability and curb U.S. competitiveness and hurt our overall economic strength. It is critical that our trading partners protect and enforce intellectual property rights," says Pisano.

Here is the list, via TorrentFreak:

BTjunkie.org – Sweden

This BitTorrent indexer with an Alexa ranking of 385 aggregates content "torrents", which are executable instructions that initiate the download process. Btjunkie offers nearly 100,000 active torrents that are identified as copyrighted movie or television files. Unique to btjunkie.org is its ability to make available both public and non-public infringing content. With most release groups posting new content to non-public torrent websites, this indexing capability is particularly challenging for rightsholders. The site is currently hosted by Sweden's NetworkSpiration.

Demonoid.com – Ukraine

Demonoid is a very active, semi-private BitTorrent tracker and website with servers located in the Ukraine. Individuals can view what is available but downloading the torrent metadata requires the user to log in. A review of the accessible content on the site lists nearly 100,000 copyrighted movies and television files. Demonoid's Alexa ranking is 516 which is extremely high for a semi-private environment

IsoHunt – Canada

This is the most popular BitTorrent site in the world after The Pirate Bay. IsoHunt boasts of having 12.51 million peers and 3,743,581 active torrents and has an Alexa rank of 227. A U.S. Court issued a permanent injunction against IsoHunt after finding that over 90% of the downloads made using IsoHunt's services related to infringing content and that the defendants were liable for inducing infringement. Yet, its Canadian operator continues to run the site with impunity. The site's operator has commenced an action in Canada seeking a declaration that its operations do not violate Canadian law. IsoHunt can be found at 208.71.112.30. Its corporate address is IsoHunt Web Technologies, Inc., 820 Broadway West, Vancouver, BC V8Q 4K1.

Kickasstorrents.com – Sweden

This BitTorrent portal has a commercial look and feel that could deceive users into thinking it is legitimate. It has been gaining popularity since 2009. The site is hosted by Sweden's Dedicated Network, Luxembourg's Root, and France's OVH. This infrastructure creates redundancy to defend against successful litigation, raids or other actions that may threaten the service. Its current Alexa ranking is 457 and it appears to offer access to 8.1 million torrent files.

Rutracker.org – Russia

This BitTorrent portal is the clone to Torrents.ru, which was taken down by the Russian criminal authorities. It is an indexing site that serves four million users and it has over one million active torrents. It has a global Alexa ranking of 297 and a shockingly high local ranking – 15. Torrent.ru had its domain name suspended by RU-Center, the nation's largest registrar and web-host, but for now the site is back up at Rutracker.org and it remains to be seen whether the new domain will be taken down by the authorities. Its IP address is 195.82.146.114 and it is hosted by AvtomatizatsiyaBusiness Consulting.

ThePirateBay.org – Sweden/Netherlands

This BitTorrent portal has servers in both Sweden and the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay (TPB) comprises a BitTorrent tracker and websites which facilitate the exchange of vast amounts of infringing content. The Pirate Bay operators proudly claim that it is the biggest tracker of its kind in the world, with over one million users. Since its establishment in 2004, the website has grown exponentially and is now accessible in some 39 separate languages. It has facilitated the illegal exchange of untold millions of protected copyright works. Rightsholders, their trade associations and collecting societies have made countless complaints about the TPB's activities. The Pirate Bay contains significant and lucrative third-party advertising, much of it promoting the porn industry and US green cards. Advertising revenue is typically a function of number of unique site visits per day. With more than one million hits per day – the Pirate Bay takes in an estimated $60,000 per month from advertisers in addition to thousands of dollars collected from user "donations." In May 2006, the Swedish Police executed search warrants at 10 separate locations and seized 17 computer servers and made three arrests, closing down the site for a brief period. Although the site operators were ultimately convicted by a Stockholm court, the site has not been shut down. Only the Italian government has taken such action vis à vis Italy. This site has also sparked numerous civil proceedings.

UseNext.de – Germany/Netherlands.

This Usenet service markets to mainstream P2P users much more heavily and directly than do traditional subscription Usenet services. UseNext claims that over 1.2 million videos are available and proclaims "There is nothing you won't find here." High-quality Blu-ray rips of MPAA members' content can be found on UseNext. UseNext has approximately 200,000 regular users. UseNext provides a free trial period to users and then subscription plans start at approximately $10 USD a month and go up based on the quantity of content users wish to download. It is estimated that UseNext clears around 100,000 EUR a month. UseNext is a German operation with indexing servers in the Netherlands. Its Alexa rank is 5,845 and its German rank is 2,811.

Without giving full explanations, MPAA also specifically notes Megaupload.com, Megavideo.com, RapidShare.com, Webhards, Ba-k.com and Kino.to.

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Samsung has said today that it expects to sell 1 million Galaxy Tab devices by the end of the year, despite just beginning to sell it this week.

The tablet will be available on all four major carriers in the U.S., and on major carriers in the UK, Canada and other nations beginning this week with a staggered roll out.

Says Samsung president of mobile business JK Shin: "I estimate we will be able to sell more than a million units worldwide by the end of this year."

Samsung's tablet runs on Android 2.2, has a 1GHz processor, a 7-inch multi-touch screen and dual cameras.

The Galaxy Tab is also expected to be the first tablet that can actually compete with the clear market leader, the Apple iPad.

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Queen Elizabeth II, the 84-year old British monarch, is now on Facebook, launching a number of official pages that will give updates on her life.

The pages will have videos, photos and news items.

Starting tomorrow, the Queen's pages, as well as Princes Harry and William's, will go live.

Using the pages, 500 million Facebook users can leave comments for Buckingham Palace, or find royal events in their neighborhoods.

The Queen authorized the decision but the pages will be corporate, therefore no one can request friendship from the Royal family.

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Last week, Adafruit Industries sent notice that it was giving a $2000 USD prize to anyone who could hack the new Microsoft Kinect to run on devices that aren't the Xbox 360.

Reads the notice:

"Upload your code, examples and documentation to GitHub. First person / group to get RGB out with distance values being used wins, you're smart – you know what would be useful for the community out there. All the code needs to be open source and/or public domain."

Today, user "AlexP" of the NUI Group Community Forums has posted a video doing exactly what the contest asks for, so it seems like that $2000 may have a new owner.

The Kinect is being controlled via a PC in the video, but there are little other details.

When shown the video, Microsoft was not happy with the "hacking."

"Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products. With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant," says the company, via Cnet.

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Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the U.S.' largest banks, are prepared to allow employees use of the Apple iPhone for their corporate email needs, moving away from the BlackBerrys.

Both banks are currently testing smartphone software that will make the iPhone secure enough for corporate messages, says Bloomberg.

RIM BlackBerrys, once the standard for corporate smartphones, have been abandoned by a number of large corporations, with the latest being Dell, which said it would be switching from BBs to Windows Phone 7 devices made by themselves.

Says one analyst: "People are delighted with their iPhones and Android phones and they want to use them for work. The result is RIM now has real competition for corporate customers."

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said last month that a full 80 percent of the Fortune 500 list is testing software that will let their employees use iPhones or Android devices for corporate email, moving away from BlackBerrys.

Bank of America and Citigroup have a combined 542,000 employees.

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