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Police score in roundup of soccer hooligans

Compiled from wire reports

In a high-tech hunt for hooligans, Dutch police sent 17,000 text messages to the mobile phones of fans who attended a soccer match marred by rioting.

Supporters rioted before, during and after the April 17 match in Rotterdam. Two train cars were vandalized beyond repair, 43 fans were arrested and 47 police officers and an unknown number of fans were injured.

Phone companies voluntarily handed over the mobile numbers of people who were in or around the stadium that day. The companies did not give individual names to police, and police sent a standard message asking people to come forward if they had information.

But some suspects apparently thought they had been fingered. Four suspects contacted police recently, and a fifth turned himself in directly, Rotterdam police spokesman Ger de Jong said.

“Maybe they just think, ‘I’m going to get caught sooner or later so I better just turn myself in and get it over with,”’ de Jong said.

BBC planning program downloads

The British Broadcasting Corp. is planning to let Web users download its television and radio programs up to a week after they have aired.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson said he hoped the “MyBBCPlayer” service could be active by 2006.

Complete details weren’t released, and Thompson did not say whether the BBC would charge users a fee for the downloads or how it would prevent piracy and circulation beyond the week.

Report: eDonkey tops file-sharing

EDonkey, a popular software program for sharing video and other large files over the Internet, now accounts for the biggest slice of online file-sharing, according to a study comparing the top four file-swapping programs.

EDonkey eclipsed BitTorrent this year for the top share of online file-sharing traffic, according to an analysis of such traffic by Britain-based research firm CacheLogic.

The study, conducted over six weeks beginning in June, only looked at the volume of data moving over the eDonkey, BitTorrent, Gnutella and Kazaa’s FastTrack file-swapping networks, not at how many individual users or files they had.