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At today's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs gave up the details of the company's much-discussed cloud-based music service.

The new iCloud service replaces Apple's MobileMe document-sharing offering, which cost $99 a year. The new iCloud service is free and available now with an iOS 4.3 update, Jobs said. With iCloud, content such as music and documents is stored on large servers instead of on personal hard drives—and is accessible from anywhere through the Internet. Apple will provide 5 gigabytes of free storage for mail, documents and backup. The new iCloud service is Apple's seal of approval of what many experts believe is the next major iteration of the digital world.

A teenager in China reportedly sold one of his kidneys on the black market in order to buy himself an iPad.

The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, told a local TV station he had arranged the sale of the kidney over the internet.The story only came to light after the teenager's mother became suspicious. The case highlights China's black market in organ trafficking. A scarcity of organ donors has led to a flourishing trade. It all started when the high school student saw an online advert offering money to organ donors. Illegal agents organised a trip to the hospital and paid him $3,392 (£2,077) after the operation. With the cash the student bought an iPad 2, as well as a laptop. When his mother noticed the computers and the deep red scar on his body, which was caused by the surgery, Little Zheng confessed.

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Apple is set to launch a cloud-based music player that will scan a user's home iTunes library and then make those tracks available from any web device.

Apple has signed deals with Warner Music Group Corp., Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group Ltd. and expects to sign a fourth with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group this week. The agreements will let Apple offer an easy way for consumers to create and listen online to their entire music collections, without the time-consuming work of manually transferring or uploading songs. Many in the music industry see such offerings as a key next step in the evolution of digital media, in which music, and eventually video, is convenient and ubiquitous. Apple wouldn't be the first company to offer such a service, but its standing as the world's largest music retailer and more than 200 million iTunes accounts would give it clout that others have lacked.

The cost of the service has not yet been disclosed.

(Source)

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