West Babylon’s Harold Dieterle and Great Neck’s Ilan Hall won the first two editions of “Top Chef.” When the fourth premieres March 12 on Bravo, the local scene and cuisine will belong to Richard Blais, born and bred in Uniondale. His parents and sister still live on Long Island. “I like to refer to it as ‘Strong Island,’” he tells us, with a wit that says as a comedian, he’s a pretty good chef. The onetime “Iron Chef America” contestant, who says he’s a proponent of molecular gastronomy - the study of the chemical nuts-and-bolts of food behavior - got his start at Mickey D’s. He worked in various kitchens while studying comparative humanities and religion at SUNY Old Westbury, and in 1998 got a degree from the Culinary Institute of America.

A culinary trail-Blais-er - cheeseburger with foie gras milkshake, anyone? - he may have been too avant-garde for Atlanta, where he now lives; his restaurants Blais, Bazzaar and Element are no more. His latest venture, BlaisCuisine.com, is being revamped as TrailBlais, which has something to do with “taste2″ (taste squared). Seven of the show’s other chefs work in New York City.

Remember “Circus of the Stars”? Well, do your parents remember?

The world’s biggest music companies, including Warner Music Group Corp and Sony BMG, denied that they have agreed to license songs for a free download service that was launched by Qtrax on Monday.

Qtrax told Reuters and other media outlets last week that it had deals with the major labels representing about 75 percent of all music sales, to let users download songs for free in a new service to be supported by advertising revenue.

But by Monday, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner had publicly denied that they had agreed to back the new Qtrax service.

A source close to Universal Music, the largest of the group, said it also had not signed a deal for the new Qtrax service and is still in discussions.

And a source close to EMI Group said that while its song publishing unit has an agreement with Qtrax, its recorded music arm, EMI Music, does not.

“Sony BMG can confirm it has not signed a deal with Qtrax for the ad-supported service,” said a spokesman for Sony BMG, a joint venture between Sony Corp and Bertelsmann AG.

EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner all previously had agreements with Qtrax, which was testing a paid music download service. Sources say those agreements expired in the last year and did not cover the new free, ad-supported model now being promoted by Qtrax.

The first denial came from Warner late on Sunday and appeared to force the startup to backtrack on its earlier claims of having deals with all majors

 After years of fighting the Wild West of freely downloaded music, the mainstream music industry welcomed a former desperado to their annual schmoozefest Monday, highlighting the difficulty of their search for a solution to plunging CD sales.

And that solution might be: give music away legally and find another way _ such as advertising _ to make money.Participation was down at the annual MIDEM music business conference at the seaside resort of Cannes, reflecting the failure of digital music sales to make up for crumbling revenues and the billions of dollars being lost to music piracy _ illegal downloads outnumber the number of tracks sold by a factor of 20 to 1 according to industry body IFPI.Yet the theater was packed when Janus Friis _ co-founder of Kazaa, the music-sharing service once reviled by record levels _ addressed participants.Friis, who was presented as an Internet entrepreneur and a grandfather of digital music distribution, gave his backing to the latest venture making a lot of noise at MIDEM: Qtrax, which shows both the interest in making giveaways pay _ and the difficult of putting the deals together.A revamped online ad-supported file-sharing service, Qtrax promises to offer unlimited, free music downloads. It was launched amid a blizzard of publicity in Cannes, including champagne, snazzy slogans and invite-only concerts from celebrities including James Blunt and LL Cool J.After lunch with Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz on Saturday, Friis said he would have liked to create “an advertising supported service” for Kazaa _ if only the record labels had given their blessing.”We were trying to do the same things,” he told delegates.”But we couldn’t do it. The timing was just like, so off.”Yet even as record labels start embracing new technologies _ Sony BMG Music Entertainment became the last major music label to start selling music online without copy protection this month _ Qtrax showed Cannes the birthing process can be extremely difficult.The website service had not even gone live when Warner Music Group Corp. issued a statement denying Qtrax’s claims it had given the service permission to give away its music.Two other major recording companies, Universal Music Group and EMI Group PLC, later confirmed they did not have licensing deals in place with Qtrax, noting discussions were still ongoing.

Online storage provider Box.net has raised $6M in a Series B round of financing led by U.S. Venture Partners and involving Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

According to the release, Box.net currently has over 1.4 million registered users and will use the funding “to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.”

OpenBox, a way for third-party web service developers to build functionality into Box.net. The company its $1.5M in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson mid-2006 when it had only 500,000 members.

Facebook is now taking user privacy and improving the user experience very seriously. As part of its ongoing improvement program the rules for allowing publication of a story have been updated. Henceforth they will only allow actions that have been actively taken by the user to be published to the news feed.

At present applications can publish alerts to the news feed whenever a user profile gets updated, whether this is done by the user themselves or due to a third-party action via an application on the user’s profile. For example, if a user receives a virtual gift from a friend, the application can publish this to the news feed, even though the user has not done anything themselves.

In a month’s time, passive events, or third party reporting of an act will not be allowed to be published to the news feed. This is because Facebook wants to reserve its most valuable feature, which gets the most user eyeballs, to maintain the highest standards and only publish stories that are relevant to user activity, rather than publishing poorly masked promotional activity from third-party providers.

Technical details about the change in policy can be found on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook expects all developers to discontinue usage of the old, passive format of reporting, at the earliest. They may contact their users or use other means to enforce the necessary changes if they think it appropriate to do so.

Ultimately, this is good news for users. It will not only improve their experience on Facebook, but also shows that Facebook has been listening to user feedback provided via the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘x’ rating icons alongside every news feed item.