TorrentSpy Loses Case Against MPAA

A Los Angeles court decided against TorrentSpy in their ongoing legal battle with the MPAA and terminated their case. According to the ruling, TorrentSpy was sanctioned for destructing evidence.

Introducing Google Knol

Google Knol is Google's version of Wikipedia. It's currently in a private beta stage, but you can see a sample page here.

Conan O'Brien Pays Salaries of 80 People

O'Brien, host of NBC's "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" will cover the salaries of his nonwriting production staff -- nearly 80 people -- for the foreseeable future, an NBC Universal spokeswoman confirmed. O'Brien will foot the payroll bill starting next week, barring a resolution in the WGA work stoppage, which wrapped its 25th day on Thursday.

Google Reader Adds Recommendations & Drag-and-Drop Folders

Google Reader has made two improvements to its interface, one Web 2.0-ish and the other pretty darn useful. The change Reader users will really appreciate is the ability to simply grab newly-added feeds and place them in their folders—no more clicking through menu bars, which really helps when doing multi-feed updates. The other new addition is recommendations, which can be found in the "Discover" link and points you to feeds based on your current list, your search history and your location. As you can see, Reader probably knows you better than you'd think.

Stephen Colbert Officially Announces Run for Presidency

After nearly a solid week of dropping hints, Stephen Colbert threw his hat in the ring in the race for president.

First, he made a surprise appearance at his old home, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," Tuesday night to make an official announcement: He was officially considering a run for president and would announce his decision "some time soon."

Soon arrived about 20 minutes later on his own show, The Colbert Report, when, with balloons falling, he said, 'Yes, I'm doing it!" Then he welcomed CBS political analyst Jeff Greenfield to analyze his impact on the race "in the past three minutes."

Greenfield said it was "astounding."

New Harry Potter DVD to Come with PC and Portable Versions

At the DVD Forum conference in Universal City, CA, Warner Home Video announced that it will release the new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix DVD with a bit of extra content. The DVD will contain two additional versions of the latest installment in the Harry Potter series: one for viewing on a PC and another targeted for digital media players. Good move!

RIAA Wins 1st File-Sharing Case, Awarded $222,000

The first-ever RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial just wrapped, and sadly, the outcome isn't a positive one. Regardless of the incredibly asinine and consumer-hostile comments made by Sony BMG's head of litigation the other day, the jury found Jammie Thomas, a single mother from Minnesota, liable for willful copyright infringement and awarded the RIAA plaintiffs $222,000 -- that's $9,250 for each of the 24 songs she was alleged to have made available on Kazaa, for those of you keeping track at home, and probably something like, oh, say, $222,000 more than she should have had to pay, since the RIAA plaintiffs weren't required to show that Thomas had a file-sharing program installed on her machine or that she was even the person using the Kazaa account in question. Fuck that shit.

DARPA Wants to Engineer "Kill Proof" Soldiers with Hardwired Animal Characteristics

The gang at DARPA — you know, the ones working on invisible, shoot-through, self-healing armor — want to create kill-proof soldiers that have characteristics of animals that can survive in extreme conditions. They're researching things like allowing soldiers to redirect oxygen demand throughout their bodies to allow them to stay underwater for hours. Dammit, DARPA, didn't you see the Bourne movies? This isn't going to end well for you.

Aeroscraft ML866 Flying Yacht

Set to be launched next month, the whale-looking Aeros ML866 uses a combination of buoyancy (like a blimp) and lift (like a plane) to cruise comfortably through the air with over 5,000 square feet of interior room, it has more lounge space than some houses. It can take off vertically, without taking up runway time at crowded airports.

Marijuana Dealers Offer Schwarzenegger $1,000,000,000

A coalition of California marijuana growers and dealers has offered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger one billion dollars to solve the current state budget crisis. According to economic studies, regulation and taxation of marijuana could produce six billion dollars in additional tax revenue.

YouTube to Auto-Block Content by This Fall

While YouTube has already been running fingerprint technology in beta for companies like Disney, a Google lawyer said Friday that video filters should be in place by September, and if not then by fall.

TorrentSpy Gives Up, Implements Content Filtering System

It was only a matter of time. After being ordered to essentially spy on its users for the MPAA, the virtual shuttering of TorrentSpy was, to appropriately quote Agent Smith, "inevitable." True, for now it's only removing copyrighted content using a automated filtering system called FileRights, but we all know that copyrighted material is its bread and butter, like many, if not most, torrent sites.

Opera's Flash-Replacement For Cellphones

The new technology will add video capability directly into the Web browser, so that users can see and play back video content directly in Opera. As of yet, Opera has not commented on whether or not the new native playback ability for Opera Mobile will be able to play existing Flash content.

Pirate Bay to Launch Streaming Video Service

There had been rumours abound about The Pirate Bay launching a streaming video site. It has now been confirmed by the TPB guys that they are in fact in the process of building a YouTube competitor.

“YES - we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”

thevideobay.org

Mozilla CEO Speaks Out on Future of Firefox

• Part 1: How 12 people made Firefox 1.0
• Part 2: Where Firefox's $US55million a year comes from
• Part 3: Putting Firefox on mobile phones
• Part 4: business cool on IE7, recontemplating Firefox?
• Part 5: Why no built-in ad-blocker in Firefox yet?
• Part 6: Firefox 3.0 "lock-in branding" -- what gives!
• Part 7: Firefox to go head-to-head with Flash and Silverlight
• Part 8: The touchy relationship between Microsoft and Mozilla
• Part 9: Getting Firefox onto more desktops
• Part 10: Mozilla Japan's cute Firefox cartoon character
• Part 11: The stoush over Linux distros and the Firefox trademark
• Part 12: Mozilla working on "Web 3.0" -- web apps that will run in your browser without an internet connection

YouTube Mobile to launch in May

As soon as YouTube's exclusivity agreement is up with Verizon, the service will be available for all carriers with the proper handsets. The service will stat off as a "best of" gallery but will eventually offer up the same content you can get online. The service should be launching in may for Europe and June in the US.

New York City Bans the "N" Word

New York City symbolically banned use of the word ni**er on Wednesday, the latest step in a campaign that hopes to expunge the most vile of racial slurs from hip hop music and television.

Speed Racer Goes Into Production This May

Andy and Larry Wachowski (The Matrix) will be directing the upcoming movie Speed Racer this May with Vince Vaughn rumored to play Racer X. Speed Racer Should be in theaters May 23, 2008.

Bittorrent Clients Selling Out to RIAA/MPAA

AZ has started a new commercial branch called Zudeo which identifies itself as AZ 3.x.x.x, and had claimed that 2.5.0.2 was the final 2.x.x.x stable that would ever be released, and all future versions would identify themselves just like Zudeo, as AZ 3.x.x.x. this raised concerns because we would not be able to tell if a member was using Zudeo or Azureus, and we want nothing to do with Zudeo, since we feel it is a security risk, and because Zudeo identifies itself as AZ.Azureus claimed that Zudeo was simply a different user-interface for AZ, but Zudeo incorporates DRM, and has aligned itself with people/organizations that end with initials **AA. While investigating Zudeo, two of our admins, system & ibslice discovered that packets of data were being sent back to AZ, and when confronted, AZ devs at first denied, then said it was only anonymous info about how the client was working, then our staffers discovered that the packets being sent back contained your total UL stats, your total DL stats, and your ISP name/info. We replied to AZ with this information, and in a seeming panic, they did two things:

1. Admitted privately that this had been going on with ALL recent AZ stable releases for the last 12 months
2. Immediately put together and released AZ 2.5.0.4.
Who knows what other private data on you they have acquired, and if they do indeed keep this data confidential?

Bram Cohen had previously been forced to sell/partner with the Major Studios/MPAA because he was being threatened with legal action. Now, Ludde, the developer of uTorrent, has sold uTorrent to Bram’s venture. This means that uTorrent is now partially/wholly owned by the very people you read about who are suing children and grandmothers for filesharing, and who have taken down many torrent sites over the last few years. Ludde had supposedly been banned from doing any more work on new bittorrent updates by the terms of his deal with Bram/bittorrent inc., but after we banned the uTorrent beta here a month ago, he has come to our IRC chat and asked if we would accept a new stable uTorrent release 1.7. this would basically be the banned 483 beta build with a new name, making it technically within our standard client rules.

No worries thought as long as you have the “safe builds”, uTorrent 1.6.474 and Azureus 2.5.0.4

Video: Bill Gates on the Daily Show