According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

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The day Firefox 3.0 was to be released I went to the Mozilla website and changed the version numbers in the URL and was able to download the official release version of 3.0 well before it was officially released. As most of you know FF 3.5 is releasing today (apparently) and I did the same [...]

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Comics writer Mark Sable was detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for carrying a script for an upcoming comic book about a writer who is detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for writing a comic about terrorism.
“Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley’s Universe Wednesday (May 13th), [...]

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I vaguely remember a number of lawsuits over the years of Microsoft vs “The Little Guy.” One that I distinctly remember was Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft. It was a legal dispute between Microsoft and a Canadian high school student named Mike Rowe over the domain name MikeRoweSoft.com. The case received international press attention following Microsoft’s perceived [...]

Filed under: copywrong, micro$oft, ugh | 2 Comments »

Google has questioned Microsoft’s entire approach to online infrastructure, while taking some wonderfully sly shots at the company’s new decision engine search engine.
The undeniable highlight of Thursday’s cloud-happy Structure 09 conference was Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture. As he described how Google’s famously distributed infrastructure shames the Redmond competition, he would [...]

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Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the battle brewing now between Google and Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it might not matter because of the strength of Google’s brand. An independent usability and consumer preference study, [...]

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Clearly the work of computer graphics or God himself (pick one, there are a few), who knows, but if my laptop decided to do that, I’d probably go and check with the doctor to see if I haven’t got a brain tumor eating away at my cerebral cortex.

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The ACLU is suing the Transportation Security Administration for illegally searching and detaining Steve Bierfeldt, a US citizen who was detained, cursed at, and threatened by TSA agents for carrying $4700 in cash (which is legal and doesn’t require disclosure in advance) at an airport in April.
The TSA agents surely would have gotten away with [...]

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The truth is she’s a crippling dyslexic, and she really loves the guy in the picture whose name is Alan. You guys are really making their relationship unstable, could you please just chill?

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SAFFORD, AZ – The Supreme Court says a school’s strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.
The court ruled on Thursday that school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding, who lives in Safford in rural eastern Arizona.
Redding was a 13-year-old honor student when she [...]

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The Cavaliers have agreed in principle to acquire Shaquille O’Neal from the Suns for Ben Wallace and Sasha Pavlovic, an NBA source confirmed late Wednesday night.
Phoenix also will receive a second-round pick in Thursday’s draft and cash.
The deal was first reported by ESPN and Yahoo! Sports.
O’Neal has been on the Cavaliers’ radar since February, when [...]

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Luxury yachts offer pirate hunting cruises Luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast.
Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders.
When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, [...]

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Despite the Linux kernel having support for so many file systems, not all of them are enabled in RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 by default. This might be well as some of them might not yet classify as “enterprise grade” in the eyes of RedHat, who knows… Luckily, support for missing file systems such as ReiserFS, [...]

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A Twitter-like machine from 1935, that looks like a prop from the movie Brazil.
Robot Messenger Displays Person-to-Person Notes In Public To aid persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England.
Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in [...]

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Clear, Steve Brill’s second baby turkey (the first being “Brill’s Content“) flops:
[Clear] rolled out with great fanfare July 18, 2005, in Orlando. Travelers initially paid $99 a year for a card that was supposed to target those who posed a minimum security risk, and give them a special line that would process them through airport [...]

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Wikileaks has published what is said to be proof that computers compliant with “Green Dam” can be maliciously controlled, using vulnerabilities in that censorware.
Green Dam is a new Chinese state censorship program mandated to be provided with all PC’s sold in China after July 1, 2009. The program “complements” the existing internet censorship system, and [...]

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Already, both Rapid repair and ifixit have torn down the new iPhone 3G S, and phonewreck has provided some analysis. The new CPU runs twice as fast at 600 MHz and supports 720p video. They also found that the new 3 megapixel camera took better photos. Surprisingly, despite apple’s claims that the new phone has [...]

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AnnualCreditReport.com is free, mandated by law to provide you with one report from each of the big three credit bureaus once every 12 months. Note that you don’t get your FICO score (aka your I Love Debt score), just the reports.
FreeCreditReport.com is a business, selling worthless credit monitoring and tossing a free credit report in [...]

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It turns out that there’s an undocumented restriction on Kindle books — if you download them “too many” (where “too many” is a secret number) times to your Kindle or iPhone or whatever, you run out of downloads and can’t get copies anymore.
Months ago, an Amazon manager wrote to me to tell me that the [...]

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The iPhone dev-team has released an updated version of PwnageTool. It supports jailbreaking iPhones using the 3.0 firmware. This update does not include the much easier to use QuickPwn, but it should be coming soon. The release also doesn’t include the UltraSn0w unlock which will be coming via Cydia.

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