Posted by jason on 30th June , 2009
It appears that the Pirate Bay will shortly be walking the plank (couldn’t resist). The Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X will be buying them for the equivalent of $7.8 million US, with the hope of turning them into some sort of a pay for download site. Do these folks not remember an almost identical situation and buyout (and subsequent flop) with Napster? I don’t see this working out in the long term. The proceeds will apparently not be going toward the legal fees of the Pirate Bay founders (my first thought), but will be going into a fund to finance future internet projects.
http://www.thelocal.se/20364/20090630/
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Posted by jason on 30th June , 2009
I upgraded a machine this morning to the new (and not quite yet released) Firefox 3.5 to give it a whirl. It definitely seems to be zippier, although that could be just a psychosomatic effect, having read that it was supposed to be so. I had a few inconsequential plugins that did not survive the upgrade process, but no biggie. I’m also trying out the private browsing features (aka porn mode) which seem to be working without a hitch and not affecting my browsing to any visible extent. The one feature that I’ve been really exited to try out is the HTML 5 support for ogg media without having to have a plugin for flash (or some lovecraftian horror from MS) in order to play it. You can test this out at http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/us. These folks have all of their videos up in ogg and even show a banner regarding HTML 5 support on the way in. Very cool stuff and I hope that it really takes off.
Edit: Another very cool set of demos here:
http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/
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Posted by jason on 8th June , 2009
Some cool stuff out of WWDC today, including some nifty new security features that will be coming in 3.0 for the iPhone:
Hardware encryption (3GS only) – No details on this that I’ve seen. I’m sure folks will be beating on it here in about 2 weeks.
Find My iPhone – Log into Mobile me and see where your phone (or someone elses phone) is on a map. Best check the strength on that Mobile Me password.
Remote wipe – If your phone has managed to get away, log into Mobile Me and wipe all of the data on it (again on the password strength)
It’ll be interesting to see how this all pans out in the next couple weeks. I’m a bit reluctant to upgrade, but you never know. Oh and AT&T can bite me for not supporting tethering.
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Posted by jason on 1st June , 2009
Police in North Carloina want to put up a camera system that will track the license plates of every passing vehicle and run them through the NCIC database in real time. They will also keep a record of all of the captured plates for one year, in case someone becomes interesting at a later date. Well, I guess I’ll mark that off the “states to move to” list. Thin edge of the wedge indeed.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/city-wants-surveillance-cameras-to-record-every-license-plate/
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Posted by jason on 1st June , 2009
Interesting post out there on macrumors talking about the new iPhone hardware. Apparently the new camera is capable of video and focusing(yay!). Hopefully this means that we’ll be able to do barcode scanning now. Also included are a few blurry pic of the interface.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=7697111&postcount=162
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